Mijal:
Coming up on Wondering Jews…
Noam
The enemy wins. When Jews and Israelis start looking internally and and starting blaming the other. When we start doing this, then we prove sin. War. Right. I’m getting passionate because it drives me mad.
Mijal
Welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.
Noam
Today we are commemorating October the 7th and what it’s really meant to us in the past three years.
Mijal
We’re going to be asking some big questions. How has the aftermath of October 7th played out in Israel, in America, across the Jewish community? How was it divided us? How was it united us? And what does it mean to have hope at this moment?
Noam
Before we get started, this episode is generously sponsored by Nadine and Fernando Szew, wonderful leaders and many who do so much to strengthen the Jewish community wherever they are.
Mijal
They dedicate this episode in honor of the victims of October 7th and their families. On behalf of the Jewish people, they thank all those who protect Israel and work to rebuild what was lost.
Noam
May we all continue to do mitzvot and to merit peace.
Noam
Okay, Michael, let’s dig in. Today is a very heavy day. It is three years since the 7th of October, and I want you to just set the stage for me. Where were you on October the 7th? Three years later. Do you remember not just where you were, but kind of like an eye. Like where were you? Like, emotionally?
Noam
Where were you? Not physically or literally, but what was your what? What was going through your mind on that day?
Mijal
You know, first I’ll just say it. It’s just so crazy to think that it’s been three years. It’s just I don’t know if you’re feeling the dizziness of that. I feel like it was only yesterday that had happened. And I also feel like we have lived lifetimes since October 7th, 2023. So it’s like a I don’t know, I have a lot of like dizziness and emotional turmoil for this day.
Mijal
It doesn’t feel like like, you know. No, I’m like when you think about historical moments and you can really think about them in a way that you understand them. October 7th feels so raw still. Yeah. I don’t know if you’re if you’re feeling that, but, yeah, I mean, October 7th was and I think like, like many Jews around the world, I have memories of showing up in synagogue and finding out what happened and just being, being broken, devastated, anxious, nervous.
Mijal
You know, all of those emotions. I’ll share one moment with you that I. That I don’t think I told you about. It was maybe a couple of days after October 7th, in, like, that darkness of not even knowing how many people were killed and who was taken, and, you know, all of that. And I remember that we were locked out of, like, our, like, our apartment in the city.
Mijal
The lock broke and I had to just, like, go find a locksmith to open. And my, my brain was like, in Israel. And I’m like, going in Manhattan with people who are living life as as usual. And I found this locksmith, and he shows up and he happens to be Israeli. And we look at each other where like this very busy building and people around us are just walking around and we look at each other knowing that we are both literally like sitting shiva, like literally morning.
Mijal
And there was this very intense experience I had with him, like going up and down the elevator to the apartment. I hadn’t watched any video. I didn’t want to even I couldn’t watch them. But he started telling me about every single thing that he saw, and it was like an older man. And he just like he broke down completely.
Mijal
It was really intense. Know him? At the end, he wouldn’t take it, wouldn’t take any money from me. And I remember, like, running after him in, in the West Village and just telling him, okay, I’m like, I’m donating all this money. I’m giving it to this and giving it to that, I don’t know, it was like ships passing through the night.
Mijal
There was something there. I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s something like a very visceral memory of fellow Jews who were strangers, who were sobbing together and just feeling like the world was broken beyond anything we could imagine.
Noam
You know, I feel you brought up a memory for me in a very similar way, but from a different person. I remember the October 7th that day being I was I was at a, I was at an Orthodox synagogue. And when you go to an Orthodox synagogue, very often, if something major happens in the world that day, often it’s with positive things like a sports game.
Noam
So if the Knicks were playing on Shabbat, then somebody would be like, ask the security guard what’s going on. And they they would get the information from the security guard. And that was like, that’s a fun example of the security guard engagement with the Jewish Orthodox audience. But this day, the security guard, who is not Jewish, was giving information nonstop throughout the entire day because it was some Torah in the morning, as then from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and you’re there all day and all night.
