Michoel Lerner – Jerusalem
It must have been about 9:00 Saturday morning, on the 7th of October in Jerusalem when the sirens started blaring. In the synagogue I attended, we had just completed the yearly cycle of reading the Torah, the Five Books of Moses. The congregation was just about to start reading the beginning of the book of Genesis. Nobody panicked. After all, we were accustomed to our enemies often picking our holiest days to perpetrate their evil deeds. We had no idea what had already transpired in the communities bordering the Gaza Strip, which were less than a two-hour drive away from where we were.
Even after the Sabbath was over, the magnitude of atrocities committed by our Arab neighbors was not known. Even now, over two months later, as forensic experts and archaeologists(!) examine the ruins of the communities that were butchered on October 7th, new details of the Gazan’s savagery are still being revealed.
The famous Israeli poet Naomi Shemer once said that “the Arabs like their murder hot, humid and steamy, and if they ever have the freedom to fulfill themselves, we will miss the good, sterile gases of the Germans.” Her words, of course, were followed by condemnations from the usual crowd, those who describe the world the way they wished it was, and not how it is in reality.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, always the realist, famously observed, “The sea is the same sea and the Arabs are the same Arabs.” He was of course referring to the Arab leaders who over the years threatened to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean. This statement was also received by “the enlightened” with disdain. In their eyes, Shamir was stuck in the past, blind to the up-and-coming “New Middle East”.
For some, the world changed on October 7th, 2023. For others, what happened on October 7th was just a revelation of the world as it is. If Naomi Shemer and Yitzhak Shamir were alive today, the savagery, the blood lust, the cruelty and the absolute evil that were displayed on that black Sabbath in October would not have surprised them.
