Our eyes tear. Our hearts refuse to believe. The scope of the calamity swells from hour to hour, day to day.
We, regretfully, are accustomed to terrorist attacks, including severe, devastating ones. We have seen sights too horrible to bear. Buses engulfed in flames. Jews murdered on the roads. Small children run over by human fiends. But even the most horrid tales which accompany us over the years have not prepared us for what we are experiencing right now.
The State of Israel has experienced difficult wars over the years against a brutal enemy. There was the Six Day War during which 736 soldiers were killed and the Yom Kippur War in whose course 2222 soldiers met that same fate. There were other wars, minor or major, but — as difficult as it is to say — that's the way of war, and Israel is inured to war. War claims lives. There are no 'sterile' wars, where no civilians are killed at the rear lines. Sad to say, that is the work of wars. But nothing of the past can resemble what we have seen in these past few days.
This wasn't a war where armies were poised one against the other. It was a mass massacre, very reminiscent of the pogroms which we read about in history books. The butchery of years 'Tach v'Tat' (5418-5419). The bloodbath of Kishinev, of Hevron in Tarpat (5689), horrible pogroms in which hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews: men, women, children and babes, were murdered in cold blood. But that was in the faraway past. We read about them and thought that such happenings could not be repeated in these times. Perhaps we were naive, or even worse, were somewhat imbued with Zionist fervor that in a state which they founded, Jewish blood would not be of no value, free for all.
For some reason, we believed that the country had an army, a police force, a security setup. Alright, so these cannot prevent attacks here and there but could surely prevent all-out attacks, pogroms. It is inconceivable, we thought, that a bloodbath would take place against Jews for long hours without forces rushing to the rescue.
Isn't this protection the main reason for the establishment of the Jewish State — to prevent such devastating occurrences as in the past, which we heard or read about in the history books?
It is unbelievable that a situation in which our country be infiltrated, in broad daylight, openly, by hundreds of pogrom-fiends, and in the course of many hours, slaughter hundreds of civilians without a finger lifted against them! A wildest imagination could not come up with such a scenario where, within scant minutes, those devils took over whole settlements, going from house to house, butchering entire families, with no one attempting to stop them. Nor can our minds conjure up a reality where dozens of war hostages — men, women and children — be loaded upon vehicles, again in broad daylight, and rolled back to Gaza without anyone stopping them!
The State of Israel after Simchas Torah 5784 will not be the same country it was before. The dwellers of the Holy Land are awakening to a new reality, tough, trying, and who knows — are perhaps standing before a reassessment of important deliberations, not only in the national sphere but, primarily and hopefully, in the spiritual one.