Noam
And I remember the security guard saying to me when I was just checking with him, and I remember him looking at me and just saying, I’m so sorry for what your community is going through. It’s going to be even worse than what you know right now. And then he goes, but you guys are going to get him. You guys are going to get him.
Noam
And he just that that was the I and I you know, I, you know, observed Shabbat in the traditional observant way. And so for me I was like just so anxious to know what is he talking about, what is going on? What are my cousins going through? What are my what are my friends who are living there going through?
Noam
What are my uncle and and what are they thinking about? What are they going through? Are they are they. Where are they? Are they okay? And I think that, you know, right after that day, we really found out once Torah ended and then the weekday started, we started to go through this process of a lot of different emotions, and I want to go through some of them.
Noam
One was anxiety. One was anger. One was denial. One was a feeling of vengeance. One was a feeling of justice, of wanting justice. One was a feeling of being lonely and being alone and not knowing if anyone cared about the pain that you were experiencing that day. And and then all of a sudden, this rush of a totally different feeling within just a few weeks, which was, oh, actually, do people think we’re the bad guys?
Noam
Meaning we the Jews and we just like we got there’s a little bit of sympathy, but now all of a sudden, it feels like where we became viewed as the bad guys. And then I felt an emotion that you don’t hear often, which is gaslit, right? Not like anger, denial, anxiety. But but gaslit does that. Did you feel anything like that?
Mijal
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would add to everything you were saying. Just unimaginable sadness. I just, I just remember, I, I’ve never cried so much in my life. Those like few months, I, I even think as a mom, I was an absent mom for 3 to 4 months. I just didn’t exist for my my kids. I couldn’t I couldn’t function very well.
Mijal
And also just thinking about, I think, the fact that they were hostages for so long, I mean, the last hostages were only released, you know, in the last year. October 13th of 2025. But that made everything just so much more fraught, because it wasn’t only this tragedy that happened and that we could begin to process.
Mijal
They were underground, our people, children, you know, and they were underground as we began to experience, you know, animosity and accusations and lies and blood levels. And that is, of course, continued since and I think it’s it’s very hard to kind of I’ll just say it this way. Now, maybe I’m being too philosophical to existential. You can stop me.
Mijal
But, on I, I’ve begun to to wonder, like when things happened in Jewish history, the destruction of the temple, let’s say, destruction of the city of beta, which tried to rebel against the Romans. Major, major, major events. I wonder when we read them about them. Right now, they feel like neat episodes like this thing happened.
Mijal
This were the bad guys. This is how the Jews felt about it. But I wonder if people who lived through them, if there was also a certain sense of fraud and divisions and like trying to understand what exactly happened here, and how do we deal with a world that is gaslighting us and how do we deal with things two years down the line and three years down the line?
Mijal
And the reason I’m saying this now, and I hope I can say it in the spirit that I intended, there’s something about those early days of the first year, the first year and a half after October 7th that I almost again, please, I really hope you take this in a way that I mean it, that I almost like some, that I miss it.
Mijal
But I wish we could go back to. There was a certain clarity, a certain understanding of who were, how things were happening, what we had to advocate for, the how to find that we had to get out, how we had to help each other. And three years down the line, part of what I am mourning because I do more on October 7th, the day of memory, collaboration and mourning.
Mijal
I’m mourning not only what happened in October 7th, 2023, but I am mourning some of the, I don’t know, divisions, bitterness, anxiety, fraught ness, gaslighting that has just continued. And I’m not sure we’re all in our community even remembering October 7th in the same way and thinking about it in the same way and telling the same story.
Mijal
And that’s a little bit what I’m what I’m grappling with right now. And but but first, that’s what I’m saying resonate in some way. Or am I being too existential, trying to think about the way we write history?
