The shofar that we heard on Rosh Hashana is meant to wake us up from our slumber, to look anew at how we have been thinking and acting, to shake us out of our complacency, to come up with ways to improve ourselves for the future. When listened to the right way, one should be a different person after hearing the shofar than we were beforehand.
The Simchat Torah pogrom was the most horrific event targeting Jews since the Holocaust. We cannot bring the 1,200 precious lives back but we can damn well learn lessons from the klaxon of that day and make sure that never again really means never again.
We need to understand the lessons of October 7.
Hamas and its allies really are today's Nazis.
The only thing stopping today's Jew-haters from murdering 7 million Jews in Israel is is the Israel Defense Forces. The genocidal desire of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iranian leaders to murder or expel all the Jews in the Middle East is indistinguishable from that of the Nazis. The antisemitic incitement in Palestinian, Jordanian, Egyptian, Yemeni and Turkish media is no different than that in Der Stürmer in the 1930s and 1940s. And the justifications for rape, murder and burning Jews alive is just as ludicrous today as it was for the Nazis.
In the 1930s, the Nazi single-minded hate of Jews was not taken seriously, either. It was downplayed, pooh-poohed, assumed to be just rhetoric to attract followers, and the Jews who were screaming about the threat were dismissed as being hysterical and biased.
Just as it was then, only the Jews and a very few others were right to sound the alarm. Many more lives would have been saved if the world understood the danger earlier.
In a time when Iran is practically a nuclear weapons power. With Iran having the the ability to create another Holocaust at the push of a button, the time to stop them is now, not in five or ten years.
Most people refuse to accept, or choose to downplay, the threat from Islamist terrorists and Iran.
The West has forgotten the distinction between real peace and a temporary lull. Israel made the same mistake, hoping against history that deterrence can bring semi-permanent calm and security. A certain amount of violence and terror was considered "acceptable." Meanwhile, the enemies of Israel and the West never hid their ambitions - they say them every day in their own media, in mosques, from their own parliaments.
And their ambitions are not limited to the Middle East. Over the year, they have become much more public in their threats to the West - even from preachers whose freedom of speech is protected by the West.
Antisemitism is back.
Antisemitism never left, of course, but the latent antisemitism that never disappeared has become more public and more accepted.
We have seen, in real time, how Holocaust denial is possible. Because we have seen October 7 denial from every possible, contradictory angle - claims that no civilians were killed, or that Israel killed all the civilians, that there were no rapes and Israel was the only party raping. Hamas is both a freedom-fighting party of resistance and the ultimate innocent victim of Jewish evil. Palestinians have the right to murder Jews and Jews do not have the right to defend themselves.
The first anti-Israel rallies started immediately after the pogrom, and the insistence that posters of the hostages be ripped down entrenched the fact that to many people, the very idea that Jews should be objects of sympathy is deemed utterly unacceptable. Jews are monsters, and any other narrative must be shouted down.
None of this would occur for any other country, even if accused of the exact same things, even if proven over and over again to have done far worse. . October 7 gave the modern antisemites not just a reason but an imperative to double down on their lies.
And, just as with Nazi Germany, too many people believe them.
The mainstream media and NGOs are irredeemably antisemitic.
I don't say this lightly. And certainly the media and human rights organizations don't think of themselves that way.
But there is one irrefutable fact about the coverage by the media of this war: Hamas statements are treated with more respect than Israeli statements. This is even though Hamas statements are written anonymously and spoken by a man with a mask. While no one can point to a single official IDF statement that was found to be a lie, and numerous Hamas statements (including those from the Gaza health ministry) have been shown to be literally impossible, the media still treats Hamas statements with respect and doesn't trust the Israeli statements, adding caveats like "CNN was not able to independently verify the IDF's statement" - which they do not say about Hamas or Hezbollah claims.
Treating Jews as untrustworthy is an old antisemitic trope, and it is one that we see every day.
