The following are Dr. Noam Weissman’s remarks given at JEWISHcolorado’s 10/7 Commemoration: From Darkness to Light.
It was three months after Hamas attacked Israel on the 7th of October. Shabbat was winding down on a breezy 70 degree Florida evening, and my 6-year-old daughter, Nissa, and I were playing basketball on the 7 foot hoop outside our house.
As it was starting to get dark, she said, “Timeout, Abba, who is winning, the bad guys or the good guys?”
We were playing basketball at the time, so I was unsure what she meant. Was she calling herself the good guys and me the bad guys? I assumed so, so I just said, you’re winning, Gossie Jr. (That’s my nickname for her).
She said, “No, Abba, the thing you’re always talking about, I mean, who is winning – the people who stole the Jewish kids? Or is Israel winning? And, how do we know who is winning? How do you know the score?”
I paused.
And I realized I had been pushing myself for three months, go go go, do the research, write the script, record the podcast, shake the hands, talk to the press… without ever asking myself that question, and all the others it brings with it.
Who is winning? What does it even mean to win in this context?
And if it’s us – the Jewish people – who are winning both the war on the ground and the social media war, the instifada as it’s called in some corners – then what happens next?
What does our victory mean?
Like all good questions, this one doesn’t yield easy answers. Just more questions.
Because really, how can I ask whether “we,” the Jewish people, are winning, when I’m not sure how to define we, the Jews?
What does it mean to be Jewish?
What’s our identity?
WHO ARE WE?
So many people have offered answers to this question.
Most of them are not worth repeating.
But some – some are. Even if they’re hard to hear.
Simon Rawidowicz calls us “the Ever-Dying People.”
Sounds dramatic.
Sounds like something your depressing uncle might say at Thanksgiving dinner while everyone else tries to change the subject to lighter topics, like the election.
But this is what he meant.
Obviously, the Jews are not gone.
The fact that I’m standing here, four thousand years after the first Jew heard the voice of God, tells you that we are far, far too stubborn to die.
But we’re not too stubborn to worry about death.
Four thousand years of history, and we’re not taking anything for granted.
Rawidowicz points out that even before the Jewish people existed, the very first Jew was worrying about the end.
Think about it. For the first century of his life, Abraham was childless. In Beresheit, Genesis, 15:2, he stands before God and laments Oh Lord… I shall die childless!
He didn’t, of course. God grants him the blessing and the gift of not one but two children: Ishmael and Isaac. And with them, all the complexities of being the father of a “great nation.”
But Abraham set a precedent for every subsequent generation of that great nation. Because ever since then, every generation of Jews has looked around and wondered Is this it? Is this the end? Does this great nation die with me?
And really, how could they not?
How could they not look around at the Babylonians burning the temple, hauling Judea’s elites off in chains, and say this is it?
Four hundred years later, how could they watch the Romans raze the capital, kill hundreds of thousands, and believe sure, we’ve got a bright future?
How could they survive the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt – those two years of hope and rebellion – and foresee a future in which Jews were autonomous and free once again?
How could they watch Crusaders trample community after community and think, yeah, we’re doing great here?
How could they live through peasant uprisings and blood libels and the crazed, wholesale slaughter of European pogroms and say This is fine.
How could they emerge from Treblinka, from Majdanek, from Auschwitz starving, orphaned, their whole world in ash, and feel that they were going to survive?
To be the Ever Dying Jew doesn’t just mean your body is threatened. To be the Ever Dying Jew is to be acutely conscious of your soul.
Imagine being a converso in 17th century Spain.
For centuries, you’ve been going through a few motions in secret. Maybe lighting candles on Friday nights, not knowing why. Maybe singing songs about freedom for a week every April, not entirely sure whose freedom you’re celebrating. You know this is important. You know this is a secret.
But that’s all you know.
That’s all that’s left.
Or imagine being a Jew in the former Soviet Union.
There is no Shabbat.
There is no brit milah.
Your identity card says you’re a Jew.
