It's Not Friday in Israel Today

Not Friday, but it feels like it. The Jewish holiday of Sukkot begins tonight. Two years ago, October 7 coincided with the holiday of Simchat Torah, and our enemies used that day, that joint Sabbath and holiday to attack us savagely.

Two years later, this horrific date, forever inscribed in our souls, coincides with Sukkot. Sukkot is our happy holiday - easy, less serious, fun and delicious. We take our world and shake it to its core, sort of like what October 7 did, only in a good way. 

We "move" out of our homes, out of our comfort zones, to "dwell" in our Sukkot. In our previous house, we had a huge one; today it's narrower but still ours. It represents our putting our lives in God's hands - again, much as we did on October 7 and every day since.

My house is filled with the scents of baking food. First banana cake and now brownies; chicken and side dishes, and soon the round-shaped challah bread that we make for the holidays. Round to symbolize how the year and our lives revolve, in constant motion.

We are waiting to find out if the Trump deal will go through. We have agreed to the conditions; Hamas is claiming to agree, so long as we change all the conditions. In other words, no.

We are hoping for a yes; prepared for the no. We want to end this war; we will fight to the end if we have to. Much of the world agrees with this plan, and yet if Hamas refuses, we have little doubt the world will support them.

Around the world, Jews are being targeted, and in nearly every country, Jews abroad are thinking of escape routes and possible destinations. Many are thinking of coming here, where 7 million Jews live.

Like Fridays, today we shut the world away and focus on our communities, our families. We will eat in the Sukkah tonight and know that next year we will as well, as we did last year and the year before.

But we are forever changed, and that change is a reminder that the world is a dangerous place for the Jewish people. And ultimately, the truth is that we are the lucky ones, the ones God chose to bring home. We live in peace with each other, even if not with our neighboring companies. They fear our strength, our might, and that is a wonderful feeling because while we will not misuse our strength, they will. They have. We have not.

It doesn't matter to us that the world doesn't believe us. If anything good came out of October 7, it is the death of the ghetto mentality, at least in Israel. We don't care. We know that we have acted morally. We know we have held ourselves to a higher level than ALL other nations on earth. And that is enough. We go into this holiday in peace. We have hopes that the deal will go through, but we know if it doesn't, it is on Hamas.

And that the world will blame us, that is inevitable, and so I repeat. We do not care. We have done all we can do to "bring our hostages home". The absurdity of that statement still claws at me. We never could have brought them all home alive. We aren't bringing all of them home alive even now.

But we will sit in our sukkah and pray that soon those who can come home will be home soon. We will close our eyes and think of how we were before October 7, 2023. But, in an amazingly honest voice, I tell you that we will not return to October 6 again. If we had the actual ability to time warp ourselves back, we would, but only to mass our soldiers on the border and shoot anything that moved on the other side. Only to have our planes and helicopters at the ready. Only to save the lives of the thousands we have lost.

Mentally, we're better off here because we don't care anymore what the world thinks. If the world is too stupid to look at history and a map and know there is no Palestine, that is their problem and not ours. A state with no borders. No currency. No airport. No industry. A state with no leaders. A state with no plan other than to rule. Such a state is not one that will ever exist in the real world, in the real Middle East where we live. So go ahead and build it in Greenland, in Iceland, in Sweden. Give them the northern coast of Norway or the southern tips of South Africa.

What they will never have is the land that God gave to us thousands of years ago; the city we built and fought for, Jerusalem. 

It's not Friday in Israel, but the clock is ticking, the chicken and potatoes are almost done, and the challah shaped and ready to be baked. Soon we'll move the new wooden table into the sukkah and turn on the lights. Move the candles from their place into the glass box in the sukkah. Then soon we will light them, and the magic dome of holiness will come down and surround us. The world outside our windows will disappear. The golden mountains of Jerusalem will sparkle, and we will live.