October 7th and the Loss of Innocence: A Meditation

I remember it was a Tuesday. 

I sat in my middle school 2nd period classroom in suburban Philadelphia when a commotion began to spread through the room. A few students — I would later learn these were children with parents who worked in New York — began to be pulled out of their classes. Rumors flew that something was happening. And then a teacher wheeled in one of those large CRT televisions on a cart, the kind we would use to watch movies in class, plugged it into the wall, and turned on the news. All of us, 6th graders and teachers alike, sat transfixed in front of the screen. 

We watched the Twin Towers fall that day in September twenty-five years ago with a mixture of astonishment and confusion. Yet most jarring was a strange knowledge belying our youth, that in that instant the world had fundamentally changed before our eyes, never to return to what it once was. 

I can pinpoint this exact moment as my generation’s collective loss of innocence. The heady days of the booming 90s economy were about to give way to the financial crash of the bursting Dotcom bubble. The Clinton-era of opportunity and optimism that greeted my family, newly emigrated from the Soviet Union, as we arrived on America’s shores - all of it seemed to begin to fizzle. We learned a new vocabulary that year, and in the years to come: the War on Terror, the names of remote towns, valleys, and mountains halfway across the world in far-flung locales, and perhaps most importantly, that we as Americans were not viewed the same way by others around the world as we had viewed ourselves. 

It was a rude awakening for a middle schooler. But then again, as I would later realize, every generation has its own version of this.

Nearly a quarter-century after America had its most recent collective loss-of-innocence moment, such a moment came again for Jews. October 7th, the 3rd anniversary of which we commemorate on the secular calendar today, was many things. It was by a wide margin the single largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Most of us alive today were only born after the conclusion of the horrors of that darkest of periods in Jewish history, and so we only know the pain and fear of that time through stories, books, and film. For many Jews, particularly Jews in America, October 7th was the first time we felt the kind of searing trauma that we can only imagine accompanied the knowledge of Jewish calamity in Europe mid-century. 

October 7th was also a day of personal tragedy for many - those with family members, friends, colleagues, and further distant but still familiar faces who were ensnared in the inferno of that day, to mention nothing of the years of war and lives lost since. October 7th blackened what would otherwise have been one of the most joyful moments on the Jewish calendar - the dual holidays of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. I recall debates in synagogue the next day regarding whether we should proceed with dancing with the Torah scrolls as an act of resistance, resilience, and affirmation that Jewish life and the Jewish way of life go on, or whether we should instead subdue our joy in recognition of the still-unfolding tragedy in Israel. 

All these things are true. But something else is also true, something which did not fully come into view at the moment, yet similarly to my experience with 9/11, with the benefit of hindsight is as clear as day to me now - for Jews, particularly young American Jews, this was our generation's collective loss of innocence. 

For those of us who thought that virulent, violent, socially-pervasive antisemitism was a historical relic, or at least relegated to the margins of modern society, rather than a persistent, present-day reality, October 7th disabused us of that notion. For those of us who were under the impression that Jews had, more or less, fully assimilated into American life and been embraced as consummate insiders rather than perpetual Other, or that our relative stability, economic security, and prominence in civil society would inoculate us from the kind of hate that was directed toward our forebearers, we were reminded that we were mistaken. And for those of us who thought that our affiliation with any number of political ideologies, social movements, or special interest groups would somehow spare us social opprobrium — for after all, we were the “right” kind of Jew, not like those other Jews who were the “wrong” kind of Jew — our illusions were shattered. 

Over the past three years, we have watched a phenomenon emerge that I’ve come to call “Jew-flation” — the rising social, emotional, and financial costs of living proudly and openly as a Jew. We have been regularly, intentionally inundated with painful reminders of that tragic day, seen the costs for physically securing Jewish spaces — particularly houses of worship — skyrocket, been gaslit about the veracity of our past trauma and present danger by the very people and institutions who lionize their own ability to create safe, welcoming spaces for all, and witnessed a chilling effect on the presence of Jews and Jewish identity in the public sphere. As a Jew from the former Soviet Union, I see eerie echoes of the repression of Jewish life under Soviet anti-Jewish governmental policies and the hostile social attitudes that the USSR’s policies vis a vis Jews engendered, often in the guise of, and further spurred on by, “mere” anti-Zionism, which the Soviet Union adopted as its de-facto policy during much of the Cold War, particularly in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. 

