In the introduction to his last book, Morality, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks explains the difference between history and memory.

History is an answer to the question, ‘What happened?’ Memory is an answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ History is about facts, memory is about identity. History is about something that happened to someone else, not me. Memory is my story, the past that made me who I am, of whose legacy I am the guardian for the sake of generations yet to come. Without memory, there is no identity, and without identity, we are mere dust on the surface of infinity.”

As Rabbi Sacks stresses throughout his writings, Judaism is a religion, and the Jews are a people, whose identity is profoundly shaped by a shared memory. We need only look at the nuts and bolts of the Jewish calendar cycle to see how true this is. The classic example is Pesach, when, at the Seder night at the very start of the festival, we do not simply recall but rather strive to relive the subjective experience of achieving freedom from slavery in Egypt. We are enjoined to see ourselves as if we came out of Egypt on that very evening.

Of course, it is not only Pesach. We erect a temporary dwelling on Sukkot to ‘relive’ the experience of dependence on God’s protection that the Children of Israel enjoyed in the desert. Moses reminds the second generation, about to enter the Promised Land, that God is making his covenant that day not only with them, but with all the as-yet-unborn generations of their descendants. We have a tradition that we were all ‘at Sinai’, as well as a profound sense, reflected in both the liturgy and the philosophy, that each day we receive the Torah anew.

And, to differentiate, as the Hebrew phrase has it, with a thousand differences, every year, on Tisha b’Av, we adopt the customs of mourning, dim the lights in shul, sit on the floor or on low stools, and weep for the destruction of the first and second temples and the twice-visited exile from the Land. Perhaps the most painful part of the day is the recitation of kinot, laments, in shul at the end of the morning service. Over the centuries, laments have been added to mark particularly tragic events in Jewish history, be it the slaughter of rabbis, the path of death and destruction that the Crusaders cut through Jewish Europe on their way to the Holy Land, or the Holocaust.

I must confess that, while I always take part in the recitation of these laments, and am usually one of the ten or so members of the congregation asked to each introduce two or three of the laments, and give a brief background, there are years when my performance of this ritual is just that: the performance of a ritual.

One of the legacies of October 7 is that it stripped away, in a single day, 75 years, since the foundation of the State of Israel (or, if not that, then certainly 56 years, since the Six-Day War of 1967): more than half a century of believing that the helplessness of Jews in the face of antisemitic attacks was a thing of the past. I sat in shul on Tisha b’Av this year and read the graphic descriptions of the unspeakable acts of savagery visited on men, women and children after the city fell. For the first time, I did not have to imagine these scenes. I had seen the video shot by the Hamas savages themselves. The images that came unsummoned were not the jerky black-and-white news footage of the 1940s, but the full colour phone videos of 318 days ago.

For the first time I did not have to imagine those scenes in a past that, even if its most recent manifestation was the Shoah, is still from before my lifetime. Rather, it was my recent memory and, much more powerfully and significantly even than that, it was a still-extant existential threat. October 7 has taken us back to the default position of Jews ever since the fall of the Second Temple, the sense that our life is as precarious as…well, Tevye says it better than I can. I now feel viscerally something of what must have been the day-to-day emotional experience of Jews throughout the two thousand years of exile.

There were, of course, some better periods and some worse periods over those two thousand years. But any Jew who left Spain after 1492 should have known that any Golden Age comes with an expiry date, and, however well things worked out for him in Italy, Holland or England, he was living on borrowed time.

This is the hard lesson that, I fear, Jews in New York and London need to internalise today. As for Jews in Jerusalem, we have, at the very least, to acknowledge that Israel does not, at the time of writing, have all the answers. The filmed horrors of October 7 are deeply harrowing. In a very different way, the uncertainties that Israelis are feeling are equally harrowing.

I am speaking not only of the physical uncertainty of whether, and when, Iran will attack. I am not even speaking only of the tortuous uncertainties of whether any more hostages will be released, alive or dead, and at what terrible price in the release of bloodstained terrorists, and at what terrible price in more future victims of terrorism. I am, rather, speaking of whether it is possible to build an Israel that is physically secure enough to survive the unending enmity that the world directs at us, and that at the same time is morally secure enough to remain worthy of surviving, and to be recognised as such by its amazing population.

Let me be clear. I am not describing Israel as she is today. By any objective measure, the IDF is a moral army fighting a moral war in Gaza. Don’t take my word for it. Read what the High Level Military Group (an association of military leaders and officials from NATO and other democratic countries) says.

However, it is undeniable that one of the prices Israel pays for standing up to Palestinian terrorism is that it becomes increasingly challenging to act morally. At an individual level, and, potentially, at an institutional level, it becomes ever more difficult to resist being dragged down to the level of the enemy you face. If, as may well happen over the next year or two, significant numbers of idealistic young nation builders feel that Israel offers no way forward to a future that can be both secure and moral, and seek their personal future somewhere else (Where, for Heaven’s sake?), then the balance of the fabric of the nation may start to tip.

At the same time, we may be about to see a massive influx to Israel of idealistic and moral Jews who no longer see a future for themselves in the Diaspora. If that happens, then the future may look very different indeed.

As a Danish parliamentarian apparently said in the late 1930s: “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” And yet, our Jewish perspective should perhaps encourage me to be rather more optimistic. It is difficult to see our current position, depressing as it is, as the darkest moment in Jewish history…or even in Jewish history of the last 100 years. From 1944 to 1948, from the heart of the Shoah to the establishment of the State, was, incredibly, only four years. As Ben-Gurion said, “In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.”

I’m still keeping my fate tied with Israel’s. If you knows of a better ‘ole, go to it. And, Iran willing, I’ll see you back here next week.