By Zach Benjamin, President/CEO
Earlier this month, America marked the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks, which robbed our country of nearly 3,000 innocent lives and indelibly altered its social and political landscape.
A handful of times per century, humanity experiences a figurative earthquake so disruptive that it bruises the very soul of our civilization and hurtles the trajectory of human history down previously unimaginable vectors. Some of these inflection points, such as the COVID pandemic, take place in slow motion. Others, such as 9/11 and the assassination of President Kennedy, are acute gut punches that leave us in a collective state of short-term whiplash, resulting in long-term, perpetually unfolding historic implications. Both types of crises generate aftershocks that arrive in waves of geopolitical and humanitarian challenge, which, while inevitably yielding certain opportunities and silver linings, also place strains on our social, economic, and political systems.
Almost one year ago, Israel and the Jewish people found themselves similarly rocked by the atrocities carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023. By the time the sun set on that Shabbat—the bloodiest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust—nearly 1,400 innocent Israelis lay slaughtered, with countless others raped and tortured, and more than 200 men, women, and children dragged by terrorists from their homes and places of community to captivity deep in Gaza, where the vast majority of those who survive still remain.
Indeed, like other moments of crisis, the events of October 7 produced a ripple effect of broader human tragedy, political upheaval, and a global tsunami of antisemitism more rabid than any such surge since World War II.
And yet, Israelis and Jews throughout the diaspora continue to plead, largely in vain, with their neighbors, communities, thought leaders, and governments to understand the gravity of October 7 and the resulting threats to Jewish peoplehood worldwide.
We may forgive those outside the Jewish world for underestimating the scale and scope of Hamas’s crimes against humanity. After all, we cannot expect most of the Western world to be particularly attuned to and educated on Jewish history and demographics. Furthermore, The fact that Jewish people punch well above their weight class in American corporate, academic, scientific, and civic leadership sometimes creates the perception that our numbers are far more significant than is the reality.
It is important, then, to place October 7 in scale. The population of the United States on September 11, 2001 was approximately 300 million. By contrast, Israel’s population stands at just 3% of that number, or roughly 9 million people. Thus, for Israelis, the scope of human loss on October 7 was roughly equivalent to that which would have occurred had 9/11 resulted in 40,000 American deaths, a number just shy of the population of the City of Harrisburg.
Almost every Israeli, regardless of ethnic, cultural, or religious background, either lost a friend or family member on October 7 or is one degree of separation from someone who did. When we have conversations about October 7 with those who have not considered the scale of the events that took place that day, we must compel them to imagine if, on the morning of September 12, 2001, they had awoken in a world where they and/or nearly everyone they know had lost a friend, acquaintance, or loved one.
The scale of the calamity is only marginally less catastrophic when viewed through the global Jewish lens. The total worldwide Jewish population stands at approximately 15 million. Theoretically, this places each Jewish person no more than a few degrees of separation from the lost, kidnapped, and personally grieving. Expand the impact of October 7 to include those whose lives have been touched by acts of anti-Jewish bias, and we can surmise that nearly a majority, if not a true majority, of Jewish people have experienced personal trauma attributable to last year’s terrorist attacks.
Ultimately, those individuals who disrupt and threaten Jewish events, spaces, safety, and security are unreachable by reason. However, as we work to generate new allies and rally existing ones to understand the Jewish people’s current state of vulnerability, it is imperative that we create context to help them grasp the depth, breadth, and long-term impact of October 7 and its aftermath.
Every American of an age to remember 9/11 is distinctly aware of how they spent that day and of the fingerprints that the events of that morning left not only on their own hearts, but on human civilization itself. Personally, I struggle each year to find words befitting the gravity and significance of that moment in time, the shadow of which continues to loom over the American political and social experience.
Similarly, as we approach the one-year yahrzeit of October 7, 2023—the impact of which continues to unfold, often grotesquely, in real time—we must, as Jews, allow ourselves the grace to continue our coping processes while learning how to most effectively convey our reality to the broad communities of which we are a part.