On October 7, 2023, the Jewish past became the Jewish present. The Hamas massacre activated the trauma stored in our collective memory and encoded in our DNA. It forced us to become witnesses to the kind of barbarism previous generations of Jews had experienced, but we—until then—had been spared.
Ever since October 7, the past and the future have eclipsed the present. For two years, we have been consumed by grief for those murdered, killed in captivity, and lost in battle, and tormented by dread over the fate of the hostages, the welfare of our soldiers, and the plight of the Gazans. With the past hovering and the future dangling, the present has been absent.
This thought occurred to me last night, when I attended an outdoor screening of a televised event marking the second anniversary of October 7. The evening’s testimonies, recollections, poems, songs, and calls for political change swung like pendulums between past and future, bypassing the present entirely. When the call-and-response chant—“Bring them home!” “Now!”—periodically erupted, as it does at every weekly rally, I heard in it more than a demand for the return of the hostages; that “Now!” was a plea for today to reappear between yesterday and tomorrow.
As we commemorate this second anniversary, details of a ceasefire are being finalized. We are desperate for relief, but memories haunt us and trepidation lingers; so much can still go wrong. May a ceasefire emerge that brings an end to the war, easing the pain of the past and the fear of the future, and making way for a necessary, lived present.