October 7’s Twin Crises — In Israel and at Harvard

The gruesome images of Hamas’s slaughter on October 7, 2023 only hint at the scars that day and its aftermath have left on the Jewish community.

The massacre of 1,200 people, along with its immediate and ongoing justification by many at Harvard and around the world, breached the two bulwarks that have sheltered the preponderance of the Jewish people for the past three generations: Zionism and American liberalism.

Understanding this, like so much of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, means not merely knowing history, but feeling the past’s afterlife in the present.

October 7 was a metastasized echo of the infamous 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, Russia. For three days, Kishinev’s Christian residents rampaged through the Jewish quarter, murdering and raping their Jewish neighbors, and extinguishing thousands of Jews’ hopes for a peaceful, dignified life in the diaspora.

Haim Nachman Bialik, the preeminent Hebrew poet of his generation, eulogized Kishinev in his epic poem, “In the City of Slaughter.” Its verses read like captions to the horrifying videos that Hamas fighters proudly recorded and grotesquely broadcast to the world:

Arise and go now to the city of slaughter;

Into its courtyard wind your way;

There with your own hand touch, and with the eyes of your head,

Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on clay,

The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead…

Descend then, to the cellars of the town,

There where the daughters of thy folk were fouled,

Where seven foreigners flung a woman down,

The daughter in the presence of her mother,

The mother in the presence of her daughter,

Before slaughter, during slaughter, and after slaughter…

For Bialik and his fellow Zionists, Kishinev’s lesson was clear: Jewish safety and dignity depended on Jews acquiring the capacity to defend ourselves.

The 20th century’s unceasing anti-Jewish violence — from the massacre of 100,000 Ukrainian Jews during and after the First World War, to the Holocaust, to the 1955 decimation of the Jewish quarter of Mazagan, Morocco — provided a tragic surplus of evidence for this argument. For decades, had you asked almost any Zionist leader to define the purpose of Zionism, they would have told you, “So another Kishinev will never occur.”

Then, in the very place that was imagined and created to ward off these horrors — twenty-five Kishinevs in a single morning. A breach in the bulwark of Zionism.

But Bialik’s wasn’t the only path chosen by Jews, then or now. Part of Judaism’s genius is the rejection of any central authority, freeing communities to chart diverse and conflicting paths through history.

Many Jews of the early 20th century saw the solution to centuries of hatred and violence in the forces of rationalism and tolerance — and their embodiment in liberal democratic principles.

For Jewish communities built on the foundation of our neighbors’ reasonableness and acceptance, no events in recent memory have been more destabilizing than the justification and celebration of Hamas’s brutality — at Harvard and beyond.

This crisis began that very day, with the infamous letter from dozens of student groups, which held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” continued with excusal of material antisemitism, assumed physical form in the shunning of grieving Israeli students, and continues to this day.

Several months ago a student told me that, in light of his non-Jewish friends’ insensitivity to the encampment’s antisemitism, he had begun to wonder how his great-grandparents realized, in 1936, that they must leave Germany. They fled, against their families’ wishes, leaving everything behind, and were the only two members of their families to survive.

A historical contrast illuminates here as well — this time the 2018 massacre of 11 Jews praying in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue. The shooter, Robert Bowers, believed that a major Jewish organization was perpetrating a genocide.

In Bowers’s case, it was a genocide of the white race, abetted by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society’s advocacy for immigrants and refugees, but the logic isn’t too distant from that of Hamas apologists at Harvard: An unwarranted allegation of genocide against a Jewish collective justifies all means of “resistance.”

Bowers’s conspiratorial delusions, coming from the far-right fringes of American politics, were easily recognized and forcefully rejected here and in the left-of-center circles where most Harvard affiliates travel.

But coming from the left, the antisemitism of Soviet and post-Soviet export of anti-Zionism, has become entrenched at Harvard, proving hard for many to detect, and harder yet to denounce.

For four centuries, American Judaism’s bedrock has been not only our neighbors’ neighborliness, but their capacity to reject antisemitic libels that inspire violence, regardless of their political bent. As Hamas’s violence was to Zionism, Harvard affiliates’ framing of the onslaught was to American Judaism: A tectonic rupture, sundering the invisible foundations of everything we have built.

Amid all this, we know we are not the only ones grieving, and that ours is not the only world that has been shattered.

Gaza is in ruins. Its residents have suffered immense loss, and their prospects for a promising future are more precarious than ever. Judaism insists that we steadfastly attend the entirety of the loss, anguish, and grief — never allowing our hearts to contract and harden as an escape from the profound tragedy of war.

The safety and dignity of Israel’s Palestinian citizens and neighbors are matters of Jewish concern. Regarding their future, like our own, we feel an aching mixture of hope, pain, and most recently, despair.

Soothing a dispersed and demoralized Jewish people, Isaiah promised a deferred redemption, proclaiming “Great will be the peace of your children” — a prophecy that has grown only more remote since Oct. 7. The Talmud, profoundly serious and perpetually playful, suggested an emendation: “Do not read ‘your children,’ but rather, ‘your builders.’”

To be Jewish today means to be the descendant of a hundred generations in search of peace, and to be a builder: Here at Harvard, working within and beyond the Jewish community to create a tolerant pluralism stronger than the ascendant illiberal forces of polarization; and in Israel, and across its borders, to foster the flourishing of every citizen and community in dignity and safety.

As we honor the memories of Hamas’s victims and pray that the 101 remaining hostages languish not one day longer in captivity — I invite you to join in the community of Harvard Hillel, as we together rebuild the world they cherished and dreamed of, carrying their memories every day as a guide and as a blessing.

Rabbi Jason B. Rubenstein ’04 is the Executive Director of Harvard Hillel.