If journalism is said to be the first draft of history, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove’s For Such a Time as This is the first draft of an answer to the question, What is the proper response — if there is a single, all-encompassing, proper one — to the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023?
How do Jews react to the terrorism wrought by the godless followers of Hamas on the Jewish communities near Gaza?
Like any self-respecting rabbi (he is spiritual leader of Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan), he doesn’t offer one answer, but a series of anecdotes about and insights into how committed members of the Jewish community, those struggling with the aftermath of the Islamist-inspired pogrom, can, from a Jewish perspective, think about the unthinkable.
The rabbi presents practical and philosophical questions for contemplation.
Among them:
• “How shall we respond to our individual or collective trauma – past and present?”
• “Empathy or vigilance?”
• “Are Jews privileged or persecuted? Powerful or powerless?
• “As American Jews witness the precipitous rise of anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Semitism today, should we be self-reflective or reach out?”
• “Israel is now in crisis. Are you going to exit — walk away and stand on the sidelines?”
• “So many emotions, so many questions.”
His thoughts, the rabbi writes, fill the “need for a book on Jewish identity in a post-October 7th world.”
Some of the questions raised by Cosgrove are rhetorical; he does not always give an answer, does not tell the reader how to think or how to act. His goal is not to tell us what to think, but how to think, how to find meaning in violent, homicidal, meaningless acts.
The answers he does give cite disparate parts of Jewish text and Jewish tradition, notably those that deal with loss and death, endings and beginnings.
His answers, while optimistic, are not Pollyannaish, are not simplistic, are not unrealistic. It will take time for the community to heal from the pain of Oct. 7, he writes.
“When seeking to make meaning of catastrophe — Jewish or otherwise — it is wise to be circumspect,” Rabbi Cosgrove writes in the book’s introduction. “There is no silver lining.” No facile, easy, one-size-fits-all answers.
His book is an attempt to restore a sense of normality to a “world [that] was turned upside down in an instant” by “a wake-up call for all of diaspora Jewry.”
For an outbreak of horror that took place on the dual holidays of Simchat Torah and Shemini Atzeret (they are celebrated concurrently in Israel), the rabbi puts forth a Purim-based model of behavior: Queen Esther. He cites the words that Mordecai, the uncle of Esther and leader of the Jewish community in Persia, said to his reluctant niece:
“Perhaps you have attained to royal position for just such a time as this” (Esther 4:14).
Hence, the title of Rabbi Cosgrove’s book, offering insights into the challenges facing the Jewish community since Hamas attacked, while much of the progressive West acquiesced.
The rabbi’s messages:
Any Jew can be in a position to come to the defense of his or her people. One need not be royalty.
If it’s not too soon to ask the existential questions about Oct. 7 and what followed, it’s too soon to give definitive answers. But it’s not too late to begin considering our individual and communal defenses against the creeping hatred against Jews today.
To earn the respect of Israelis in our common reactions to Oct. 7, we need to get closer to Judaism in addition to Zionism. “To be good Zionists, we must be better Jews . . . Only by way of mitzvot, the positive acts of Jewish identification, the language and behaviors of the Jewish religion, can Judaism survive.”
The implied and explicit message of Rabbi Cosgrove’s book:
Today, post-Oct. 7, we are all Esther. Or can be. Every Jew can serve as a defender of the besieged Jewish people, whether in Israel or in the Diaspora: “We can shape . . . our response to whatever is happening.”
“Mordecai’s words to Esther,” the rabbi writes, “are a reminder of the role of human agency in an out-of-control world often filled with pain.”
Those words became Rabbi Cosgrove’s mantra in the months following Oct. 7. Jews outside of Israel and Jews in the Promised Land, writes the rabbi, from a decidedly US-based orientation, look at the situation differently. “This book is written from one particular vantage point — my own.”
One disturbing observation in his book — the generational divide in some Jewish circles between younger Jews raised in an era of Israel-as-powerful-and-menacing Goliath, and older Jews who harbor memories of Israel-as-David in its formative years, constantly threatened and endangered by hostile Arab neighbors. The two groups do not necessarily share a common response to the dangers that Israel faces, and many among the former align with the Palestinian cause more than with Israel.
Rabbi Cosgrove addresses his book to members of both groups.
The members of the generation of Jews who question the previous generation’s once-unquestioned support for Israel “are our future,” he writes. “Not just the future of Judaism but, more broadly, the future for all of us. In a post-Oct. 7th world, it is more important than ever to engage in conversation” with people with whom we do not agree.
His advice:
Listen, although our opinions may diverge; in the wake of Oct. 7, we cannot afford disunity mutual sniping. We have enough enemies.
For Such a Time as This is a wholesale adjunct — intended to reach a wide audience — to what he has described as the “retail” job of a pulpit rabbi, dealing with congregants and members of the wider Jewish community on a one-to-one basis.
The rabbi’s book is a fitting first draft of how he is doing his job.