Noam
I don’t think you’re being too existential. I think that it’s a it’s a great way to to contextualize the seriousness of the times that we’re living in and to not view the past and history as something that isn’t real. But it’s not it’s not magical. It’s not fantastic. It’s it’s it’s real. And I wonder the same sort of things about how did the Jewish world when the temple was being destroyed in the first century of the common era?
Noam
How did they look at each other? Did they realize, you know, that their division really was essential to their downfall? Was that just a story that the rabbis told later on as a sort of didactic moment? Is it? How did how did was there was there you know, this line from Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York City?
Noam
It never was the way it was. And I wonder, I wonder, that sort of thing. Also, how how were they experiencing these tragedies? Did they have this similar? Did the unity last as long as it lasted? For in the Jewish world now, or was it something that was longer? So it, it it it does resonate with me. And and I wanted to ask you having a little bit of, I don’t know, it’s not historical distance, but there were 1200 people that were killed on the 7th of October.
Noam
It’s 1200 innocent Israelis killed on on October the 7th, over 250 hostages. When you said before the hostages were taken. That was a day that radically shifted the lives of millions of people. And then way beyond that, it changed. It changed the geopolitical structure of the world. It had reverberations. When people talk about examples of the inability to have dialog and conflict being conflict avoidant, they talk about different moments throughout the last 50 or 60 years.
Noam
The 7th of October is one of those. It’s become a world moment, you know what I mean? So I want to I want to ask you, in the last three years, you know, there’s there’s the personal and then there’s, there’s the historical.
Noam
So October 7th, 2023, you gave me an example of, you know, where you were at the time. Where were you on October 7th, 2024, October 7th, 2025? And the reason I’m asking you this, Michael, is because you were you and I were talking about this before, before recording with each other, and you asked me where I was, and I told you I know exactly where I was.
Noam
On October 7th, 2023, New York City, exactly where I was in the synagogue, I mentioned October 24th, I was in Denver. I was giving a speech to the Federation there, and 2500 people gathered together. And I explained what October 7th meant to me and the future, what I, what I wanted to see. And then I said, I don’t even remember where I was on October 7th, 2025, I don’t remember.
Noam
And you said like, well, that’s kind of the point, Noam. So what did you mean by that? Where were you?
Mijal
Yeah. Well, I think what I meant by that is that on the one hand, you know, time.
Mijal
Time kind of makes all of us forget, you know, and things loosen density. But I think in this case, and it’s not about you, I think in general, it’s not just time that passes is that we have become, I think, so consumed with the survival of the Jewish people and the Jewish story that I think it’s almost hard to even remember October 7th.
Mijal
And I think it’s almost hard emotionally to sit with the pain and the loss, you know, and like. And by the way, when I think about it, like, I’ll start crying. I know that I have numbed myself on purpose. If I were to, like, really pause and think about the people who were taken from us murdered entire families, like, you know, the, the, the it’s such a it is so horrific.
Mijal
It is so horrific now. And I think that we have become so anxious for good reason, I would say, about the world, about the safety of the Jewish people, about the blood levels, about all of that, that it is almost hard to emotionally make space for both, you know, at the same time and with more time that passes and with challenges that we are facing in our own backyard, that that just makes it more complicated.
Mijal
But but going back to to where I was October 7th, 2024, I was it had been a year after I had spoken at like some rallies that went the bit viral, and I spoke at Washington in front of 300,000 people. So I was very, I had taken like the place I think of, like speaking very viscerally and being in many places where I could express myself with a lot of emotion.
Mijal
And that year, I think two things stand out to me. One is I, I joined a very powerful, amazing UJA commemoration in Central Park. It was breathtaking just to be there with so many Jews. I had given, by the way, on the side, some interviews with some Argentinian news stations about what was going on. So I’m sorry, some Spanish speaking news stations.
