October 7 will likely be remembered as a landmark in the history of the State of Israel, not only because of the scale of the horror, but because of what it revealed about human beings. My wife and I traveled a few days ago into the darkness of that day.
Our first stop was the place where heaps of metal were gathered, metal that had once been cars. Cars that people were shot inside, and into which grenades were thrown. Burned-out, destroyed vehicles, with the blood of the murdered crying out from them.
Our second stop was Kibbutz Be’eri. Our guide, a resident of the kibbutz, led us through the houses. We saw a wall riddled by an RPG, a wall behind which children hid. We felt suffocation.
It was hard to detach from the most basic question: how can a human being inflict reach such cruelty toward another? A deadly combination of vile racism, cruel persecution, and systematic extermination.
Our third stop was the site of the Nova festivalsite. We looked at the faces of the young people in the photos, and I thought again of the phrase “the younger generation is declining.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Every generation has said it about the next. The truth is not that the generation is declining, but that it is rising, and we must make sure it does not go anywhere, that it can and will want to live here.
At Nova everything around us was green and in bloom. On one hand, something about it felt cruel, as if the earth is saying, “You are not needed here.” On the other hand, it carried hope for renewal and revival.
The wheat grows again, but this post has no conclusions. It has only a cry: we must stand up and speak out loudly against every form of racism and hate speech.
We will not forget the murdered, because forgetting would be the equivalent of killing them once again.
So we will not forget,
and we will not forgive,
but all of us, absolutely all of us, will grow.
Boaz
