Our Full Moon Moment
On October 7th, 2023, I was in Tzvat, Israel, enjoying Sukkot with my friends from seminary. I was having one of those Tzvati nights where the sun rises and you’re still out with your friends basking in the feeling of Simcha. Around 7 am in the morning, we said goodbye to the new friends we met and returned to our rooms - half an hour after Hamas launched their massacre. As I slipped into bed that night, I had no idea that when I would wake up, my life would be altered forever.
As is characteristic of any good night out, I woke up in the afternoon. Everything was calm. I lazily got out of bed, put on my Shabbos clothes, and meandered to the main corridor of the seminary to get water. The sound of my singing filled the silence of the halls and I energized myself with the chilled breeze pouring in from the open doors.
As I returned upstairs with my freshly filled water bottle, my friend rushed into the hallway, looking concerned.
Rocket alert map from October 7 - courtesy INSS
“Serina, something’s happening. I usually have my phone switched off fully on Shabbat but I left it on this time and I thought my RedAlert was glitching–I kept getting ping after ping–”
“What? What happened?” She was speaking so fast.
I sped into her room to check out what she’s talking about.
“I looked at the news and it says there was an attack at a music festival.”
I checked her phone and my eyes widened as it all flashed in front of me: 22 dead and counting. What happened next was a whirlwind of trying to consume as much information as I could about the situation, all in the span of time it took for my friend to get dressed to go to Kiddish.
In an orthodox community who abstain from technology on the holidays, the only way for anyone to get information was from people like my friend and I, who checked their phones and relayed to others about what had happened. Despite it being very late into the afternoon, the Kiddish meal hadn’t yet started. Everyone had had a late night. The energy in the hall was dampened by the lingering in the back of everyone’s minds that something bad was happening. Although no one had exact details, the talks around the Kiddish table were intermittently interrupted by comments about the evil smoke of air billowing over the rest of the nation.
The massacre embodied the fears I had been conditioned to anticipate my entire life – that "never again" could happen again. I grew up with a typical Jewish American upbringing marked by visits to Holocaust memorial museums, attending talks from survivors when I was a child, going to Jewish camp and Hebrew school–developing a naive sense of security that that form of hatred was in the past.
As a university student, I came to fully understand the condition of Galut. It was February, 2023, and I was on a Shabbaton in Florida–the same weekend an International Day of Jewish Hate was announced. During that February, I gained the vivid awareness that I was living in diaspora, and what that meant. After the shabbaton, I had an interaction with an older woman in my community. In 1979, when she was only a teenager, she had been forced to leave Iran, settling eventually in the US. Now, in 2023, she shared a sobering insight. She calmly stated, “If the US is no longer welcoming to Jews, then it could be time to move again.” Her words struck me and continue to this day–I had never heard the concept of diaspora expressed with such matter-of-fact acceptance. It made me realise that while I exist comfortably outside of Israel, I will never be truly secure. Israel stands as the only nation where my safety is the foremost priority. Without the state of Israel, I am vulnerable to exile, persecution, and ghettoization.
Months later, I was studying the course of the Jewish people from a text known as the “lunar files.” This outlined that an Amalek (an enemy of the Jewish people) would exist in every generation. Typically, the Amalek is the most powerful country or empire at the time, but that the Jews would always survive. It compared the Jewish nation to the moon, both going through cycles of waxing and waning.
Predating the war by months, I had begun to predict something horrific would happen. Were we at our full moon moment? If that were true, we could only wane from here. Perhaps it was generational trauma leading to my cynical paranoia, but was I wrong? What took place only months later seemed just that.
I reflected on the great success Jews were having in the United States, with unlimited access to shape the course of their lives through arts, medicine, and any line of work they chose. We have never been this assimilated, while enjoying the full benefits of citizenry anywhere.
However, at this unique juncture in the history of the Jewish nation, the global superpower - the United States - is not antisemitic. It is not the Amalek. On the contrary, it protects the freedom of religion. There has never been a time in history when the dominant power was on the side of the Jews.
It is at this critical time of synergy, where we have our own country, and we share allyship with the most influential country in the world, that we must advocate for Jewish life, for ourselves.
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