But your connection to Judaism, those four thousand years of history – it’s all beyond your reach. Someone has placed it behind iron bars. Said if you try to embrace this, if you try to internalize it, we will kill you. Or worse.
This is what it means to be the Ever Dying Jew.
To be acutely conscious, always, that your history is transgressive.
That no matter where you are, there will always be someone who prefers you weren’t there.
Who will try to stamp you out.
Who will make you believe you are vulnerable.
Who will make you believe you can be erased.
So Nissa, my sweet girl, maybe you’re right to ask who’s winning. Maybe you’re right to look at the long and bloody sweep of history and ask have we been losing all this time?
How could you not wonder, sometimes, in the dark night of the soul, if this is the end?
How could you not look around, after October 7th, 2023, and wonder if you’re the one that’s crazy?
Just last week, in a neighborhood in Brooklyn, someone spray-painted in bright, bloody red Happy October 7th.
How can we not wonder, sometimes, if we’re the last link in the chain?
After four thousand years, the trauma lives in our genes.
Existential worry is encoded in our DNA.
Who is winning, Abba?
That’s not just a question my daughter asked me.
It’s a question I asked of God, both the night of October 7th, when I finally turned on my phone after the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, and every night since.
I don’t claim to have a direct line to God, by the way (as others might).
But I do think I’ve gotten an answer.
It’s all around me. It’s right here.
It’s in the faces in this room. The people – Jewish, Christian, Atheistic, and Muslim, who showed up to an October 7th commemoration – not to celebrate, not to revel in our loss, but to mourn.
And to say, we’re here.
James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits, explains that the word identity was originally derived from the Latin words essentitas, which means being, and identidem, which means repeatedly. Which means that one’s identity is literally their “repeated beingness.”
He writes:
“First, decide who you want to be. This holds at any level—as an individual, as a team, as a community, as a nation. What do you want to stand for? What are your principles and values? Who do you wish to become?”
You need to know who you want to be. Otherwise, your quest for change is like a boat without a rudder. You have the power to change your beliefs about yourself. Your identity is not set in stone. You have a choice in every moment. You can choose the identity you want to reinforce today with the habits you choose today. Building better habits isn’t about littering your day with life hacks. It’s not about flossing one tooth each night or taking a cold shower each morning or wearing the same outfit each day. It’s not about achieving external measures of success like earning more money, losing weight, or reducing stress. Habits can help you achieve all of these things, but fundamentally they are not about having something. They are about becoming someone.
More precisely, he explains, your habits are how you embody your identity.
“When you make your bed each day, you embody the identity of an organized person. When you write each day, you embody the identity of a creative person.
When you train each day, you embody the identity of an athletic person.
What we do is who we are.”
What we do is who we are. So… what do we do, us Jewish people, us so-called ever-dying Jews? And what does that say about who we are?
We show up, just like you did, today, to be in this room with me.
10/7 defines our enemies. Hamas. Hezbollah. SJP and Within our Lifetime.
What they did on that day defines them. The slaughter. The rape. The torture. The kidnapping. The celebration over the death of Jews. The Tweets glorying in our worst moment in nearly a century.
Those are our enemies.
They are defined by what they did.
And they will account for it – either in this world or in the world to come.
But we Jews, we aren’t defined by what was done to us.
Not on 10/7, and not in 1942, and not in the pogroms of 1903, and not in the Spanish Inquisition in 1492, and not in the Crusades of 1096, and not when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in the year 70 and not when the Babylonians destroyed the first in 586 BCE.
We are defined by what we do.
We are defined by 10/8 and every day since.
We are defined by the tens of thousands of volunteers that flooded Israel to donate blood, to pick fruits, to babysit, to bus soldiers to bases, to cook food, to identify victims, to give, to give, to give.
We are defined by the solidarity we showed one another, by the solidarity trips and the Shabbat dinners, and the coming together – some of us for the first time.
We are defined not by despair.
Not by looking around and asking is this it.
