Tisha B'Av After October 7

For me, I am thinking about the Kibbutz my family lived on when we first made Aliyah - Kibbutz Beit Hashita in the Beit Sha'an valley.

Many early Zionists rejected religion, seeing Zionism as a secular alternative to Jewish religious practice, and Kibbutz Beit Hashita was no different.

But long before my family lived there, and before I was born, the Yom Kippur war broke out and this small kibbutz suffered more losses per capita than any other community in Israel, with 11 kibbutz members losing their lives in the fighting.

Then, in the 90s, Israeli songwriter Yair Rosenblum visited the kibbutz and, moved by the history and sacrifices of the kibbutz, was inspired to write a melody for Unetaneh Tokef, one of the key Yom Kippur prayers. Rosenblum's tune is now one of the most popular renditions, sung in multiple synagogues in Israel and the diaspora every Yom Kippur.

So what is the connection between the story of this small kibbutz which holds for me immense significance and this year's Tisha B'Av?

There is a very understandable tendency to mark this year's Tisha B'Av with our most recent instance of Jewish trauma - the Hamas terror attacks on October 7. And as threats from Iran and its proxies remain very real, there is unfortunately no guarantee that another Jewish trauma is not right around the corner.

But in recognizing the similarities of Jewish trauma of the past in comparison to October 7, we must also be precise about how this trauma differs from previous traumas, namely, that we are now a sovereign nation in the State of Israel.

While the day after a pogrom, the Jewish community in the diaspora was left to clean up the after-math of the violence and destruction against them quietly, the day after October 7, Israel could, and did, choose to fight back.

So while we must, and will, continue to mourn the trauma and pain on this day, we can no longer view contemporary Jewish-Israeli trauma through the lens of being powerless victims. To do so absolves us of moral responsibility, of political and legal accountability. 

At Kibbutz Beit Hashita, early members, eager to create a new, strong, and independent individual Jewish identity in the State of Israel, rid themselves of many Jewish religious traditions as a way to break from the past. The tragedy of the Yom Kippur war brought them right back to those traditions and that past.

Therefore, on this year's Tisha B'Av, we must struggle once again between all that is similar and all that is different between the past and now.

We must not only mourn, but we must take responsibility - for the return of the hostages, the end of the fighting, the end of the suffering of innocent Palestinians, and toward peace. 

We cannot ignore or reject our past, as we learn from Kibbutz Beit Hashita. But how we contextualize the past in modern times will dictate how we shape our present, and our future.

Our work at JSpaceCanada has always been about rejecting easy answers and binary notions, and living instead in the nuance and the complex.

That is true of this year's Tisha B'Av as well, and I want to take these moments before the holiday to thank you for your embrace of the complex and the nuanced. We will shape our present and future together, while we remember the past.

By Maytal Kowalski, Executive Director.