In light of these attacks, October 7 on Simchat Torah, Yom Kippur in Manchester, the horror on the first night of Hanukkah in Bondi Beach, I keep circling the same strange feeling.
It isn’t just fear. It isn’t even only grief.
It’s the unsettling sense that this is familiar.
For a long time, maybe forty or fifty years, especially in the West, being Jewish felt different than it had for most of history. Not safe in an absolute sense, but quieter. Softer around the edges. Jewish life flourished publicly. Institutions grew. Synagogues expanded. We inherited stories of persecution rather than its daily reality. Trauma felt historical, not immediate.
And now that thin layer of quiet feels gone.
There’s a recognition setting in. This, too, is part of the Jewish experience. Not because suffering is inevitable or acceptable. It isn’t. But because Jewish identity has always included historical consciousness. To be Jewish is to carry time differently. The calendar itself holds memory. Sacred days are not abstract. They are sanctified precisely because they have been contested, violated, and defended.
When violence lands on Jewish time, on Simchat Torah, on Yom Kippur, on Hanukkah, it strikes something older than politics or headlines. It touches a deep internal archive. Pogroms. Expulsions. Massacres. Survivals. The shock is not only that it happened, but that it fits a pattern our bones already recognize.
That recognition is disorienting. It can feel like stepping backward into a history we thought we were done living inside. But it is also a connection to ancestors we never met, to generations who lived with this awareness as a constant companion. There is a strange intimacy in realizing that what you are feeling now is something others felt centuries ago, in different languages, under different skies.
Judaism, however, has never romanticized martyrdom. Jewish law prioritizes life, safety, and continuity. We are not commanded to die for the calendar. And yet, Jewish history is not a straight line of victimhood either. It is a braided cord of rupture and rebuilding, destruction and commentary, fear and stubborn continuity.
After catastrophe, Jews wrote. After trauma, Jews ritualized. After attempts at erasure, Jews insisted on meaning.
That is why lighting candles after violence is not denial. It is defiance of a specific kind. Not loud. Not triumphant. Precise. It says you do not get to define what this moment means. We will.
What I am feeling now is not despair. It is lineage awareness. The sober clarity that Jewish life has always required holding joy and vigilance at the same time. That openness comes with risk. That continuity is not passive. It is chosen, enacted, renewed again and again.
This realization doesn’t make me feel weaker. It makes me feel located.
The line never broke. It thinned, perhaps. It quieted. But it did not disappear. And now, standing where I am in time, I can feel it again, running backward into ancient history and forward into whatever comes next.
That, too, is part of the inheritance.
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