The secondary effects of this are huge. Because Israel is not believed when it says it was targeting Hamas or Hezbollah terrorists hiding among civilians who are killed, and terror groups routinely deny what we have seen lots of videos proving, then the media treating Israeli spokespeople as liars opens up the door to bogus charges of "genocide." Genocide requires intent, and there is absolutely zero evidence that Israel intends to destroy all the Palestinians in Gaza - but because the media doesn't trust Jews, it doesn't fact-check the lies of the antisemites. Because deep down they agree that the Jews must be up to something, and the Palestinian "people of color" must be assumed to be innocent.
Israel cannot outsource its security.
Israel cannot rely on anyone else for security.
UNIFIL proved once again to be an utterly useless group that had one job - keeping the peace in Lebanon- and it failed. The UN itself remained a cesspool of antisemitic hate.
The UK turned from somewhat of an ally to an enemy in one day. France just proved it is as interested in surrendering to Islamist terrorists as they ever were.
The US claims to be Israel's friend but it kept hamstringing Israel, and its humanitarian pier was merely a transparent attempt to stop Israel from doing what needs to be done in Gaza. Its support for Israel comes with a catch and its aid to Israel is often in the form of handcuffs.
Israel must make its own decisions about its own security. Every part of its military, from mortar rounds to bunker buster bombs to advanced aircraft, must be produced domestically or else it is at the mercy of those who might not agree with Israel's decisions. It finally started moving in that direction, but it will take many years.
And it also needs a lot of help from Heaven.
Iran is pulling the strings.
It may be possible that Sinwar chose to attack without coordinating with Iran and Hezbollah. From what we have learned, October 7 could have been much worse had Hezbollah decided to join in with similar attacks it had planned for the north of Israel.
In the end, though, Iran is the party that provides money, weapons, guidance, advice, training and strategy. Israel is not at war with Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Egypt - it is only fighting forces that are allied with Iran. Iran must be the target of not just a symbolic strike but a knockout blow, military and economic, because without Iran, the other attackers would run out of resources within months.
Iran has been terrorizing the entire Middle East for decades. It has relied on its proxy strategy to avoid risk to itself. It is way past time to call its bluff and turn the tide of its heretofore inexorable increase in strength across the region. The West needs to wake up and choose the side that is trying to save the world singlehandedly.
Israel has been waging a brilliant, moral and just war, and it needs to do much more.
While the antisemites claim Israel is deliberately attacking civilians and ignorant people of the world assume Israel is at the very least uncaring towards the people on the other side, military experts are astonished at how Israel has raised the bar to avoid civilian harm while not compromising on its military goals. Its tactics against a foe entrenched in hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath civilian structures, and who choose to do military actions from within the people it pretends to care about, will be studied for years.
Israel had to make up these tactics on the fly. One of the most impressive parts about it was how quickly the IDF learns lessons and incorporates them into their war plans within days or hours. While other militaries still have separation between their air forces, navy, ground troops, artillery, spycraft and intelligence, Israel has integrated them in ways unheard of by even the most professional Western armies.
The most difficult part has been the hostages. Israel must rescue those they can, but the only deals that are acceptable to release them are those that will still allow Israel to crush Hamas. Allowing Hamas to re-group and to control Gaza again is simply not acceptable, and the world must learn that it will never happen.
The intelligence piece is most impressive. The IDF captures enemies and within a very short period of time the intelligence they provide helps the IDF choose the next targets and the next intelligence trove. The percentage of civilians killed was pretty low even in the first months of the war compared to militants but it has steadily gone down over time.
International law does not require one to allow the enemy to win because they have created a strategy of human shields. Israel has every legal right to try to win even when thousands of innocents are killed - and the party responsible for that is the one that chose to hide behind the civilians to begin with.
The war is not just kinetic. It is cognitive. Israel maybe doing poorly in getting its points across to the Western world, but the Arab world sees what it is doing and they support Israel against Muslim Brotherhood offshoots and Iran.
Israel has made some mistakes, both before and since October 7, 2023. It is fighting a war the likes of which has never been seen before. But in the past month it has re-taken the initiative and the momentum from the terrorists. There is a long road ahead, but this is an existential fight.
It is a fight Israel didn't want but once it started, it is a war that Israel cannot afford to lose - or to delay.
