A better year

“There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen.”

According to Snopes, it is hard to know where that quote came from but pretty easy to decide that despite frequent attributions, it did not come from Lenin.

Phew.

But no matter where it came from, clearly it’s true.

We have been living through decades, if not actual centuries, compressed into weeks, and it’s disorienting.

Much of what’s been shoved together in a rotten time sandwich is bad.

This is the week when we commemorate the antediluvian brutality that created October 7, done by people whose barbarity seemed almost impossibly out of time. How could someone living in the 21st century act like a medieval berserker? Probably because that level of degenerate violence lies at the bottom of some people’s psyches, and the hatred they’re taught, that’s in the air they breathe, liberates it.

It’s been a year since October 7. There are 101 hostages still in Gaza; some are alive, some have died but their killers hold onto their bodies, keeping from their families any possible relief that might come from even the illusion of closure. Even to think of tiny imprisoned Kfir Bibas and his brother, Ariel — Kfir was an infant when he was kidnapped and Ariel was 4 — is to have your brain, your stomach, and your heart insist that you think about something else immediately.

Some of the stories in this week’s paper are about October 7, and the pain of the last year.

The communities we cover all will have commemorations of that terrible day. The Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest, and the Jewish Federation and Foundation of Rockland County all plan to gather the community together to remember, to grieve, and also to hope.

But although October 7 was a year ago, it also feels like decades have gone by. As I write this today, it is with the certain knowledge that more history will have been made in Israel and the Middle East.

I am writing on Tuesday, October 1. The pagers and then the walkie-talkies exploded in the hands and pockets of Hezbollah middle management terrorists, in a feat of espionage thriller legerdemain, just about two weeks ago. Israel assassinated the butcher Hassan Nasrallah, another jaw-dropping feat of spycraft, last Friday, a week before this paper’s publication date. As I write, Iran, Hezbollah’s puppeteer, a country that swears it will destroy Israel, is dropping bombs in central Israel, only to see them intercepted by the Iron Dome.

What next?

Who knows? (Or at any rate, Mossad probably knows, but certainly we don’t.)

So as we leave Rosh Hashanah, remember October 7, and move toward Yom Kippur, which begins at sunset on October 11, a week from this Friday, we wish our readers gmar chatimah tovah. May this be a better year. Please may this be a better year.

—JP

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