One man’s pain is another man’s memory.
One man’s reliving of the visceral losses and memories of the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago is another man’s history book.
What are we to make of this?
It is positive in that the pain over the losses that began on Oct. 6, 1973 have long been superseded by the dramatic military, economic and diplomatc gains in Israel; by a much stronger IDF, by a “startup nation” and by a nation at peace with six Arab countries. In 1973 Israel was at peace with zero Arab countries.
But the distance from the Yom Kippur War is no benefit in that the huge loss of Israeli life and the stunning heroism in that war hardly register anymore on younger Jews who did not live through it. The Yom Kippur War is consigned to remembrance.
The as yet unfinished war against Hamas and Hezbollah — let G-d grant us full victory! — may come to fit into this same pattern. The pain of the war now is too much to bear — but what of the future?
Alongside the Jewish penchant for remembrance is the much less noticed, all too human, penchant for forgetting.
Remembrance is baked into the Jewish calendar and Jewish consciousness. “Remember the Exodus.” “Remember the Sabbath.” “Remember Amalek.” “Remember all the mitzvot of the L-rd.” “Yizkor” — remembrance of the dead — is formalized four times a year. A Jew is bidden to visit the cemetery in the month before Rosh Hashanah. Holocaust victims scratched on the walls of their death cells: “Remember!” Remembrance is redemptive. It bestows an eternal quality on ephemeral life. Jewish life from beginning to end is suffused with remembrance.
In Judaism, remembrance begins with the Hebrew Bible — not just the five books of Moses but the entire Tanach. Different forms of the Hebrew for “remember” recur hundreds of times in the Tanach. Remembrance is so natural to the Jew that without studying other religions a Jew might not know that the centrality of remembrance is unique to Judaism.
We always remember, but we do not always remember to forget. Without forgetting, a person could not live. If a person bore throughout his life the pain and suffering felt upon the loss of a parent, for example, that person could not live. If every financial setback and every personal failing were fresh, every embarrassment keen, every terrible pain of a broken bone or a major surgery vividly remembered, a person could not live.
The date of the Yom Kippur War — Oct. 6 — is hardly remembered. The date after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War — Oct. 7, 2023 — will it be remembered?
In this painful time, the date Oct. 7, 2023 is more than remembered, it is visceral. The idea that some time in the future this date may slip from consciousness seems sacreligious. But consider Oct. 7, 1941, Oct. 7, 1942, Oct. 7, 1943 and Oct. 7, 1944. On those dates far, far larger number of Jews were murdered than on Oct. 7, 2023. We must work to remember these and other dates from the first half of the 1940s. Remembrance is our sacred duty, honored paradoxically because these dates are no longer visceral. The pain of the immense losses on these dates is no longer vivid in Jewish consciousness. No person could possibly bear all that pain and live.
We do try to bear all that immeasurable pain once a year, on Tisha b’Av. Ritual and the literature of calamity rescues us from both the sin of forgetting and the unbearable pain of immediate remembrance.
When Oct. 7 hit, the first thing I thought of was the Yom Kippur War of 1973. All the pain from that time came flooding over me again. I witnessed young men pulled out of Yom Kippur davening, hopping onto military jeeps inexplicably appearing on the streets on the quietest day of the year. I myself and the rest of the people in the minyan moved from the shul to the bomb shelter. I spent many times in a Jerusalem bomb shelter during that war. I lived through the spooky, utterly blacked-out nights. Far, far worse were the daily reports of the tally of the Israeli dead on the northern and southern fronts. Altogether, some 2,500 Israeli soldiers were killed in the three weeks of that war.
Fifty years later it took me some time to realize that I was one of the few who reacted to the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7 the way I did, because for most Jews alive today the Yom Kippur War is history. Most Jews bore no pain from it. Perhaps perplexity, analysis or even anger, but not pain. It is hard to convey today that for at least a decade after the Yom Kippur War, its losses and consequences convulsed Israel. Why were the surprise Egyptian and Syrian attacks not foreseen? Which Israeli generals were at fault? Why were the intelligence signals missed or dismissed?
That bitterness is all but forgotten today. This is hard for me to absorb as I live a double life: Then, and Now. The Oct. 6 War and the Oct. 7 War. The vivid, unforgotten pain of one war and the visceral pain of this war.
Worse still is this part of my double life: Painful memories of the Oct. 6 war alongside most everyone else’s emotional distance from that war. This leads me to the fearsome reality that at some point in the future — nowhere soon — the pain and bitterness of the current war will also dissipate and assume their place in the history books and the Jewish rituals of remembrance.
© IJN 2024
