One year later: Jewish community grapples with new reality after Oct. 7 massacre | Opinion
I will never forget the first time I saw my mother sobbing. It was Nov. 4, 1995. I was in second grade, only a few weeks away from my 8th birthday. She was watching the news. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had just been assassinated.
At that age, I was certainly too young to understand all that was lost in that moment. But that day, something about my mother's reaction, the level of anguish she was experiencing, made it clear that a significant shift had happened in Israel's history — that we had arrived at a new reality, and we could never go back to the one we had inhabited before.
As we near the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in Israel, that sense of a paradigm shift feels true once again. The prevailing feeling for so many Jews and Israelis worldwide is that Oct. 7 left us in a new reality: that we are, will forever be, Oct. 8 Jews. The world around us may look the same, but it's one we don't recognize.
That sense of a shift can be felt even here in Kansas City — thousands of miles from the Middle East. We have felt it in the silence, or worse, the gleeful celebration of Oct. 7 by those we counted as friends, and in the isolation that resulted from damaged relationships. We have felt it in the loss of a sense of safety and belonging, a loss reflected in surveys and data . We have felt it in a pain that never truly abates, in a protracted state of agony from which there has been no sustained relief for an entire year. We have felt it in the minimization or outright erasure not only of what happened that day, but of who and what we are as a Jewish people, and of what the land of Israel means to us.
Today, we live in a reality in which the world can turn its back on the massacre of 1,200 Israelis, and can continue to ignore or even justify the ongoing captivity of 100 more. We live in a world in which unspeakable acts of sexual violence are met with silence from the international community when the victims are Israelis. We live in a world that is quick to take a side, to disengage, to highlight the differences among us all, and declare them insurmountable.
The Jewish story can be hard to grapple with. It can often serve as an uncomfortable reminder of the need to consider context and nuance in a world that craves easy answers to devastatingly complicated questions. The only way through this impossible moment is in the renewed focus on our shared humanity, on the stories and histories each of us brings to the moment in which we find ourselves.
The world will never look the same to the Jewish community. It will always be Oct. 8 — the day after. But this new reality offers an opportunity to shape it into the one we choose for ourselves — as a society, and as a Kansas City community. We can decide to approach one another with curiosity. We can challenge ourselves to hold multiple, at times seemingly contradictory truths at the same time. We can take the time to reflect on our values, on the world in which we want to live, and then make tangible plans — together — to put those values into practice.
We can never go back to a world in which Oct. 7 never happened. But we do have the power to decide how we move forward. One year later, we must face the truth of how deeply divided we are, and make the choice, despite the challenges, to move toward one another.
