When I was 17 years old, I stood in a gas chamber at Auschwitz when I went there as a member of the March of the Living. My mother survived the Holocaust as a baby born in a ghetto. My grandparents somehow managed to make it out of the fire, despite losing a son, their parents, sisters and a brother.
Why do I share this now? I don’t know how comforting it is, but as hard and unbearable as the events of Simchat Torah 5784 were, we have been through worse. As a famous Israeli saying goes, “Avarnu et Par’o, na’avor game et zeh – we got through Pharaoh, we will get through this.”
Our generation hasn’t known events of this magnitude. The Yom Kippur War occurred seven years before I was born. But many of us did live through 9/11. It’s been over 20 years, but the thoughts of the days after that event have rushed through my body in a way that I thought I had forgotten. The solidarity. The anger. The resolve. I remember saying on that day that we got a glimpse of what the Holocaust and World War II were like. And so it is today. This is our generation’s moment. This is the worst massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. Think about that.
As a child and grandchild of survivors, we vowed “Never Again!” We are not helpless victims. Today we see the cruelty of the enemy we face. Can you just imagine what would have happened in 1948 if the Jews lost? But today, thank G-d, we do have a state, we do have an army, with all our internal squabbles we have rebuilt from the ashes. No other nation on the planet can claim this.
And yet. Our people’s purpose is to be a “Kingdom of Priests and a Holy Nation,” an Or La-Goyim, a moral and spiritual beacon. Let every individual take comfort in the proven fact that from destruction you can rise and rebuild, that “our Hope is never lost.” The one thing that truly, truly hurts me is that the perpetrators did this in G-d’s Name. Rav Yehuda Amital, zt”l, said after 9/11 that it was a chillul Hashem, a Desecration of God’s Name.
I have many Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab friends. Many called to ask if we were OK, some to even tell us to arm ourselves, and that they were praying for us. There are good people in the world. There were many non-Jews during the Holocaust who risked their lives to save Jews. Evil is real, and we have very real enemies. But not every Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian is our enemy.
The Abraham Accords brought peace with Muslim countries like the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, among others. We were just on the verge of a historic deal with Saudi Arabia. The Muslim world has been changing. But forces like Iran don’t want to see that happen. Hamas doesn’t want to see that happen. Hezbollah doesn’t want to see that happen. So they desecrate G-d’s Name by murdering in the name of politics. Every religious figure in the world should be outraged at this. How dare they! We will persevere.
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” There will be justice for all those who were murdered. We will recover, physically and spiritually. We will become that “Light unto the Nations,” bearing the Name of Hashem, providing healing for all who have been hurt or broken.