Mijal
And I remembered, by the way, that I, I realized I speak Spanish fluently, but I didn’t know what word to use for hostage because I hadn’t used that word in so long. In Spanish. I’m like, how do I say hostage? And then that same day, I ran a commemoration for my community, which was really, really emotional.
Mijal
We stayed very late into the night, just singing in the morning and being together and praying for hostages. And it was it was very powerful. It was it was just very visceral. I think we still felt that we were fighting and we felt I think the hostages were just forefront in our minds. Last year it felt different already.
Mijal
It felt different. I still remember where I was. I tended a few ceremonies. I made an effort to go there. I it’s so important to me to go there. It felt important to me to watch ceremonies from Israel. But I remember just having a sense of, like, beginning to feel that the, the we didn’t have the same visceral reaction that we had the previous years.
Mijal
And the people were more nervous. They were walking in eggshells. What can you say? What can’t you say? Who’s sitting in the room? Which politician is here? Who’s running for office? You know, this and that. And I remember feeling that. And I really just like, you know, that’s there’s something I mean, it’s natural, but it’s but it’s hard.
Noam
Is it also the case, Michael. And now I want to start being I want to just I want to process some of the analytical things going through my brain. Is it also the case that what happens is since the 7th of October, there’s been a war for the last three years in which the narrative shifted from very quickly, from October 7th being a horrific day to the last three years.
Noam
What people are seeing on social media is the fact that tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, and that became the story. And so the story very quickly, like October 7th now, is less and less and less relevant. And what’s more and more relevant is the fact that Israel waged a reaction to war, a defensive war in reaction to it.
Noam
And that’s been on people’s minds. And you and I want to know from you, even with what I just said right now.
Noam
Why is 911, which it was 25 years ago, 25 years and one month ago that nine over 11 happened. You were telling me that there was an article that you read from Arthur Brooks that talks about how nine over 11 was a you unifying factor. But I don’t see the 7th of October unifying the world in the same way.
Noam
And I could give you examples just from just some examples within Israel itself, there are parties that are both calling out the other right now as we speak. Like they were saying, they shouldn’t be part of be allowed to be in the Knesset, whether that’s or that’s Itamar Ben-Gvir saying that other should not be in existence in the Israeli electoral system, or you see within Israel 40% of Israelis according to believe that what happened on the 7th of October was an inside job, to an extent that either Bibi Netanyahu knew a lot more than he is, is giving on or or that.
Noam
Yeah, Golan knows a lot more than what? Than what he’s, than what he’s saying. And examples of Americans and Israelis being the American Jews and Israeli Jews being divided from each other as Reilly Jews feeling American Jews. Do you not get it? And American Jewish saying is really Jews? Do you not get it? And so I just want to understand, like I feel that this since the seventh, 7th of October, there’s been divisiveness.
Noam
Why is 911 different than ten seven?
Mijal
Yeah. So I think you asked two questions here. Let me maybe say something about the first question in which you you I think you noted that there’s something about the subsequent wars that Israel has waged and the very let’s just, you know, tragic and terrible loss of human life, especially Palestinians who have been killed. The you’re saying that that might also be part of, of of what’s happened, that it’s almost like October 7th itself was erased and, you know, and only what happened afterwards became the story.
Mijal
I would let me say something a little bit dark. I don’t know if it’s dark. It is dark. I often wonder, you know, what are the headlines? You know, what are the history books going to write in a hundred years, right. About these few years? How are they going to remember it? And on the one hand, what I think they will say is that there, there, there might have been plans for multiple armies to attack Israel at the same time.
Mijal
And Israel was able to wage battles that destroyed multiple terrorist proxies along its borders, and that established it in a in a more powerful way, militarily, in a way that, I’ll use my language here and not the history of books. That was miraculous and fantastic. But there’s a second story there, which I think the history books might tell or might not tell.
