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The Return to Jewish History

"As a moment in time, the Oct. 7 massacre was, paradoxically, an event both anomalous and familiar, at once exceptional and routine." Tomer Persico writes.
sderbane via AdobeStock
sderbane via AdobeStock
Dr. Tomer Persico  is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Rubinstein Fellow at Reichman University and a a Senior Research Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His fields of expertise include contemporary spirituality, Jewish modern identity, Jewish renewal, and forms of secularization and religiosity in Israel. His first book, The Jewish Meditative Tradition (Hebrew) was published by Tel Aviv University Press in 2016, and his second book, In God’s Image:

“As a moment in time, the Oct. 7 massacre was, paradoxically, an event both anomalous and familiar, at once exceptional and routine. It was horrifying and shocking to the extreme, yet, given the historical memories that we, as Jews, carry with us, it was typical — even expected, almost preordained. Strictly speaking, the calamity we suffered on Simchat Torah 5784 was a very Jewish calamity.

The murder, burnings, rape and torture — as well as the fact that there was no help, that hours passed before the army finally showed up — shaped the terrible disaster that we suffered into an event that differed from anything we had experienced, making the unfamiliar, and that which we had assumed would never become familiar, a part of our lives. We experienced things we had only heard about and learned about, a reality we had faced momentarily during memorial days. The massacre brought Jewish history back into our lives, while also making us a part of Jewish history. It infused the hardships of the Jewish people into us, welding us with hellfire in the historical continuum of Jewish suffering.

The massacre brought us back to Jewish history.

Returning to history was Zionism’s ancient desire, but for the Zionist movement, this meant returning to the history of mankind while departing from the history of the Jews. This aspiration stemmed from a negative perception of the Diaspora, which included a rejection of the passive stance and victimhood that traditional Judaism had taken upon itself, contented with eternal wanderings. The Zionists wished to put an end to these wanderings, and thus also to the victimhood. Agency would replace passivity, sovereignty would replace being subject to the will of others, and self-determination and control of our own fate would replace helplessness. The Jew would once again take part in the history of mankind.

A return to Jewish history moves in the opposite direction. Oct. 7 — during the interminable hours of Saturday and Sunday we listened to the voices of our brothers and sisters pleading for the help that didn’t come, we slowly realized, and were astounded, and astounded again, and again, by the unbelievable scope of the disaster — threw us back into passivity, into victimization, into the miserable existence of the pre-1948 Jew.

We had known about pogroms, some of us being third-generation, or even second-generation relatives of Holocaust survivors. We are all familiar with Jewish history. But that is exactly the point: We had assumed it was history. We thought we were past it, disconnected from it, that we now live in different times, in a new era. We thought we had become part of modern world history, a part of universal, normal, banal reality. That we live in a time when Jews are completely accepted and receive equal rights in the Diaspora, and alternatively enjoy solid protection in their own sovereign state. That what had been will no longer be. We thought, Never Again.”

Read Tomer Persico‘s full article The Return to Jewish History in Jewish Journal.

 

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