What we become post-7 October is our choice

Three years ago, on Simchat Torah, my phone started buzzing before dawn. Not the ordinary morning noise. Messages from people in Israel, one after another, asking if I had heard, if I understood, if I was watching. I went onto Twitter and saw the footage that would define that morning for anyone who watched it: a white pickup truck moving through Sderot, and the bodies of pensioners who had been gunned down in the street. I woke my wife and told her something terrible was happening in Israel, that I could feel our world tilting on its axis, and that I did not think it would ever sit the same way again. 

I had been invited to Great Park Synagogue that yomtov. Because it was Simchat Torah, most of the congregation had no idea what was unfolding while they davened. I remember moving between people, telling them what I had seen, and watching the shock on face after face. Men and women who had walked into shul that morning as they always did walked out of it into a different world. By the time we understood what Hamas had done, that a terrorist organisation had murdered families in their homes, raped women, burned children, and dragged the living and the dead across the Gaza border as trophies, I already knew two things with total certainty. The first was that Israel would never be safe in the way we had allowed ourselves to believe it was. The second was that I, as a South African Jew, would never again describe my Zionism the way I had the day before. 

That is the part we do not talk about enough – 7 October did not change only Israel. It changed us, here, in Johannesburg and Cape Town and every WhatsApp group, dinner table, and chag in between. It changed what it costs to say you are a Zionist out loud. It changed who looks at you differently at work when they find out. It changed what our children have had to explain to classmates, and what our university students have had to survive on campuses that decided, with unmistakable speed, whose grief counted and whose did not. 

For three years, this community has lived in something close to emergency mode. We organised. We fundraised. We showed up to vigils and rallies and briefings. We learned the names of hostages the way you learn the names of family, because in the truest sense they were. We became fluent in a vocabulary we never wanted: proof of life, ceasefire negotiations, body identification. We watched South African political leadership fail, repeatedly and by design, to name Hamas as what it is, and we understood that this failure was not an oversight. We built our own record because others would not. 

I am proud of every part of that response. I would not undo a single vigil, a single placard, a single uncomfortable conversation at a braai. But I want to say something to this community that I think we need to hear as we mark this third anniversary: a people cannot live permanently in a state of siege and call that a Jewish life. Emergency mode is not identity. It is a response to a wound, and a necessary one, but it cannot be the whole of what we pass on. 

Here is my personal observation, the one I keep returning to. In the months after 7 October there was a general instinct in this community to become smaller in public. People I know quietly stopped wearing anything that identified them as Jewish on the street. Not out of shame. Out of a fear that had settled into daily life without anyone naming it out loud. I have two sons, both proud Zionists who have never hidden it, and I watched them navigate a world that had suddenly made that pride feel like a risk rather than a birthright. Children and young adults read what we do not say. And I realised, somewhere in that first year, that if we weren’t careful, the single clearest inheritance we would leave the next generation of South African Jews was fear itself: fear dressed up as vigilance, fear mistaken for wisdom. 

I refuse to accept that as our legacy. Fear is not what we owe our children. Responsibility is. 

There is a difference between belonging and responsibility, and 7 October is what forced us to learn it. Belonging is comfortable. It asks nothing of you beyond showing up to shul on the high holy days and feeling warmly held by a community that has always been there. Responsibility is different. Responsibility means understanding that Jewish life in South Africa, and support for the world’s only Jewish State, is not a birthright we passively inherit but a position we have to actively hold, explain, and defend, generation after generation, in rooms that are not always friendly. Belonging was what we had on 6 October. Responsibility is what 7 October demanded of us, and what it will keep demanding. 

What does it mean to stand tall as a South African Jew and a Zionist in this moment? It doesn’t mean shouting louder than the people who wish us gone. It doesn’t mean performing our grief for an audience that has already decided not to listen. It means something quieter and harder: showing up consistently, not just in crisis. It means teaching our children the history and the language of this conflict properly, so they can hold their ground in a lecture hall without needing us beside them. It means refusing to let campus intimidation or diplomatic hostility or social exclusion convince us to make ourselves smaller. Standing tall is not a posture we strike for a photograph. It is a discipline we practise on ordinary days, when no one is watching and there is no crisis to respond to. 

That is the real lesson of these three years, and it is the one I want us to carry forward. We learned what showing up actually requires. Not adrenaline. Not outrage, though outrage has its place. What showing up requires is endurance: the willingness to keep doing the unglamorous work of community, advocacy, and education long after the news cycle has moved on to something else. The world’s attention is short. Ours cannot be. 

So as we mark this anniversary, I am not asking this community to relive 7 October in our kitchens and our synagogues once more, though we will, because we must never let it be forgotten or minimised. I am asking us to decide, deliberately, what Jewish life we choose next. Not a life defined by what was done to us. A life defined by what we build in response: proud, informed, unafraid, and rooted in responsibility rather than fear. 

Our children are watching us decide this right now. Whether we mean to or not, we are teaching them what it means to be Jewish in this moment. Let them inherit backbone, not dread. Let them inherit a community that stood tall, not one that merely survived. 

• Craig Pantanowitz is the national chairperson of the South African Zionist Federation.