Mosaic Magazine, Sept. 21, 2023
“There is no lack of “Yom Kippur Jews” for whom the day means, if anything at all, going through the motions of soul-searching perfunctorily. If the God of Israel chooses to punish them for their unrepented sins in the year that follows, will they not also have had a yom kippur shel?”
This year’s 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, whose Gregorian calendar date is October 6, has led to a predictable spate of articles, lectures, TV documentaries, and even (assuming that the release of Golda was timed with it in mind) Hollywood films. And yet in Israel, if truth be told, every Yom Kippur in the last 50 years has taken place in the somber light of the 1973 war, the trauma of which has faded only partially with time. Although many who lost sons, husbands, fathers, and friends in the fighting are themselves no longer alive, the memory of it lives painfully on in Israeli society. The fact that it ended in a decisive miliary victory has never compensated in the nation’s consciousness for the price paid for the overconfidence and lack of caution that made possible the near-catastrophic surprise Egyptian-Syrian attack with which the war began.
One of the minor testimonies to the war’s impact is that for a long time now, the words yom kippur shel, “the Yom Kippur of,” have referred in Israeli speech to any debacle that might have been prevented by better judgment and a more modest sense of one’s capabilities. “This is the Yom Kippur of the Ministry of Finance,” a ministry official was quoted as saying in 2000 about a costly government surrender to striking port workers in what is the earliest documented use of the expression that I have been able to find, although it undoubtedly goes back much further. And December 10, 2013 is still known in Israel as “the Yom Kippur of the weathermen” because predictions of moderate rainfall on that day failed to foresee the unusually heavy snowstorm that hit the country, especially Jerusalem—which, caught unawares, was paralyzed for days.
Two years later, when Benjamin Netanyahu beat Isaac Herzog handily in the national elections of 2015 despite forecasts of a close race, a news service ran the headline, “The Yom Kippur of the Pollsters.” And “The Yom Kippur of the [Agricultural] Authorities” was a similar headline in 2022, when an estimated 100,000 chickens were killed by an outbreak of avian flu that no one had seen coming.
