Dear Friends, 

In September 1974, the journalist Gideon Samet penned a revealing op-ed in the pages of Philadelphia’s Jewish press. “These days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have seldom been more significant as a period of national stock-taking.” Samet had in mind the looming one-year anniversary of the devasting Yom Kippur War, in which a coalition of neighboring Arab nations attacked Israel.

Israel’s leaders were unprepared for the 1973 Yom Kippur War. What could have been done differently? Samet rehearsed the ongoing “process of mass psychoanalysis.” For many months, newspapers and television personalities had debated who was to blame for the perceived military breakdown; whether the Yom Kippur War was a “big war before the long-expected peace” or if it was “just another episode, to be repeated before long.”

Israel was on every Jews’ mind, so claimed Samet. “This time, the questions do not remain the business of rabbis sermonizing from the pulpits nor the professors in cathedra.” At stake was Israeli (and Jewish) self-confidence. Writing on the eve of the New Year, precisely fifty years ago, Samet expressed an unease about how to usher in the Jewish holiday season. Instead, he hoped in generalities, praying for a “new consciousness” of “self-revaluation” focused on shining a “light on the possibilities of a better future.”

But most of all, concluded Samet, he hoped that American Jews use the High Holy Days to “better understand themselves,”—to learn from the lessons of the past to shape attitudes for the future.

In Hebrew, we call that Heshbon Ha-Nefesh; literally, an “accounting of the soul.” I engaged in something of this sort last week with 250 others at the Weitzman Museum of American Jewish History. There, Seed the Dream Foundation, Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, and I Believe Israeli Women screened “Screams Before Silence,” a film that documents the horrible violence perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli women on October 7, 2023.

I confess that I attended with reluctance, unsure of how I would absorb the chilling accounts. But Samet’s point about self-revaluation kept me in good stead, just as it did for his readers in 1974.

Looked at this way, the film, for me, wasn’t solely about testimony of the past; it challenged me to consider what I can do in the months ahead.

Samet’s line of thinking matches a culture of apprehension that sits uncomfortably within many of us. Much remains unknown about the recent past and looming future that surrounds the pogroms of October 7. Its impact is no doubt heaviest in Israel but has held significant political, religious, cultural, and educational implications for life in the United States and elsewhere. Notwithstanding these insecurities, I’m comforted by Samet’s message to Philadelphia’s Jewish community articulated a half-century ago: with so much beyond our control, let’s use this time to better understand ourselves and consider how we can help cultivate a “new consciousness” in the critical moments yet to come.

Shana Tova,

Zev Eleff