Rabbi Yossy Goldman
In November 2023, I was a guest speaker in the small town of Spokane, Washington. The rabbi had organized a Friday night dinner, where I was due to address the issue of antisemitism. With only 1,000 Jewish residents, the rabbi thought that he knew every Jew in town.
Then David arrived. A tall young man, unknown to the rabbi, he hadn’t booked for the dinner, but, of course, was made to feel welcome. He was given a seat right opposite me.
After greeting him, I asked David, “What brings you here tonight?”
His answer was chilling: “Oct. 7.”
There is no question that the horrific massacres of Oct. 7 unleashed a groundswell of Jewish identity that broke through layers of apathy and pierced years of indifference in Jews around the world.
Generous philanthropists who had supported Ivy League universities in North America for years were redirecting their contributions to Yeshiva University, Touro College or other Jewish causes. These donors were not generally supporters of yeshivahs or day schools.
But the universities’ lack of any suitable response to the horrendous outburst of blatant antisemitism on their campuses was good cause for them to rethink their priorities in charity. We’ve seen similar responses in South Africa.
In Israel, secular soldiers who grew up with little to no traditional Jewish education were suddenly clamouring for tefillin, tzitzit and books on Tehillim (Psalms). It was unprecedented.
How are we to understand this phenomenon?
I believe that it is proof positive that the inner core of the Jew — that irreducible minimum and nucleus of identity — is always there. It may be hidden and dormant, but it is ever-present. The spiritual pilot light may be unseen, but it is inextinguishable. And on Oct. 7, somehow, it was touched deeply. Jewish men, women, teens and even children who were previously uninvolved, disengaged, disconnected or even seemingly severed from their faith, heritage and religious consciousness awakened and were responsive.
They may have previously shouted their atheism from the rooftops. They may have never set foot in synagogue. They may not have been affiliated with a single Jewish entity. They may have regarded their Jewishness as nothing more than coincidental. But at the end of the day, the Jewish spark never goes out. It’s always there and can be ignited when touched in the right place and in the right way.
Oct. 7 touched us all in ways we hadn’t been touched before.
Suddenly, Jews who were “lapsed” or assimilated felt as if they had been attacked for being Jewish. It was random. Any Jew was fair game. Young people at a music festival, grandparents babysitting their grandchildren, tiny toddlers murdered in cold blood, liberal students at Ivy League universities harassed and frightened to be overtly Jewish.
The face of evil had revealed itself for all to see and millions to fear.
All the guilt trips, all the stories of Holocausts and Inquisitions, pogroms and persecutions became real. No longer were they academic history lessons, but hard realities in sophisticated, progressive Western societies. The hallowed humanitarianism of the university was transformed into raw hate, toxic, vicious and venomous.
It is a bitter irony that the overwhelming number of the victims of Oct. 7 were liberal-minded people. They had been reaching out and helping their Gaza neighbours for decades in so many ways — giving them jobs, and taking them and their children to Israeli hospitals for treatment. Those same people who were helped so often by their Israeli neighbors across the border were either the perpetrators themselves or active supporters assisting the murderers, pointing out where people lived and where they may have hidden, and even who had dogs for protection. The myth of the “innocent” citizens in the Gaza Strip needs to finally be dismissed entirely.
Of course, it is sad that antisemitism is more successful than rabbis in inspiring Jews to remember who they are. But such is the tragic reality. When we forget who we are, the antisemite can be relied upon to remind us. Please God, in the future, our innate faith and sense of peoplehood will need no reminders from anyone.
I believe that Oct. 7 exposed more than the covert Jew hatred in the world, which was just waiting for an excuse to come out of the closet. In my humble opinion, Oct. 7 revealed the true nature of the Jew. We may hide, we may deny, we may disassociate. But ultimately, we are who we are, and a Jew is a Jew is a Jew ad infinitum. And that is reassuring to know.
Rabbi Yossy Goldman is life rabbi emeritus of Sydenham Shul in Johannesburg and president of the South African Rabbinical Association.
