Daniel Gordis
Substack, Oct. 2, 2022.
“The return of existential vulnerability which the Six Day War had seemed to banish forever, the reversion to the fear and worry that Israelis thought they’d never feel again, left them shattered.”
There’s something strange about Israeli TV before Yom Kippur. Before Passover, there is a lot of programming about …. Passover. Before Sukkot, a lot of material about … Sukkot. The same with Rosh Hashanah and most other holidays.
But not Yom Kippur. Watch Israeli TV before Yom Kippur, and much of what you’ll see is about … the Yom Kippur War. Even half a century after the war, the war continues to trump the holiest day of the year.
It takes being in Israel, at Yom Kippur and for much more time, to begin to appreciate the degree to which the Yom Kippur War still haunts Israel forty-nine years after the war, and the degree to which the horrors of the war’s failures have shaped Israeli life, discourse and even religion in the decades that have passed.
Five years after the Yom Kippur War, Avraham Balaban, a noted Israeli poet, published a poem to mark the anniversary, pointing with painful simplicity to the fog and pain that simply refused to clear. The poem is called “October 12, 1978”: … source
