7 October
1,200 people were murdered a year ago today (on the Gregorian calendar).
As I have been saying again and again and again and again and again, we can and should hold and honor everyone's story, everyone's pain– and fight to prevent harm to everyone.
We have seen, already, with all the (just) scrutiny on the actions of the Israeli government– there has been, already, much (unjust) dehumanization of Israeli civilians in many parts of the public conversation. And just as I demand that my own community address its anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism more generally, and face the atrocities committed against these human beings, created in the divine image– and to hold that every single death is a thing of ultimate consequence – so, too must the rest of the world also remember that every life taken by Hamas was a life.
(And just as US civilians– and denizens– should not pay in blood for the unjust actions of the US government, so, too, must we remember that every human being has, continues to have, human rights.)
Today I am focusing on the horrors of one day. I have not fully honored this specific loss in this space this year, and today, I feel that I must.
And if you're not Jewish, perhaps how I've done this will help you to understand why this trauma has cut so deep for so many of us.
I speak of this one day, today, but I do not forget every other day– and all the horrors – that have been in this last year, nor can any of us.
If you're in the Chicago area, join us on Wednesday at this event of collective mourning for all the losses of this last year.
Serious trigger warning on the piece below. It is unsparing.
There were just so many stories. They poured in like waves.
A grandmother murdered brutally, filmed on her own phone, and the video sent out to a bunch of contacts on her phone, including her granddaughter.
The fourth grade classroom that eventually resumed half-empty, because most of the classmates were dead.
People bound by cable ties, their bodies found burned–it's unknown if they were burned alive, or lit on fire after their murder.
At least 347 people at the Re'em music festival slaughtered, shot to death near the dance floors and around the bar, in the parking lot, the surrounding fields and as they tried to flee on the roads.
Shani Louk, 23, murdered as she ran for safety. Her partially-clothed body, paraded around the back of a pickup truck in Gaza City as people cheered and spat on her corpse.
Gunmen lit houses on fire while families tried to hide in safe rooms– they'd fire at the door of the safe rooms, throw grenades into the homes.
People executed on the sidewalk, in their bedrooms, at the health clinic.
Families choosing between being burned alive or shot to death.
One family of five waited until the magnets stuck to their safe room door began to melt.
Some people were cooked alive inside their safe rooms because of the heat.
Bullets were blasted into the air. The shrieks emanating from Jewish homes were chilling. The killing of men and children and attacks on Jewish women were rampant. And then, the fires started. Houses were being torched amidst the cries of their destroyers. Black smoke ascended towards the heavens. The putrid smell of smoke filled my nostrils—together with the smell of burning flesh. I will never forget those smells. (Sabih Ezra Akerib's account of the Farhud, the 1941 pogrom on Baghdad that ended 2000 years of Jewish life in Iraq)
When he called his daughter to say goodbye, Avlum Miles, 80, told her that they had removed the fingers on his left hand, without explaining how. He then began to drift in and out of consciousness.
“A young mother was in the bathroom, and when the terrorists saw her they lobbed in a grenade and killed her.”
A father was shot while walking with a baby carriage. A motorcyclist. A taxi driver. Everyone.
Two Eritrean and one Sudanese asylum seekers murdered, a Tanzanian student, a Cambodian student, four each Philippine and Chinese nationals, two Sri Lankan health care workers, ten Nepalis, forty-one Thai nationals who had come to earn money for a better life.
“I’m burning, I’m drowning,” were 80 year-old Silvia Mirensky's last words to her son on the phone.
“…with great cruelty ...they began to run through the streets of the city and carried out the aforementioned massacre with such rage and fury that they did not protect anything, leaving no person behind, large or small, and they entered houses and killed by the throats and the others received them in their lances and weapons that they carried....” (Portugese historian Gaspar Correia’s eyewitness account of the 1506 massacre of Lisbon Jewry)
“We heard them going house to house and spraying the people with gunfire,” said one survivor. “We heard them talking, shouting, laughing. There was the sound of endless automatic gunfire, fires burning, residents screaming.”