To be a Jew in 2026, whether in America, Israel, or elsewhere in the world, is not the same as to be a Jew before October of 2023. And it never will be. The post-October 7th Jew now has to make an even more affirmative choice whether to maintain connection with their Jewishness, even as the cost of being Jewish continues to rise. And the post-October 7th Jew has learned the hard truth, whether they choose to embrace it or run away from it, that no matter what they do, they will always be a Jew.

There is a famous rabbinic maxim in the fourth chapter of Pirkei Avot (“Ethics, or Chapters, of the Fathers”): 

בֶּן זוֹמָא אוֹמֵר, אֵיזֶהוּ חָכָם, הַלּוֹמֵד מִכָּל אָדָם

Ben Zoma would say: “Who is considered wise? He who learns from every person.” 

I’ve tried to habituate myself to apply this principle not only to my teachers and role models, but also, and perhaps especially, to those who I would not perceive as obvious sources of wisdom. If Ben Zoma is correct, there must be something to learn from everyone, even the most odious among us. And so for the past three years, I have asked myself, “What is there for me to learn from the Hamas-niks of this world?” What deep, moral lesson could they possibly impart to me that I don’t already know, and that I could not learn elsewhere? 

I am pleased to report I have derived what I think is the core learning, at least for me. The lesson is simple: All Jews are the same. 

On October 7th, the Hamas terrorists did not ask the Jews they massacred about their halachic status, how many Jewish grandparents they had, what denomination of Judaism they practice, whether they voted for or against Netanyahu, whether they were politically to the right or to the left, whether they were Zionists or anti-Zionists, whether they were Ashkenazi or Sephardi or Mizrahi, queer or straight, fair or dark-complexioned, or any number of ways that we as Jews differentiate ourselves. They indiscriminately slaughtered, maimed, and kidnapped men, women, and children, young and old, religious and secular, left-wing and right-wing. Why? Because, in a certain sense, these distinctions don’t matter - they were simply looking for Jews. From the perspective of Hamas, there was no “right” kind of Jew or “wrong” kind of Jew to target. All were fair game. In a strange, twisted way, they were able to see something that unfortunately eludes us as Jews all too often - we are all Jews, and on a deep, fundamental level, once we strip down identity to its most essential, primordial layer, we are all the same. We are all one. We are all fingers of the same hand.

How I yearn that we as a Jewish people, as Am Yisrael, could see this reality as clearly as those who wish to do us harm. Not to deny, ignore, or belittle our differences, but to simply acknowledge that there is a unifying, underpinning element of Jewish identity that weaves us all together, whether we’d like to be interlaced with each other or not, that far outweighs any other distinctions that may exist among us. The only solution I can see to the challenges - and opportunities, which are equally numerous - of the historical moment that we as a Jewish people now find ourselves facing is to double down on identity, to double down on pride, to invest even more deeply in Jewish community, Jewish education, and Jewish cultural, religious, and historical literacy, to step up rather than be pushed down - to, in the worlds of the the Talmudic Sages (Shevuot 39a), deeply subscribe to the notion that כׇּל יִשְׂרָאֵל עֲרֵבִים זֶה בָּזֶה, that “all Jews are guarantors for one another”, that we are all responsible to and for each other. In other words, that we are all part of one larger organism.

This October 7th, I am sitting deeply with the words of one of my mentors, Rabbi Avi Weiss, who taught us in yeshiva that the primary job of a rabbi is to love the Jewish people. Let’s be honest: even for us as Jews, it can sometimes be hard to love the Jewish people. We are, after all, a flawed people, a diverse people prone to internal squabbles. Stubborn. Prideful. Yet it is these very qualities that have kept us intact and allowed us to weather the storms of history. And so too, we will weather this historical moment. It starts with loving and embracing one’s own identity as a Jew, despite, or perhaps even because of, everything that swirls around us. Yet it continues with seeing oneself as part of the larger fabric of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people as part and parcel of one’s own individual identity, with a love that radiates outward to encompass the entire scope of Am Yisrael. 

Let us remember that to live a life as a Jew is an incredible gift that has been bequeathed to us, and one that has been taken away from so many that came before us. Let us endeavor to honor the memory of those that fell on October 7th and beyond by living lives of Jewish substance, meaning, and purpose, and let us remember that we are all inevitably, inexorably connected to one another.