We are defined by something else, our hope.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory, the former chief rabbi of the United kingdom – whose wisdom I turn to constantly, who I miss so, so much in this time of need – distinguished between hope and optimism in his book To Heal A Fractured World. He wrote:
“Optimism and hope are not the same. Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to hope. The Hebrew Bible is not an optimistic book. It is, however, one of the great literatures of hope.”
In other words, optimism is passive.
Hope is active. Hope is a verb.
It’s something we do.
It’s something we work towards.
Sacks explains that this identity of hope, this virtue of hoping, is the difference between ancient Athens and ancient Jerusalem, between the culture of tragedy and the culture of hope.
In ancient Greece, there was a belief that once a decree had been sealed, there was no way of averting it. Every act taken to frustrate it merely brought it closer to fulfillment. That forms the heart of Oedipus and Laius. In Judaism, however, “there is no fate that is final, no destiny that cannot be changed. Therefore there is always hope. Greece gave the world its greatest tragedies, those of Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Israel was and remains the supreme culture of hope.
It is no wonder, then, that the anthem of the Jewish State is Hatikvah, The Hope. It won over the Revisionist Zionist anthem of Shir Beitar, with its focus on battle and war. It defeated “shir ha’emunah,” the song of faith, which the religious Zionists, led by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, had lobbied for.
Why? Why did a nine-stanza poem by Naftali Hertz Imber win out over songs of battle and faith? Well, to start, it was dramatically shortened, so people could remember it more easily. But it was also deeply, deeply rooted in a Jewish tradition of hoping – where to hope is a synonym for to do. To act. To change the world.
You don’t need to be a person of religious faith to have hope.
You don’t need to be a person who wants to fight with a sword and a shield.
You just need to be a person who looks back at Jewish tradition, at the long arc of the ever-dying people, and understands why we are still here.
This past summer, I had the opportunity to sit down with Rachel and Jon Goldberg Polin and interview them for my podcast Unpacking Israeli History. You are no doubt familiar with the Goldberg-Polins. Rachel has become the mother of the Jewish people, not just of Hersh. In her devastating eloquence, we’ve found both comfort and inspiration.
She said to me:
No, we don’t feel cynical… Of course, we have moments of frustration and anger and sadness and despair. But I think overall, they are moments. And we have really tried very hard, very intentionally when we wake up to be hopeful. And we say hope is mandatory. That it’s not advice, it’s not a suggestion. It’s mandatory. Yes, we’re in an unimaginable place. And I just, I don’t feel cynical.
The Goldberg-Polins have survived the unsurvivable.
The unimaginable.
And they speak of hope as an imperative.
They are not alone.
They are joined by people like Amir Tibon, the Haaretz journalist who hid, with his wife and two young daughters, from the Hamas terrorists who took over his home in Nahal Oz on the 7th of October, until his father Noam, who is in his 60s, came to rescue them.
I recently had the privilege of speaking with Amir on the other podcast I host, Wondering Jews.
Amir lived an utterly normal life in Nahal Oz for nearly a decade, which means that he and his family survived endless rocket attacks, constant trips to the mamad, the shelter, with barely a second thought. This was normal. The price you have to pay for a life that feels, otherwise, like paradise. Where kids walk themselves to kindergarten and no one locks their doors.
But on October 7th, Hamas set fire to that paradise.
And as they set up shop on Amir’s front porch, while he and his family hid in their shelter without food or water or electricity, he told his little girls, “If you stay silent, Saba will open the door”.
He was right.
It took Noam Tibon hours to reach Nahal Oz.
The road from Tel Aviv to the south had been overtaken by Hamas terrorists. He exchanged fire with them. He came across dazed and bleeding Nova survivors, who still hadn’t quite internalized what they had just survived. Finally, after hours of fighting, the 60-something general joined up with a few young soldiers to break into the kibbutz from a back entrance. And Amir’s faith was rewarded. Saba did eventually open the door to save his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughters.
With stories like this, we are winning.
Since the 7th of October, I have found myself thinking a lot about Richard Rohr, a Catholic Theologian. He explained that transformation and change occur in three stages: order > disorder > reorder.