Mijal
We’ll see how things are going. But in many ways, sin war accomplished what he said to do with October 7th, which is not necessarily to, you know, be able to destroy Israel militarily, but to be able to destroy Israel standing in the world and to be able to have the elites and intelligentsia and populations from countries all around the world, demonizing Israel and believe that Israel is one of the key obstacles to the redemption of the world.
Mijal
Sinwar had seen how much division there was in Israel. Let’s remind ourselves, there had been a year or two years of like, literally hundreds of thousands of people protesting in the streets around the judicial reform. And it was something so visceral that was staring Israeli society apart, like we saw images on Yom Kippur of services being disrupted.
Mijal
And senior was betting in some way that that division would make Israel weak and vulnerable, and that October 7th would harm it in a much more potent way because of that division.
Noam
Well, I think that that bet might have been right and not in terms of militarily, because in the first month after the 7th of October, you saw all segments of Israeli society, all segments of Jewish society coming together right, center, left. Didn’t matter what your back on was whether you were ultra-Orthodox or super secular. And if you look at the the vast majority of the Israeli government, the parliament, they’re the Knesset, they also are, like the vast majority of them were very in favor of fighting this war in a very specific and profound and intense way, like they were where I’m saying that he may have gotten it right, or he went to the history
Noam
books and saw that divisiveness division is the only thing that could destroy the Jewish people. That’s it. No external force could ever destroy the Jewish people. I believe that that’s that’s right. When you look at the the first century of the common era, you saw the way the rabbis described the story of the Second Temple falling. It was internal division.
Noam
And now you’re seeing the 7th of October. In the three years later, you’re seeing Israelis saying that it was an inside job. 40%, according to Maariv, said that it was an inside awareness, not inside job, but inside awareness. The conspiracy theories developed that that either be new way too much on one tt side or someone like a Golan knew so much on the other side.
Noam
And that is the enemy wins. The enemy wins. When, when, when Jews and Israelis start looking internally and and starting blaming the other. When we start doing this, then we prove sin. War. Right. And like I it I’m getting passionate because it drives me mad. It drives me mad that we allow that narrative to unfold. It drives me mad.
Noam
And, and and that’s I guess why I’m saying that’s another gamble that he made. And like I said, militarily he was wrong. But culturally, I think that there’s a longer fight that they the enemies of the Jewish people, Hamas, what they’re doing is betting on internal Jewish division. Ultimately, the judicial reforms were about it’s not just about who who gets to serve on the courts.
Noam
It was about the future of the character, of the state of the Jewish people. Is it going to be more this more Jewish, more religious, more that way of thinking, or is it going to be more this, more democratic, more about the, you know, the ethos of Western society and what’s the future going to be? And and he was betting on, on the Jews dividing.
Mijal
Yeah. So first I’ll say this goes back to what you were reminding me about this article by Arthur Brooks that I mentioned to you. So he wrote this piece in the Free Press in which he was trying to, look historically at different tragedies that happened in America and trying to kind of see what happened afterwards. And he compared and contrast, for example, Americans after October, after sorry, after September 11th and Americans after Covid.
Mijal
And of course, there’s a lot of differences there. But his argument was that after September 11th, we saw a lot of unity and a lot of solidarity and after and in the midst of a crisis like Covid, we kind of saw the opposite. We saw divisions and recommendations, and he made a bunch of arguments. But I’ll draw two points that he that he says, number one, he says that whatever, whatever was the nature of of the social fabric before a tragedy, it’s probably going to persist afterwards.
Mijal
So he said, if we are more united before September 11th, which we were as a country, for many reasons, that’s going to contribute to the unity as opposed to if, God forbid, we had an attack. You know, now when we are more divided in America, our reaction is also going to be more divided. And then the other thing he mentioned is that the most important kind of like ingredient that determines if you’re able to grow stronger and more united after tragedy is whether you you begin to blame each other.
