October of reconnection with our identity

In November 2023, I was a guest speaker in the small town of Spokane, Washington, on the far western side of the United States. The rabbi had organised a Friday night dinner where I was due to address the issue of antisemitism. With only a thousand Jewish residents, the rabbi though he knew every Jew in town.

Then David arrived. A tall young man, unknown to the rabbi, he hadn’t booked for the dinner but, of course, he was made to feel most welcome. He was given a seat right opposite me. After greeting him, I asked David, “What brings you here tonight?” His answer was chilling.

“October 7.”

There’s no question that the horrific massacres of 7 October 2023 unleashed a groundswell of Jewish identity which broke through layers and layers of apathy and pierced years and years of indifference in Jews around the world.

Jewish girls who had no big issue with marrying non-Jewish men suddenly began reconsidering whether they had made the right decision. One woman said plainly, “I don’t understand. My husband just doesn’t get it.”

Generous philanthropists who had supported American Ivy League universities for years were suddenly redirecting their contributions to Yeshiva University or other more Jewish causes. These donors weren’t generally supporters of yeshivas or Jewish day schools. But the universities’ lack of any suitable response to the horrendous outburst of blatant antisemitism on their campuses was good cause for them to rethink their priorities in charity. And we’ve seen similar responses here in South Africa.

In Israel, secular soldiers who grew up with little to no traditional Jewish education were suddenly clamouring for tefillin, tzitzit, and tehillim books. It was unprecedented.

How are we to understand this phenomenon?

It’s proof positive that the inner core of the Jew, that irreducible minimum and nucleus of identity is always there. It may be hidden and dormant, but it’s ever-present. The spiritual pilot light may be unseen, but it’s inextinguishable. And on 7 October, somehow it was touched. Deeply. Jews who were previously uninvolved, disengaged, disconnected, or even seemingly severed from their faith and Jewish consciousness, suddenly awakened and were responsive.

They may have previously shouted their atheism from the rooftops. They may have never set foot in shul. They may have not been affiliated to a single Jewish organisation. They may have regarded their Jewishness as nothing more than coincidental. But at the end of the day, the Jewish spark never goes out. It’s always there, and can be ignited when touched in the right place and in the right way.

7 October touched us all. In ways we hadn’t been touched before.

Suddenly Jews who were “lapsed” or assimilated felt as if they themselves had been attacked for being Jews. It was random. Any Jew was fair game. Young people at a music festival; grandparents babysitting their grandchildren; tiny toddlers murdered in cold blood; and liberal students at Ivy League universities harassed and frightened to be overtly Jewish.

The face of evil had revealed itself for all to see and millions to fear.

Suddenly, all the guilt trips, all the stories of Holocausts and inquisitions, pogroms, and persecutions, became real. Tangible. Fact, not fantasy. No longer were they academic history lessons, but hard, on-the-ground reality in sophisticated, Western, progressive societies. Suddenly, the hallowed humanitarianism of the university was transformed into raw hate, toxic, vicious, and venomous.

It’s a bitter irony that the overwhelming numbers of victims of 7 October were liberal-minded people. They had been reaching out and helping their Gaza neighbours over decades in so many ways – giving them jobs; and taking them and their children to Israeli hospitals for treatment. Those same people who were helped so often by their Israeli neighbours in the south of Israel were either the perpetrators themselves, or active supporters assisting the murderers, pointing out where people lived and where they may have hidden. The myth of the “innocent” citizens of Gaza needs finally to be dismissed entirely.

And yes, it’s ironic too that the Jewish girl the rabbi couldn’t convince not to intermarry now says, “Maybe I made a mistake after all. My husband just doesn’t get it.”

Of course, it’s sad that antisemitism is more successful than rabbis in inspiring Jews to remember who they are. But such is the tragic reality. When we forget who we are, the antisemite can be relied upon to remind us. Please G-d, in future, our innate faith and sense of peoplehood will need no reminders from anyone.

I believe 7 October exposed more than the covert antisemitism in the world that was just waiting for an excuse to come out of the closet. In my humble opinion, 7 October revealed the true nature of the Jew. We may hide, we may deny, we may disassociate, but ultimately, we are who we are, and a Jew is a Jew is a Jew ad infinitum. And that’s reassuring to know.

• Rabbi Yossy Goldman is life rabbi emeritus of Sydenham Shul in Johannesburg, and president of the South African Rabbinical Association.