Before the 7th of October, it seemed as though the Jewish people had fallen into intense disorder. We were squabbling. We were torn apart. Still, there was a kind of order to the chaos. Rohr explains:
A sense of order is the easiest and most natural way to begin; it is a needed first “container.” But this structure is dangerous if we stay in its safe confines too long. It is small and self-serving. It doesn’t know the full picture, but it thinks it does. “Order” must be deconstructed by the trials and vagaries of life. We must go through a period of “disorder” to grow up. And then we have re-order. Only in the final “reorder” stage can darkness and light coexist, can paradox be okay. We are finally at home in the only world that ever existed.
We’re in disorder now.
All of our comfortable old narratives, our blinders, everything we thought we knew.
It’s gone.
The world of October 6th was an illusion.
We’re living in the chaos that comes after October 7th.
So how do we re-order? How do we feel at home in this new world, which isn’t really a new world, just new to us?
There are three interconnected answers: Proactivity, education, and storytelling. And if you’ll permit me to start with that last one first, I’m going to tell you a short story. The late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, had a student who had a friend whose son was about to become a bar mitzvah. This friend wanted his son to meet the great Rebbe. They entered his study, and the Rebbe greeted them with his characteristically warm handshake. He asked the bar mitzvah boy, “Are you a baseball fan?” The Bar-Mitzvah boy replied that he was. The Rebbe asked: “Yankees or Dodgers?” And the boy replied “Dodgers.”
“Does your father have the same feeling for the Dodgers as you have?” the Rebbe asked. The boy said no. “Does he take you out to games?” the Rebbe wanted to know. And the boy said “Well, every once in a while my father takes me to a game. We were at a game a month ago.”
“How was it?” asked the Rebbe.
“It was disappointing,” the 13-year-old confessed. “By the sixth inning, the Dodgers were losing nine-to-two, so we decided to leave.”
The Rebbe looked at him. “Did the players also leave the game when you left?”
The bar mitzvah boy stared back at the Rebbe, shocked. “Rabbi, the players can’t leave in the middle of the game!”
“Why not?” asked the Rebbe. “Explain to me how this works.”
So the boy launched into an explanation. “There are players and fans. The fans can leave when they like — they’re not part of the game. Even if they leave, the game continues without them. But the players can’t do that. It’s their job to stay and try to win until the game is over.”
It’s as good an illustration as any of the obligation we have.
We can be in the game… or we can be in the stands.
It’s one or the other.
We can be the observers of history.
Or we can be the ones changing it. Writing the story as best we can.
But to be in the game, we need education. We need to know our history, our story, ourselves.
And I hate to say this, but I have to.
We, the Jewish world – we have fallen short.
The people of the Book! Falling short on education!
But it’s true.
When it comes to Israel, to the conflict, to the past 100 or so years – we haven’t given our kids the tools they need.
We’ve given them talking points, some of us. Maybe some indoctrination. A sense that Israel is important and you have to go on Birthright and also, don’t forget to call Bubbe. But we haven’t given them education. We haven’t given them a way to grapple with all that Israel is – good, bad, ugly. We haven’t done enough to give them the tools to think for themselves, to tell the story for themselves, in all its complexity with different narratives.
But the good news is: it’s not too late. It’s not too late to combat the dangerous mix of ignorance and overconfidence that affects our young people in particular. Back in December, a Stanford professor surveyed “250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S.” When asked about the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” chanted frequently at rallies, “most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).”
Lots of enthusiasm. Not a ton of knowledge. But after “learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting ‘from the river to sea’ to rejecting the mantra.”
In other words, education made all the difference
AND THAT GOES BOTH WAYS.
I recently spoke to 120 12th graders at a Jewish school and asked them how passionate they were about Israel. All hands went up. A win. That’s good, I thought. I then asked if they had heard of the Altalena Affair – a painful but very important chapter in Israeli history that might just be the reason that the Jewish state even exists today.
Three hands.