Mijal
And that that to him, that’s like the big question. If you start blaming each other, you know, you’re not going to be able to, to grow or to become strong. You know, from a tragedy having having said that, I want to agree with you and disagree with you and maybe with this, I’m also taking us to not only focus on the difficult and hard things, but also focus on constructive, hopeful and optimistic ways of thinking about the future.
Mijal
I totally agree with you about the tragedy that is the division. And it’s not just in Israel, here in America. I mean, it is just it feels exhausting every day to open the news and just see, you know, how how we’re going after each other and hurting each other in quite significant ways. There’s there’s just so much, so much division.
Mijal
We can spend a couple of hours just trying to map out all the divisions that we have around the world. And at the same time, I would argue that there is, there is, there is. And I’m not being Pollyanna here. I’m not like just trying to put like a pretty bone everything. Even with all the division that we’re seeing, there is still so much solidarity.
Mijal
And I’ll say it in the following way. Now, you mentioned before significant percentages of people who believe there was some sort of internal betrayal in Israel that led to October 7th. I’ll have you know that I actually know a bunch of people in Israel who think this way, and these are still people who will risk their life to save the life of another Israeli who is in a different political camp.
Mijal
Right. They will do it. They do it. A lot of them, you know, serving the army, and they leave their families for hundreds of days. And they they would be willing to lay down their lives for somebody else. Right. And here in America as well, we have a lot of divisions. We have a lot of challenges. And at the same time, I would say that there’s a very significant segment of our community that has become more united.
Mijal
You have, rabbis working across the nominations who never did beforehand. You have institutions collaborating in new ways. You have a new sense of existential solidarity in which we understand that we must be here for each other, right? To be able to face the challenges that are going on around us that we didn’t have before. So this is not to say that sinwar’s bet was definitely wrong for me.
Mijal
What this is to say is that it is up to us right now. It is up to us right now to actually do the work to make sure that that Beth fails. That’s that’s the job that we have. I think that we have less control over the first bet, you know, can can the world healing, Israel. I, I really wish we had better global diplomacy from the Israeli government.
Mijal
That’s a different conversation. But but putting that aside, I think that the work that we have to do is to do everything in our power, in our capacity to make sure that that Beth fails, to make sure it doesn’t have to be combined. It doesn’t have to be to pretend like there aren’t huge, significant disagreements. It doesn’t have to mean that we have no boundaries.
Mijal
By the way, as you know, you know, you know, I’m pro and there are some people that I’m not including in this way right now, and we can go into that if we want. But for those of us who speak of ourselves as a we who feel bound to Jews from Amsterdam to Sydney to Tel Aviv, who care about the well-being of Jews around the world, who care about the well-being of Israel for all of us who see ourselves in that camp, we have to work so, so, so hard to make sure that if that were there for each other, they were there for each other, and that even if we are divided in some
Mijal
ways, that that division is smaller than the level of solidarity we have, if, God forbid, you know, it’s needed. I know it sounds dark, you know, just be there when things are hard. But I actually think that’s like the most important time to be there for each other.
Noam
Yeah. What you have me thinking about is this line that I heard from John Green, who’s the author of A Fault in Our Stars. He said.
Mijal
I was like, is that the author of Fault In Our Stars? Is this unknown misquoting?
Noam
Yeah. So he he said something like he said something like, is it possible to create a really passionate us without creating a them?
Mijal
Oh, I love that question. There’s sociological papers written on that actually.
Noam
Like, is that like, is that possible to really not to create a group identity that’s not based on creating an outgroup? Is that possible?
Mijal
Well, no. Can you just clarify what you mean? Who’s the US and who’s the them in your question?
Noam
Well, okay. Now now you’re being the sociologist. The what I’m talking about is the broad Jewish world. That’s what I’m talking about right now. Like that’s that’s the US. Now, you could talk about the US being concentric circles as people who are pro-democracy, people who are pro, you know, Western values, people who are pro, you no safety, security, democracy, human rights, all like, I don’t know, you could continue to broaden it, but I just mean that just having a Jewish conversation right now is can is there a way to to do this?
