I Thought I Knew Fear and Sorrow. Then Came October 7th.

This piece belongs to a series of op-eds and columns to be published throughout this week reflecting on the one-year anniversary of October 7th.

—Tommy Barone ’25 and Jacob M. Miller ’25, Crimson Editorial Chairs

Israelis are accustomed to living in fear. In school, we perform rocket drills so that we are ready to take cover at a moment’s notice. We are trained to check beneath our bus seats for explosive bags, to keep track of the nearest bomb shelters. The unsettling feeling of danger always lingers in the background.

On Oct. 7 last year, that simmering fear turned into boiling terror.

The night before that fateful day, I returned from Boston to Harvard with a few friends. We walked the whole way, as it was Sukkot — one of the most sacred Jewish holidays — and some of us could not use electricity. Briefly, we paused on the steps of Harvard Hillel as our phones lit up with a notification: Rockets had been fired at Israel from Gaza.

The cruel irony of constant fear is that one becomes numb to it. At that moment, standing in the safety of Cambridge, my friends and I responded as we had countless times before — with resigned shrugs and tired sighs. We had no way of knowing that this time would be different.

It was.

This past year, the perpetual fear that was once a distant hum in the background of quotidian life has become a loud roar. Now, we are no longer safe in our own homes. In our beds. The brutal images from the massacre in southern Israel remind me of stories about the Holocaust that my family and teachers would tell me. The distant memory of my ancestors has become my startling reality.

Even at Harvard, thousands of miles from home, this heightened fear followed us. My friends and I have stopped speaking Hebrew in public, and we only walk across campus in pairs. Even at Hillel and Chabad — the two main Jewish spaces on campus — we are on edge despite the heightened security.

Israelis are also accustomed to living in sorrow. Three times a year, the entire country pauses to mourn our dead. Everyone — and I mean everyone — attends a remembrance ceremony. We dress in white and gather in school auditoriums, parks, and public squares to sing songs about loss, learn the victims’ stories, and read survivors’ testimonies. We all stand in utter silence — in utter heartache — as sirens go off in every Israeli town and village.

Each ceremony has its own purpose: One for the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, another for the soldiers who gave their lives defending our homeland and the civilians killed in terror attacks, and a third for remembering how political violence can threaten democracy. For twelve years of my childhood, I stood in those ceremonies, absorbing our nation’s grief into my own heart.

This year, though, our calendar of sorrow has expanded. A fourth ceremony now joins the others, marking the massacre of October 7th.

And with it, the nature of our mourning has fundamentally changed. When I attended these remembrance ceremonies as a child, the losses I honored felt distant. Now, millions of Israeli children will stand in those same white uniforms, but this time, they will remember their own siblings, parents, and grandparents. The stories they hear won’t be from history books; they’ll be their own.

During the vigil hosted by several Jewish Harvard organizations on the steps of Widener Library, within a crowd of Israelis raising posters of the 101 hostages stolen by Hamas, I felt like one of those children. The more I stared at the pictures of these smiling people, the more I felt as if I had known them my entire life — and the more I felt sick as I imagined them enduring endless suffering in captivity. On the posters, they smile with great joy, while in reality, they have been raped and abused, held against their will, now for more than a year. I hope that, a year from now, we won’t have to raise their posters again because they will be right here with us.

The weight of our present tragedy now overshadows the grief from our past. Yet, out of our sorrow and fear, we always emerge united — something that makes me deeply proud to be Israeli.

Our nation of just nine million people, smaller than New Jersey, functions like a small village. We care for every person in our community as if they were our own family.

After October 7th, the largest massacre in our country’s history, it became nearly impossible to book a flight to Israel, in part because Israelis around the world were so desperately trying to return home to help with the crisis and keep their families safe.

Our history of persecution — of fear, of sorrow — could have made us bitter and isolated or completely torn us apart. Instead, it has taught us that our strength lies in unity. That is why, for me and many other Israelis, our loss on October 7th is the loss of 1,200 of our family members.

In Judaism, we have a teaching that whoever saves a single life saves an entire world. I wear a necklace that says, “Our heart is held captive in Gaza.” Not “hearts,” but “heart” — singular. Because despite the fear that now roars louder than ever, despite the sorrow that has become so devastatingly personal, we remain one people with one heart.

Even though I have never met any of the 101 hostages, they are my family, and our hearts beat in unison. Until we are all free, none of us is free.

— In memory of Dorin Atias, my high school classmate, who was murdered on October 7th at the Nova music festival.

Maya Shiloni ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Government and Economics in Mather House.