"What is there to wonder about? The same feeling of confidence and composure that accompanies a person in his speech, as if he were truly conveying his thought or expressed feeling smoothly and through a bridge of iron, and he does not realize at all how loose the bridge of words is, how deep and dark the open abyss beneath it is, and how much of the miracle there is in every step in peace" (Bialik, "Discovery and Coverage in the Tongue")
Two days after the October 7 inferno, I was contacted by an acquaintance from Germany, who we hadn't spoken to for almost 13 years. Ask how I am, and if everyone in my family is okay. I replied that personally, yes, but also that the indescribable horror made me feel that the family in question had no boundaries at all. Then I wondered among myself about this wording, and only days later did I realize that the monstrous deeds had wrinkled and collapsed not only reality, but also me. It wasn't the boundaries of my imagined family that expanded in the hours of terror and the discovery of horrors, but the boundaries of my own personality that were challenged. The "I," as a distinct being, is confronted here with something as deep as chaos itself.
This realization itself comes through silence, or more precisely, through a total inability to find the right words, words that can capture, fence and name the intensity of the crime. Yes, we all have different combinations of ISIS and Nazis in our ears and in front of our eyes, and they give something, but still - to me at least - it does not seem that these symbols of evil can describe the inferenal sadism that befell the residents of Nir Oz, Kfar Gaza, Reim and their neighbors.
Until the token fell to me: the language was not there yet, because what was happening touched completely primordial layers of existence, in areas that preceded not only culture, but human existence as such. In places where even the God of Genesis is silent.
All violence can be paralyzing, and it is no coincidence that silence is derived from the same root, as violence and sisterly muteness are; But what was there, if you recall the descriptions (and how can you forget them?), was a slope where the tearing of humanity was only the first step down. From murder followed by degradation of the corpse (a second murder, if you will), to dismemberment, to the reduction of corpses into amorphous and sooty lumps. Hannah Arendt wrote: "Unpunishable crimes are unforgivable." And what shall we say about crimes that cannot even be conceptualized?
These are actions that are beyond words, because words embroider human civilization. And if we look at them through Jewish mysticism (the Book of Creation, for example) or Christian cosmology (the Gospel of John, for example) – even beyond creation, which was done in letters and words and speech.Previously, pirates had a special status: Hostis humani generis (enemies of mankind), because in their rebellion against all laws they excluded themselves from humanity. On 7 October, we faced hostis imaginis Dei – enemies of the image of God. Because yes, when we read the horror testimonies from there, we hear the voice of chaos, the terrifying whale that civilization begins with its decision and exists as long as it is tamed.
C. Apropos Photographer: Nine years ago I criticized the equation "ISIS is Hamas and Hamas is ISIS" – a rhetorical tool whose author in 2014 doubted even believed in its validity (unless we suspect that even then he knowingly fed an ISIS monster – and not an organization in which he saw an instrumental partner and an indirect dialogue for other purposes).
I argued at the time that there was nevertheless a striking difference between the two terrorist organizations: a degree of compassion for their victims.
While ISIS put them face to face with their deaths, and even made their deaths a blinker, Hamas, at least then, did execute them publicly, but at least with sacks on the victims' heads, as if the victims were given a last resort and the shooters were given the opportunity to guard, even slightly, the photographer. This difference, after all, was a small bridge, separating the barbarism of an organization that tried at least to be a sovereign agent, from the fundamentalists of radical evil. Nine years later, it turned out that the bridge, more than it separated, actually connected – and that Hamas even surpassed their teachers.
D. This encounter with chaos, which was our lot, is, in my opinion, also the basis and justification for the fact that the struggle against Hamas is no longer confined to the story of anti-Semitism, or to the Jewish overarching narrative of the war against Amalek, and certainly not within the framework of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the massacre only "exceeded" the number of victims. Not. It has fallen to us here to wage a civilization's struggle against the shadow of death, a shadow of death in every sense, against the mute darkness of the chaos that has burst forth through the limbs of civilization and the tendons of humanity.
It is impossible to underestimate the magnitude of the moment, the singularity of what happened to us – and to all of humanity through us. Again, echoing Arendt, the crime against humanity was committed in the Jewish body. But now, we Jews and all our supporters have an opportunity, even an obligation, to act to subdue evil. When Hamlet is shocked to learn that his uncle has murdered his father, he murmurs: "The wheel of time has been broken, overstepped in place, woe betide me that I must return to install it." This is our mission, to reinstall the wheel of time, and it is a human-cultural mission of the first order.
Its uniqueness, by the way, is perhaps one of the reasons for the countless questions that arise around the struggle against the organization: Who to catch? Only the senior officials, or all of them? Only the political wing, or also the military wing? What does it mean to eradicate? They are correct, and it is very important to raise them, but their multiplicity perhaps reflects the wandering of reason in the perimeter of the black hole that has opened in the tissue of existence. But the law itself is decisive, and the question is only when it will be implemented. Hamas delenda est.
And a final word: precisely because the struggle against Hamas is also a struggle for the return of words, for the return of the ability to speak, for being on the side where God triumphs over the monsters of chaos - it is also our duty to protect the image. The photographer in us. To conquer the urge to release all restraints and toy with even hasty contact with the monster districts, which were the starting point and modus operandi of Hamas operatives on that accursed Shabbat in the Gaza envelope. And if that's too much, at least not to dehumanize every Gazan. If there is no escape, hate them as human beings. Not for their sake, but for us. Because the abyss knows how to look back.
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