The Next Chapter: Israeli Responses to Catastrophe

The Next Chapter: Israeli Responses to Catastrophe David G. Roskies (bio) Keywords October 7, Israel, Hamas, Collective memory, Black Shabbat, Trauma and Jewish agency, Responses to historical catastrophe BLACK SHABBAT When catastrophe strikes, the first thing that the survivors do is cast around for analogies. "Ask and see," wrote Solomon bar Simson as he tried to take the measure of the catastrophe that had befallen the communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz during the First Crusade. "Were there ever so many sacrifices like these since the Days of Adam? Were there ever a thousand one hundred sacrifices on one day, all of them like the sacrifice of Isaac, the son of Abraham?"1 The unprecedented spectacle of Jewish mass martyrdom in response to the Crusaders' missionary zeal awakened the memories of every conceivable religious precedent: the sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah (the Akedah); the death by fire of Aaron's sons Nadav and Avihu (Lev. 10:1–3); the trial of Hanania, Mishael and Azaraiah (Dan. 3: 13–33); the Temple sacrifice, and Rabbi Akiva's grand improvisation, dying with the Shema' on his lips. The Chronicle of Solomon Bar Simson opened a new chapter in the self-fashioning of Ashkenazic Jewry because in addition to providing the precise timeline and place names, naming the victims and perpetrators and enumerating the mind-numbing statistics, the chronicler turned the spontaneous acts of cultic homicide into a powerful new archetype that linked Speyer, Worms and Mainz to Jerusalem, Sinai and Mount Moriah. Thanks to an elaborate coding system developed over millennia, Jews had a surfeit of historical and mythical analogies to draw upon. Not one Leidensgeshichte, the Passion of Christ, and the Christian martyrs who followed, but a chain of catastrophes linked in collective memory through End Page 7 a mnemonic sequence—Hurban (the Destruction of the First and Second Temples), Kiddush Hashem (the Rabbinic martyrs during the Hadrianic rule), Gzeirot TaTNU (the First Crusade), Gerush Sefarad, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Gzeirot TaH veTaT (The Chmielnicki massacres of 1648–49), Hasufot baNegev (the Tsarist pogroms of 1881–82), Masa Nemirov (the Kishinev pogrom), me'ora'ot TaRPaT (the 1929 Palestine riot), Kristallnacht and Shoah-der driter khurbn (the Holocaust)—to name but the most consequential.2 At every point along this timeline, the Jewish dialectical response to catastrophe was likely to kick in: the worse the present catastrophe, the more it recalled the most awful and awesome precedent.3 TaSHaH (Israel's War of Independence) was supposed to have been the last chapter, the decisive end to these cumulative, incremental cycles of violence and the beginning of a new calendar in the heroic saga of a sovereign state that would stand proud among the embattled nations of the world. Even the First and Second Intifada were absorbed into this nation state paradigm when Yom Hazikaron was redefined as the Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of the Wars of Israel and Victims of Actions of Terrorism. Until October 7, 2023. Was there a name for what happened on that day, either denotative or associative? Politicians both in Israel and the United States who wished to address a universal audience immediately seized upon 9/11. This brought home the sheer number of dead and wounded on a single day (unprecedented in American collective memory) and underscored the element of shock and disbelief. By adjusting the numbers proportionate to the size of the respective populations, 9/11 paled by comparison to 7/10. The internal Jewish memory bank, however, contained other possibilities. The word "pogrom" immediately called the Kishinev pogrom of April 1903 to mind, complete with citations from Hayyim Nahman Bialik's two epic-making poems, the first written on the eve of his fact-finding mission to Kishinev, and the second, in its aftermath.4 This analogy opened up several interpretive venues. However brutal, the Kishinev pogrom had claimed a "mere" forty-nine lives. Like Solomon Bar Simson, the survivors of October 7 could say: "For this one pogrom, the world shook. How much more so when one thousand two hundred were killed and slaughtered on one day!" Calling what happened in Ofakim, Kfar Azza...