SETTEOTTOBRE
L’ESPRIT DU TEMPS
Soon it will be one year since the pogrom with which Hamas declared war on Israel and the West. The Setteottobre Association, which was founded in Italy to combat resurgent anti-Semitism in our societies, has decided to initiate a reflection on what has changed after October 7, 2023, in our individual lives and collective lives.
Noam Shachar
To be or not to be.
In human life there are moments that constitute a drastic change, frequently they are dramatic moments involving the personal sphere, tragedies, accidents, traumatic moments or moments of great success or good fortune.
There are strong moments of impact on a broader, national or global level that change collective life, for example, 11/09 that affected everyone’s life in some way.
After 07/10/2023 my life continued as before, same job, same house, same desires and fears, changing with the passage of time in a physiological, normal way.
However, when asked how this day changed your life, the instant answer was: in everything. The world after Oct. 7 is a different world with different fears, different hopes, different certainties.
Then I asked myself the question of why I feel everything has changed even if it is not in appearance, I gave myself some answers, probably partial, but still relevant to my life.
A child born in the late 1950s in Israel lived in a country full of light and sunshine but always under a great cloud, that of the Holocaust, one felt everywhere, one knew the stories, the survivors, the dark looks of those who cannot tell the unspeakable, one felt the existence of evil things and experienced the great questions of: Why? Can he come back? What should I do to prevent it from coming back for the world and for me?
The same child in the mid-sixties looking at himself in the mirror, talking to himself said, Know that millions of people want you dead, they don’t know you, they don’t know who you are, but they want you dead anyway and they will also make efforts to promote this end, and you child will have to live with this knowledge, take courage, this is the world.
In the late 1980s, the now-grown child, trying to rent housing in Italy with his family, found himself trying to figure out, much to his embarrassment, whether that house had a hidden shelter in case the Nazis came looking for him and his family.
Those fears came out of the scene, for years they did not appear, those nightmares of a human being turned prey seemed like water under the bridge.
After Oct. 7, that fear resurfaced, not of death, not just of loss, but of the “Beast,” that fear of seeing seemingly normal people enraged with visceral hatred, people who want your death, without knowing you, because of a feeling stronger than themselves.
People who talk about wanting to eliminate suffering but convey destructive and irrational hatred.
I am told that at least in the Western world there are not as many of them, they are an extreme part of society, but the biggest plagues start this way.
In addition to this, many other fears have been aggregated, which find fertile ground in that basic fear born of knowing that human beings can easily become bearers and perpetrators of evil, and for some unclear reason, all of this often, spills over against members of the Jewish people.
Too often we place certain influences on a political map: fascism and racism are right-wing, flattening is left-wing, but the sad reality is that the hatred that consumes the human soul has no preference, right or left has nothing to do with good or evil, values that go beyond life or death, that allow or disallow us to be worthy human beings.
Oct. 7 was an earthquake, it tore and tore all the security of a people and left them feeling that they had no solid ground under their feet, but what happened afterwards, all over the world, made it clear that when the wall collapses, the worst can come in and consume and attack.
Too many times, talking to friends and acquaintances outside Israel, I have realized how difficult it is to explain the concept of the denial of one’s right to exist. People understand the concept of the enemy, declared or not, even if deadly, with the hope of appeasement, much more difficult to understand the concept of denial of the right of existence a priori, which says no matter who you are, what you think and why, you were not supposed to and should not exist.
I want to exist, I want my loved ones to exist, I don’t want to justify or cause the death of any innocent being or inflict pain on anyone, but I can’t accept that my right to exist without a fight should be taken away.
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