Two months after October 7th, 2023, I stood in a half-empty high-rise in Tel Aviv with leaders of Kibbutz Re'im. Re'im, the kibbutz closest to the Nova music festival site, was attacked by Hamas terrorists on October 7th, like so many of its neighbors along the Gaza border.

CJP was about to make a significant grant from our Israel Emergency Fund to help the kibbutz relocate and stay together in community. The leader of the kibbutz at the time shared with me the harrowing story of their October 7th experience, and I asked how he found the strength to keep leading his kibbutz through this.

"Don't worry," he told me. "We will return. We will rebuild. And we'll do it together."

They have kept their word. With CJP’s help, nearly the entire kibbutz stayed together in Tel Aviv, and today, more than 95 percent of its members have moved back home. Ten new families have moved there to join them. Last year, while on a CJP mission to Israel, I had the joy of visiting the kibbutz and eating lunch in their dining room. The rebuilding goes on.

I keep coming back to the third thing the Re'im leader said: we’ll do it together. This work of resilience and rebuilding  —  whether in Israel or right here in our community  —  belongs to all of us, and we have to recommit to it again and again, long after the crisis has passed.  

In the weeks after October 7th, it came almost naturally. Nearly 7,000 people in our community gave more than $60 million to the Israel Emergency Fund. Whatever distance or divisions we felt faded away in the face of the worst day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. To quote one of the sharpest observers of modern American Jewish life, Mijal Bitton: “that pain you're feeling is peoplehood.” We knew that we are one extended Jewish family.

Three years later, that feeling is harder to hold onto. Our wars continue. We are heading into two elections, in Israel on October 27th and here on November 3rd, and in so many of my conversations I hear the fear that our differences could tear us apart from within. If October 7th taught us anything, it is that turning on one another is downright dangerous. We have seen it throughout Jewish history, and we have seen it in our own lifetime.

That is why remembering matters so much. We remember the people we lost, and the heroic individuals who risked and gave their lives for others. And we remember who we were in those first weeks and months, when we didn't have to think twice about showing up for one another.

Last night, we gathered on the North Shore with Omer Shem Tov, whom we welcomed to Boston after his miraculous return from captivity. Tonight our community will gather to remember, and I'm so grateful that Ziv Abud and Eliya Cohen will be with us. On October 7th, they were hiding together in a shelter at Kibbutz Re'im. Ziv made it out alive. Eliya was taken to Gaza and released after 505 days. They survived, were reunited, and got married this past summer. They chose life and they chose love in the face of everything that tried to take those from them.

If you can't be with us in person, I hope you'll join the livestream. I hope you will pause to grieve the people we have lost and to honor the resilience and indomitable spirit of those who have survived and who choose life.

I am grateful to my CJP colleague, Lior Krengel, and Benjamin Sharoni, the Consul General of the State of Israel to New England, for sharing their reflections which you can read about here:

The Work of Hope by Lior Krengel
Sharoni: Building our tomorrow - three years after October 7th

I also ask that you remember that, even with all our differences and disagreements, we are one, small but mighty people, one family. Perhaps consider reaching out to someone in our community you've drifted from, whether over Israel, politics, or anything else, and talk. Let’s keep the promise that our friend from Kibbutz Re'im made when it seemed impossible to imagine: let’s return and rebuild, and let’s do it together.