I called an old friend from the car on Monday. I think we both felt the urge to connect as Rosh Hashanah was coming, and we did the usual, casual check-in about our eight (!!) combined kids. It was a lovely way to spend a few minutes in that liminal space until she asked me, “Next year has to be better than this year, right?”
It’s a fair question that deserved a fair answer, and I hedged pretty hard. I think I said something like, “I’m not so sure,” and her dejected reaction felt unembellished.
I won’t recap the last 12 months; they’ve been terrible, yet occasionally joyful. I have celebrated hostage rescues, audacious intelligence operations, and the elimination of terrorists while mourning the lost and the forgotten. I have also watched in real time the cowardice of the international community when confronted with a binary choice between supporting Israel and supporting terror, and the utter failure of colleges and universities to get on the right side of history. Heartbreaking? Yes. Surprising? No.
5785 arrives with missiles from Yemen and Iran, an unspecified number of hostages still alive after a year in captivity, another can-we-call-it-an-invasion in southern Lebanon, a slow war in Gaza, and ongoing campus antisemitism, so I am grasping at straws here. Everything can get worse, and, if we’re being honest, Oct. 7 opened up a portal to a kind of suffering that many people of my generation had never experienced and one that has fundamentally realigned Jewish identity for many of us.
And yet after the spectacular military and intelligence failure of last October, Israel has seized the initiative and the narrative. It has kneecapped Hezbollah dramatically in a series of bold actions, taken the fight to the Houthis in Yemen, and continues to eradicate tunnels and terrorist infrastructure in Gaza. Restoring not only deterrence but also striking fear into those who would seek Israel’s destruction is the kind of mean that I am interested in reverting to.
With that being said, all of this will happen again. Israel’s enemies neither slumber nor sleep, but, then again, neither does our Guardian or our guardians. Am Yisrael Chai and Chai we will continue to do—we have not survived for 4,000 years to walk away now.
As Rabbi Menachem Creditor recently wrote, “We do not aspire to war. But we will fight until we do not have to any more. May that day come soon and in our days.”
Amen, selah. That’s my prayer for this year, and I fear for the rest of my years.
Shana Tovah.
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