Blogger’s Note: It may well be that, some weeks, when you start reading my post, you find yourself wondering just where it’s leading. It may or may not surprise you to know that the experience of writing it is often the same. What could easily be mistaken for a lazy lack of planning is, in fact, an attempt to achieve an easy flow of spontaneity.

The downside of this is that sometimes, when I discover where the post has led me, I’m not that enamoured of the final destination, and then I have to retrace my steps and choose the road more taken instead. This week, I was quite surprised to see where I ended up, and really couldn’t decide whether to stick with it, or start again. While I know at least several of my readers will find little, if anything, here to interest them, with apologies to them, and after reflection, I feel I want to stand behind where this week’s musings led me.

In the Jewish calendar, in a normal year, these few days are very unusual. If we are fortunate, the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, have led us on a spiritual journey up to the peak of reaffirming acceptance of Hashem as both King and God at the very end of Yom Kippur, in what we truly believe may be and hope is indeed as close to a state of being unencumbered by our sins as we can ever aspire to. Immediately, a whole slew of mitzvot crowd in on us. While the sound of the shofar’s final long single note, the Tekia Gdola, still reverberates, we recite arvit, the evening prayer, then hear Havdala, the ceremony marking the transition from Shabbat to weekday, then move outside shul to recite Kiddush Levana, the blessing on the New Moon. The next days are filled with erecting and decorating the sukkah, acquiring the arba minim, the lulav and etrog and cooking and learning for chag.

All of this is true this year, and yet, in this most unusual year, these few days seem even more unusual than normal. It began, for me, with the prayers of the Yamim Noraim, which seemed to have an additional resonance, reflecting the particular sensibility that I brought to them this year. To give just one example: how can I have failed to notice, until this year, that the first block of specific appeals to ‘Our Father, Our King’ in Avinu Malkeinu, after the general introductory group, are appeals to remove all of the external threats to our wellbeing, including the nefarious plans of our enemies. This is a timely reminder that only someone who has been removed from immediate physical danger has the clarity of mind to reflect on their sins. The war creates its own priorities. When the siren sounds, you first find shelter and only then continue your prayer.

More immediately striking is the fact that the looming sense of Sukkot approaching has an additional and antithetical layer to it this year. October 7 fell, this year, on the fifth of the ten Days of Penitence, at the very heart of the Days of Awe. Even more significantly, as we look forward to Sukkot, we see, immediately following it, Simchat Torah, and the first yahrzeit of the victims of the pogrom.

Nobody can say what Simchat Torah will feel like in our shuls this year. Being asked to rejoice in the Torah on this most bitter of yahrzeits, one for which none of us can feel ready, is both the least imaginable and the most Jewish of asks. How will we, how can we possibly, be overwhelmed with joy at the gift of Torah Hashem bestowed on us, when all we see, every day, is the horrifying price tag attached to that gift? How can we rejoice in our privileged position as those who accept the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven at the same time as we are asking God every day how long He will continue to hide His face from us, and how He can bear to allow to be visited on us what has been visited on us as a nation over this last year?

And yet…and yet. What choice do we really have? October 7 was the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Usually, when we hear that sentence, the speaker’s intention is that we should feel how exceptional October 7 was. However, let us keep a sense of perspective. The Holocaust ended less than 80 years ago. If we measure Jewish history from the Brit ben Habetarim – the Covenant of the Pieces – that God made with Abraham, and if we imagine Jewish history from then until now as a single 24-hour day, then the Holocaust ended at about 23:30, just half-an-hour ago.

What this tells us is that October 7 was not all that exceptional. Our liturgy reminds us, in so many places, that throughout our history we have suffered atrocious pogroms and unspeakable acts of hate-filled violence, sometimes carried out in uncontrollable anger, sometimes in fiendish glee, and sometimes in cold-blooded calm. As we read on Seder night, “in every generation they rise up against us to destroy us”.

Today (Monday, as I write this) is an especially difficult day. We learnt last night and this morning the details of the direct hit on an army training base dining room during the evening meal, killing four 19-year-old soldiers – whose given names were Yosef, Yoav, Omri and Amichai – and injuring 58 others. In addition to the pain of those losses and that suffering, this attack has raised a slew of worrying questions. Did the drone release a missile immediately before it crashed? How is it that the drone was, apparently, originally identified and tracked, and then lost to radar? Were the timing and the precise location of the hit cruel misfortune or precise design and GPS navigation? Is this a one-off event, or does it mark an escalation of Hizbollah weaponry for which we have no definitive answer?

Any euphoria we allowed ourselves to feel over our multiple intelligence and tactical victories over the last weeks in Lebanon now begins to look as though it may melt into hubris.

It increasingly seems that any talk of achieving an absolute victory, in the North or the South, is unrealistic. The ‘Never Again’ that we lived with for most of the last 80 years seems to have proved to be an illusion. This was always a slogan that faced both ways. The world would never allow another genocidal attempt, and the Jews would never submit to another genocidal attempt. The last year has arguably made it clear that in neither of those two ways is the slogan necessarily true. Looking outwards, we see a world in which antisemitism continues to flourish. Looking inwards, we see that our survival is fragile, and that it does not lie within our power to change reality sufficiently to create a climate of peace.

At the end of the day, everything is in God’s hands. The very fragility of our survival emphasizes our dependence on God. Our acknowledgement of that dependence is our acceptance of His dominion, and our rejoicing on Simchat Torah will reflect that acceptance. When you buy a season ticket for the rollercoaster, you know that you are going to be facing ups and downs. On the rollercoaster there can be no ups without the downs. The very fact of your buying the ticket affirms that you accept the downs as well as the ups.

No. On reflection, not ‘accept’, but ‘embrace’. You embrace the downs as well as the ups. If you believe that everything is in God’s hands, then you have to strive to find the meaning, the potential, that is in everything, however hard it may be to see. Victor Frankl striving to help his fellow prisoners find a sense of purpose in Auschwitz; Golda Meir emerging from the cellar in which her father hid the family as the Cossacks raped and pillaged; emerging determined not to be that frightened little girl any longer. The thousands liberated from the camps who then married and built themselves new lives, new families, that could never replace those they had lost, but that gave them a life infused with a previously unimaginable richness and sweetness. The thousands of individual acts of bravery, self-sacrifice and public service that flashed brilliant on October 7 and every day since.

Human life, Jewish life, is made up of dark and light. Without shadow, there is no brilliant sunshine. We strive to keep the shadow away as much as possible, but when it sweeps over us, we must face it, and inhabit it, and strive to grow from it.

Wishing you all a Chag Sameach, despite, and in defiance of, our existential crisis.