I then asked if they had heard of the Titanic.
Every hand went up.
At another Jewish school, the principal informed me that many of his students could not locate Gaza on a map. Meanwhile, the organization Boundless just surveyed 18-40 year old Jews, and found that 40% could not define Zionism. 40%!!!
I’m not telling you this to make fun of young people.
I’m telling you this because THIS IS OUR CHANCE FOR CHANGE.
This is our work.
This is our future.
And we have to decide whether we’re going to give our young people the tools to do more than just be the Ever Dying Jew. We have to empower our young people to HOPE. And that means we have to give them the education they need.
That’s our mission at Unpacked and OpenDor Media.
We educate, inform and inspire Jews and non-Jews alike.
You don’t need to be a Jew, or to be religious, or to believe or look a certain way to be part of the Jewish story, to learn more about us.
All you need is an interest in the history of the Jewish people.
All you need is the desire to know more.
And the desire is there. Oh, man, it’s there. Since October 7th of 2023, we’ve had 26M YT views, 11M SM video views. We’ve had 1.4M podcast downloads. We’ve gotten over 320,000 subscribers to our YouTube content on Unpacked. We’ve had 2,846 new people using our educational platform for Jewish educational institutions from all 50 states.
And the wildest part of all: we are reaching our target audience.
72% of our audience is either millennials or Gen Z – the next generation and those who educate them. 49% of our audience is not Jewish. Forty nine percent.
There is so much to be hopeful about, if you only know where to look.
Best of all, we recently launched a new division to teach about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in non-Jewish educational settings, called ConnectED. In fact, we are now teaching the story of Israel and the complicated and complex and nuanced Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflict in 19 of the top independent schools in the country. From Fieldston to Dalton to Horace Mann in NYC…To two of your top schools here in Colorado…Grayland and Colorado Academy.
Muslim, Christian and Jewish students are learning our content with our approach… together. In NYC, one of our Muslim students, who happens to be of Palestinian descent, said to me later:
I was not going to come here to participate because I did not want to be a traitor to my people.But, I decided to attend. Then, when we started learning, I made a decision to sit here quietly, but not participate. By the end of the class, I learned that you were interested to hear my story, that others wanted to share their stories, and so I participated, and was eager to hear your stories and your perspectives.
We are not the people of despair.
This is not a moment to despair.
Yes, it’s a moment to grieve. It’s a moment to mourn, to be sad, to remember what we’ve lost.
And it’s a moment in which we can seize all the opportunities around us.
It’s a moment that is full of hope.
It’s a moment in which it is more important than ever to BE PROACTIVE. TO EDUCATE OURSELVES AND OTHER – not with propaganda, not with misinformation, not with some one-sided narrative of good versus evil. We do not fight indoctrination with indoctrination. We fight indoctrination with education.
This is the moment to invest in real education. Real storytelling. Real dialogue.
I’m going to borrow from Scott Galloway, the business/marketing machine and podcaster, who wrote:
One query I get often is “What class/skill would you suggest our kids take/learn to compete in the modern economy?” Or some-such. I think most expect me to say computer science, STEM courses, or some BS about the wonders of a liberal arts education that foments curiosity. But hands down, the skill I would grant is singular: storytelling.The arc of evolution bends toward good storytellers. Communities with larger proportions of skilled storytellers experience greater levels of cooperation…Storytellers themselves are more likely to receive acts of service from their peers.
When we tell stories with empathy; when we share the good-the bad-the ugly; when we tell stories instead of explaining, instead of doing hasbara, instead of telling people messages, we can move people.
One listener from Australia wrote:
I just listened to your podcast Meta-Narratives of the Israel-Hamas War and it was truly profound. My father was Jewish; my mother a Gentile. Dad brought me up to love and respect the Jewish people and, as a pastor, I teach Christians about the centrality of Israel and the Jewish people in the purposes of God.
