At dawn on October 7, 2023, when the unthinkable struck, I found myself not in the south, but just five miles from Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Our family had gone north to celebrate Simchat Torah, a day meant for joy, song, and the simple happiness of being Jews together. On the surface, being far from Gaza felt like a stroke of fortune. Within hours, we understood how mistaken that assumption was.

We were far from Hamas, but dangerously close to Hezbollah. As news from the south grew darker by the minute, the north sat in an eerie, terrifying calm. For a brief window of time, we were able to move out of immediate danger. By the next day, that same region would come under rocket and drone fire. What we experienced in those first hours was not panic, but something worse, the slow realization that the ground beneath our assumptions had shifted.

The fear of that morning reminded me of only one other day in my life, September 11, 2001. On that clear Tuesday morning, I was traveling to work on the Number 9 train in Manhattan, headed for the World Trade Center station. The train halted unexpectedly at Christopher Street as service was suspended. Minutes later, the station further ahead would be buried in debris. I emerged close enough to watch the towers collapse, to breathe the acrid smoke, and to hear sirens that did not stop.

And yet, the fear that surrounded Israel on October 7 was different in kind, not just in degree. In New York, tens of thousands of us walked north together, terrified but not expecting gunmen to emerge from behind the trees. In Israel, that was precisely the fear. Heavily armed terrorists had streamed across the border with one mission only: to kill, to burn, to destroy. No one knew how far they had penetrated or where they might be hiding. Police set up checkpoints on every road. Cars were searched one by one. Suspicion hung over every interaction.

That fear was compounded by a quieter, more unsettling question. More than two million Arab citizens live in Israel. They are doctors and pharmacists, mechanics and bus drivers, even justices on the High Court. In the days that followed, unease crept in. Would violence spread inward? Would loyalty fracture under pressure? Many Jews avoided buses, clinics, and public services, haunted by uncertainty. It was not paranoia; it was the natural consequence of trust shattered overnight.

What failed on October 7 was not only a fence. It was an idea.

In Hebrew, we call it the conceptzia, the set of assumptions that quietly govern decision-making: the belief that deterrence would hold, that Hamas was contained, that we had time, that the unthinkable, by definition, would not happen. But it did. The wall was breached, and with its fall, a deeper question emerged, one that goes beyond military failure or political blame.

What if this was not about God’s absence, but about His presence? What if the shattering of our illusions was not meaningless tragedy, but a divine alarm meant to awaken us before something even worse could come?

That question stands at the heart of this series.

For the Jewish people, existence itself is testimony to covenant. We were never promised safety from pain or loss. We were never told that history would be kind. What we were promised is something far more demanding: that we would not be abandoned, even in the valley of the shadow of death. Covenant does not spare us suffering. It binds us to responsibility.

October 7 was a day of unspeakable horror. Entire communities were devastated. Families were destroyed. The cruelty inflicted that day defies language. And yet, in the aftermath, something unexpected emerged. The world anticipated a broken people. What it saw instead was a people refined by fire, scarred but unbowed.

This series is an attempt to give voice to that reality. It is not a work of triumphalism, and it is not an exercise in denial. It is a sober chronicle of catastrophe and restraint, of human courage and divine concealment, of moments where the hand of Heaven seemed hidden and moments where it felt unmistakably close.

In the weeks ahead, we will examine how the wall fell. How it fell not only along the Gaza border, but within us. We will confront the silence that followed, the faith that broke, and the faith that somehow remained. We will look carefully at what happened, and just as importantly, at what did not. We will ask what history has taught us before, and why we so often struggle to listen.

Events continue to unfold, and details will change. But the questions raised by October 7 will not. They are Jewish questions, ancient and urgent, about responsibility, memory, courage, and covenant.

Out of tragedy, a fire of faith can rise. It is not a comforting flame, but a demanding one. The kind that illuminates rather than soothes. The kind that has carried our people through every exile and every catastrophe, and that carries us still.

This week, we begin by naming the rupture. Next week, we will return to the moment the wall fell.

This column begins a weekly series drawn from the book Fire of Faith: What the October 7 War Taught Us About G-d and Israel, which explores the spiritual, moral, and historical questions raised by the October 7 war through verified events and Jewish theological reflection. Future installments will follow the book’s chapters in the weeks ahead. The book is available on Amazon or at FireOfFaithBook.com.

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