posted on shelraphen.com How will we be remembered? — The Jewish People After the War
How will we be remembered? As the Jewish people, what will history remember of our actions today? What will be the narrative they tell about us? We were victims of the holocaust, and then enacted a genocide ourselves. We have truly gone astray.
Ultimately, the war in Gaza cannot last forever. The situation in Israel and Palestine cannot last forever as it is. Someday, it will end. The question is, how? When it's all over, what will become of the Jewish people? How will be remembered?
This past Saturday was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, dedicated to self-reflection and atonement for the harms—both individual and collective—done over the past year. It may has also have been the single year in which Jews, as a collective, have done the most gruesome harm across all our thousands of years of history. This is bitterly painful to reckon with, but now is the time we must reckon with the things that are the hardest.
Shel's post dives into this pain by imagining how Jews will be seen after the war is concluded, once the die has been cast and the world must sit with the outcome. None of the hypotheticals are rosey, because the Jews inescapably have blood on our hands. But it's also worth taking this as a reminder that the future is not yet set in stone, and that we may still work to see the best future that's possible from the imperfect now. We may still perform actions we will be proud of, and our children will be proud of, in the years and centuries down the line.
Next year, in a free Jerusalem.