Still standing, still living as Jews
Three years after October 7, we gather to remember and continue the Jewish life that hatred cannot extinguish.
The succah is an odd thing to build a festival around.
Flimsy by design and open to the weather, it comes down after a week.
Jews have put one up every Tishrei for millennia regardless, and this year, in backyards and on balconies, we did it again.
It is a fair picture of how this community has lived since October 7.
Next week marks three years since the massacre in southern Israel, and much of that time has felt exposed. The Adass Israel synagogue was firebombed. Then came Bondi.
Arsen Ostrovsky, who survived that attack, took its lesson to the UN in New York last week. The massacre, he told the rally, “did not happen in a vacuum” and the answer to antisemitism “cannot be Jewish silence. It must be Jewish strength”.
Our readers seem to agree. Asked in this week’s poll how they would mark the anniversary, 61 per cent said they would attend a commemoration in person and 31 per cent will mark it at home.
This while organisers keep venues secret until the last minute and ASIO won’t rule out threats to community leaders.
None of this is new.
When Rome destroyed the Second Temple, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai asked for Yavneh and its scholars, and Judaism learned to travel light: a book, a table, 10 people and a prayer.
England, France and Spain expelled their Jews, and each time the books left with them. Holocaust survivors came to Australia, opened shops, raised families and bore witness.
Sheina Gutnick, whose father Reuven Morrison died confronting the Bondi gunmen, has just had a baby.
Of her public advocacy this year, she said: “I was speaking about death, grief and the worst thing that had ever happened to our family, while carrying this reminder that life was continuing.”
The year ahead will bring trouble: a Royal Commission, state elections here, a national election in Israel, and no sign the hatred will ebb.
But we have come through the High Holy Days again.
We prayed, we fasted and we continue to eat under roofs you can see the stars through.
On October 7 we will gather to remember, then go on living as Jews, which has always been the answer.