Reflecting on October 7 + This week at Tzibur

Today is October 7.

I’ve been sitting with what this date has come to mean — not only as an anniversary of catastrophe, but as a dividing line in the lives of a generation of Jews. I wrote about it this week. Here is the beginning:

"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..."

The place I ultimately arrive is something that sits at the heart of what we are trying to build at Tzibur: when being Jewish feels more costly, the answer cannot be less Jewish life.

For me, the answer is more relationships. More learning. More community. More care for one another. More opportunities to live Jewish lives of substance, meaning, and purpose — together.

And, as ever, there are many ways to step into that community with us this week.