Following October 7th, I experienced the very same stages of grief that you described. I felt as if the fabric of my soul had been torn asunder and struggled to comprehend the seeming indifference of others. Yes, my friends were shocked and appalled by the Hamas atrocities, but they were bewildered by how personally devastated I felt and acted. Please keep up the good work, you never know just how many lives your podcast has touched. Even here, down under … well, down under.
Another listener named Maria, who was born in Ukraine but emigrated to the U.S. in 2002, wrote:
“In my younger years I was pretty disconnected from my Jewishness. I was the family member who made jokes at Passover like “boy, can Jews hold a grudge”. But in recent years I’ve begun to feel more and more unsafe, feeling antisemitism in America, beneath the surface. October 7th made everything boil over for everyone. Antisemitism became louder. And so has many people’s connection to their Jewishness, including my own.
I recently found your podcast and I binge-listened to it. It had a tremendous impact on me. The opening audio clips make me break into goosebumps every time. The stories of Israel’s struggles, its mistakes, its hopes, and how all Jews are connected in a way, have really touched me. The episode about Soviet Jews made me cry thinking about my mom. She knew nothing about being Jewish because of Soviet suppression (as you can tell from my name) until we came to Israel. She found Judaism and felt an immense connection to it. As a child I was annoyed sometimes, I just wanted to do what I wanted to do, especially once we moved to the U.S. But listening to that episode it really struck me in a new light what she must have gone through. I wish she was still here for me to tell her, to validate her. But more than that, these stories have put words to things I was never able to articulate well. The millennia-old generational pain we carry with us, that other people just can’t understand. I’m in an interfaith marriage (as you may be able to see from my last name), and I do my best to ensure my kids know both sides of their background. And I’m doing my best to not let my kids see how scared and isolated I feel some days. I think what you said in one episode was correct: the best antidote to antisemitism, is our Judaism. I find comfort when I take my son to Hebrew class and then he tells me what he learned. I find comfort in baking hamantaschen with my kids and then pretending it’s not at all disgusting as I choke it down (parenting haha). And I found a lot of comfort in listening to each episode and knowing I’m not so alone.
I’m not telling you this to cheerlead myself.
I’m telling you this because it encapsulates our responsibility.
Our power.
I’m telling you this so that you, too, can reclaim your identity. Not as the ever-dying Jew. Not as the anxious Jew, the worrier, the Jew who needs to cut away parts of themselves to fit in.
I’m telling you this because there is power in the Jewish story. There is power in surviving for four thousand years. In being too stubborn to go away. In being too in love with life to stop clinging – even when it’s the easiest thing in the world.
But to access that power, we need to know our story. We need to tell it – to ourselves, to our children, to our community, to whoever needs to hear it, in whatever language meets the current moment.
The current moment is difficult.
But we have showed ourselves – and the world – who we are by coming to meet it.
We haven’t shied away from the hurt, from the pain, from the grief.
Instead, we’ve put our arms around each other. We’ve held up our brothers and sisters in Israel when they couldn’t stand any longer. They’ve done the same for us.
Are we winning, Abba? Are we winning?
Of course we’re winning, Nissa’le. We’re in this room, together. We have survived Babylon and Rome, exile and expulsion, Crusades and pogroms and Inquisitions, blood libels and genocide and October 7th and October 8th and every single day since then.
We know who we are.
We know what we stand for.
We know we stand together.
In Colorado alone, the Jewish people are 100,000 strong. And if all 100,000 of us know our story, know our truth, know what our ancestors survived – we’ve won.
If all 100,000 of us realize that Judaism is so much more than being opposed to antisemitism – that the story of the Jews is so much deeper than the story of those who hate us – we’ve won.
It is not on you to finish the task – but it is also not for you to walk away from it.
Hope is mandatory. Not easy. But necessary. Staying in the game is mandatory. Also not easy. Also deeply necessary.
Rachel Goldberg Polin is right.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is right.
Naftali Hertz Imber is right.
We are the people of hope. We are am hanetzach, the people of eternity. We are not the ever-dying people; we are the Ever-Living, Ever-Surviving, Ever-Thriving Jews.
Now let’s go finish this fight.