Noam
Because there’s so many US’s that are created within the US as well, and then we create more and more of them. So I’m, I’m more asking an internal question to the Jewish world. Of the 15.7 million of us, can we create a really robust us with constantly without constantly creating, you know.
Noam
Micro themes as well in order to create our new identity and that that’s that that I think is a real challenge for us to be thinking through. And we do this all the time in the world. And that’s why that question from John Green has me thinking. But and I’ll let that sit with you for a second, or everyone listening, like, how do you how do you think about that?
Noam
But but the other positive that I want to say, since the 7th of October, which is very real, is there’s been three different types of, of October 8th, people that have been created. There have been October 8th Jews who all of a sudden I met a Jewish person after October, like, who’s a self-described October 8th Jew who told me, I won’t say his name, but basically he said, listen, I’m Jewish.
Noam
You know, I don’t have you know, I’m not from an observant background in the slightest, but I always had a non-Jewish name. And just recently, this past week, he told me he changed his name to a Jewish name because he he just he feels so deeply Jewish. He didn’t know he was deeply Jewish, but he just changed his name so that people know that he’s part of the Jewish community.
Noam
I thought that was amazing. There’s October 8th Jew that has emerged. There’s October 8th professional that’s emerged. So many people that I work, you know, at a at a Jewish organization and and as the you so many people that came from the broader professional world, I call them October 8th professionals that they started joining Jewish organizations to say, this is what I want to be doing with my life.
Noam
I want to be activating this part of my identity and helping taking what I’ve done from, you know, a marketing company that’s a general marketing company, and now working for a Jewish organization and leveraging their passion in a way that’s sincere and leveraging it in a way that could be activated for the Jewish world. And then I and the October 8th philanthropist also like that’s also why we see so many philanthropists out there who in the past, just this wasn’t their area of focus, caring about the Jewish world.
Noam
And they said, enough, enough. We have to be part of this, and we have to help rally the Jewish world to be more educated, to know the Jewish story better, to fight for the Jewish people and to fight for a better Jewish future as well. So that is something that October 7th absolutely launched as well.
Mijal
Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you tell the story about the the guy who changed his name, I, you know, I have the goose bumps, whether what a marvelous, well, you know, I love I love our people. I love our people. We are complicated. Have really bad PR. You know, I have a bunch of issues, but you tell me that story, and I just want to be like, you know, I, I, I feel very privileged with all of the challenges and tragedies.
Mijal
I feel, I feel quite privileged to be part of our magnificent people, which which might be a good way to conclude our commemoration, I think. Yeah. You know, we started by remembering October 7th and remembering all those who were killed and taken from us in the worst, you know, attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Mijal
And we should remember that. Never forget.
Mijal
We should also remember all those who stood up since in the days since we should, we should and we should remember that not as a memory. That we’re just like writing it down somewhere. But but I think it it I think these memories, they they should obligate us. That’s what it means to be a Jew, right? We don’t just do history, we do memory that obligates us.
Mijal
And, and I was moved on by our conversation. Just considering that one of the main ways it should obligate us is to make sure that sin loses is bad, and that we continue to be to have solidarity and to be, a people that cares for each other no matter what. So that’s what I’m what I’m taking this day.
Noam
And what I’m thinking about is there was a great philosopher named Emil Fakenham who said that there are 613 commandments. He said the 614th commandment is to not give Hitler a posthumous victory. So I would add a 615th commandment, which is let’s never give sin war a posthumous victory as well, and making sure that no matter what, like you said, we have unity.
Noam
We figure this out amongst each other. We live as a as a culture of hope and like real hope, sincere hope. But but a community that’s going to say we will never, ever let Hitler have the last word. And we will never, ever let have let and we will never, ever let sin war have the last word.
Mijal
I’m going to say Amen to that Noam. Beautiful.