A member of Be'eri managed to get his parents on the phone just as gunmen broke into their home and fired through the safe room door, hitting his father. His mother told him that he was losing a lot of blood, that they're now throwing grenades. He heard his parents' murder in real time.
"The city was under fire continually. The shells exploded over the houses and only during the night the cannonading stopped for a few hours. The Jews, seeking safety from the shells and the bandits, fled from loft to cellar and from cellar to loft. Even now when I close my eyes I see these people, men, women, children, running now here, now there, not knowing where they should go or where it would be better for them. And then . . . then you see dead bodies lying everywhere in the streets, horribly disfigured bodies, lakes of blood... " (Eyewitness account of the Cherkassy pogrom, Ukraine, 1919)
A medic wrote,
"Along the road, we began to see dead bodies. Inside more cars, entire families were murdered. And on the streets, we bore witness to the bodies of babies, children, women, and men covered in blood, limbs missing or faces distorted. We drove for 15 kilometers, or almost 10 miles, until it became impossible to drive on without running over dead bodies. I saw a hundred dead people before I saw a single, living, wounded person."
To us You were silent and hiding face;
the shatterer came and struck down mother with children.
My lasses and lads moan:
Woe is me, for my soul is tired of murder!
Our hands went slack to hear the cry, we knew that their brows were ruddy as a split pomegranate.
May their dust rest in the bonds of life.
(From a liturgical poem by Rabbi Joseph of Chartres, after the mass slaughter of Jews in York, England, in 1190. Translation Isaac Grantwerk Mayer)
Judith Weinstein was a Kibbutz Nir Oz resident who was murdered with her husband, Gadi Haggai, as they took their regular early morning walk. She was many things, including wife, mother, teacher, puppeteer and poet.
Here are some of her poems:
tripod set to go
subject without focus
no selfie today
voices on paths
children run across lawns
kibbutz life returns
life so delicate
days of war, peace, sorrow, joy
let’s choose love
days pile on days
what is different this year?
lost belief, new hope
Abraham sent one child out of his home, exiled him from his place of birth– and he terrorized his other child by holding a knife to his throat.
But eventually, after so much suffering– in the end, after Abraham’s death, Isaac and Ishmael came together to bury him. (Genesis 25:9)
May we someday come together, may we someday return the source of all of this pain back to the Earth. May it herald a new beginning.
May the memories of every single soul slaughtered on October 7th– and every soul slaughtered since– be a blessing that helps to illuminate our way forward– towards valuing all life, towards understanding how holy every human being is, towards creating safety and care and home and sustenance for everyone.
May all those who mourn be comforted.
May all those in captivity return home, speedily.
May we reach a comprehensive ceasefire agreement soon.
May we move towards an end to these unceasing cycles of violence.
May we find a way to build something different.
let’s choose love
אֶל מַלֵּא רַחֲמִים שׁוֹכֵן בַּמְּרוֹמִים הַמְצֵא מְנוּחָה נְכוֹנָה תַּחַת כַּנְפֵי הַשְּׁכִינָה בַּמַּעֲלוֹת קְדוֹשִׁים וּטְהוֹרִים כְּזֹהַר הָרָקִיעַ מַזְהִירִים לְנִשְׁמוֹת יַקִּירֵנוּ וּקְדוֹשֵׁינוּ שֶׁהָלְכוּ לְעוֹלָמָם. אָנָּא בַּעַל הָרַחֲמִים הַסְתִּירָם בְּצֵל כְּנָפֶיךָ לְעוֹלָמִים וּצְרֹר בִּצְרוֹר הַחַיִּים אֶת נִשְׁמָתָם. יהוה הוּא נַחֲלָתָם וְיָנוּחוּ בְּשָׁלוֹם עַל מִשְׁכָּבָם וְנֹאמַר אָמֵן
God filled with mercy, dwelling in the heavens’ heights, bring your dear and holy ones proper rest beneath the wings of your Shekhinah, amid the ranks of the holy and the pure, illuminating like the brilliance of the skies the souls of our beloved and our blameless who went to their eternal place of rest. May You who are the source of mercy shelter them beneath Your wings eternally, and bind their souls among the living, that they may rest in peace.
And let us say: Amen.