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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Three years later, perhaps we are finally ready to say this sentence and understand what it really means: October 7th did not happen in a vacuum.
October 7th did not emerge from nowhere because massacres of Jews have almost never emerged from nowhere. They are preceded by words, conspiracy theories, accusations, and the gradual normalization of ideas that would once have been considered obscene. They are preceded by societies convincing themselves that Jews are uniquely powerful, uniquely dangerous, uniquely guilty, or somehow less innocent than everyone else.
And then, eventually, those ideas become blood.
October 7th belongs to its own time and place. It was a singular catastrophe, with its own victims, its own circumstances, and its own horror, and it should never be flattened into a historical analogy.
But it also belongs to something much older: the long Jewish memory of places where Jews woke up one morning believing that the world around them was still basically intact, only to discover by nightfall that it was not. Jews have experienced that rupture again and again — the moment when ordinary life gives way to something ancient and terrifying, when neighbors become mobs, when institutions disappear, and when the rules that seemed permanent suddenly no longer apply.
In 1096, Jewish communities along the Rhine were slaughtered during the First Crusade. In 1190, the Jews of York were trapped inside Clifford’s Tower, where many died rather than fall into the hands of the mob outside. In 1648 and 1649, entire Jewish communities across Eastern Europe were devastated during the Khmelnytsky uprising.
In Kishinev in 1903, after years of antisemitic propaganda and a blood libel inflamed the population, Jews were murdered, wounded, and their homes and businesses destroyed. In Hebron in 1929, Jews who had lived in the ancient city for generations were attacked by their neighbors. In Baghdad in 1941, during the Farhud, Jews were murdered, raped, beaten, and looted in a city where Jewish life had existed for more than 2,000 years.
Then came the Holocaust, so enormous that it sometimes obscures everything that came before it and everything that came after. Six million Jews were murdered not in some primitive ancient world, but in modern Europe, in countries of universities, orchestras, philosophers, scientists, courts, newspapers, and laws.
The Holocaust was different in scale, machinery, and intention from the massacres that preceded it, but it reinforced a lesson Jewish history had already taught many times: Civilization is not an automatic safeguard against barbarism, and education does not immunize societies against hatred.
And still it did not end. Jews were murdered at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012. Eleven Jews were murdered while praying at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Jewish institutions across the world have required guards, cameras, barricades, police protection, and emergency procedures not because Jews enjoy living this way, but because history has repeatedly punished Jewish communities that assumed danger belonged only to the past.
Then came October 7th, when Israelis in kibbutzim, towns, army bases, and a music festival experienced the same terrible rupture that has appeared in Jewish history in different forms for centuries: the moment when normal life collapses and Jews discover that the people coming for them are not interested in arguments, nuance, or innocence.
The names change. The countries change. The century changes. The ideology changes. Sometimes the murderer speaks the language of Christianity, sometimes nationalism, sometimes racial science, sometimes revolutionary politics, sometimes Islamism, and sometimes white supremacy. Antisemitism is remarkably adaptable because it does not depend on one coherent ideology. It can attach itself to almost any worldview and reshape its accusation accordingly.
The Jew is condemned for being foreign until he assimilates, and then he is condemned for being influential. The Jew is condemned for being poor until he succeeds, and then he is condemned for being wealthy. The Jew is accused of refusing to integrate until he integrates, and then he is accused of infiltrating society. For centuries, Jews were condemned for having no country. Now we are condemned for having one.
That is why remembering October 7th cannot simply mean remembering October 7th. We should remember Kfar Aza and Be’eri, Nir Oz, and Nahal Oz. We should remember the young people who went to dance at Nova and never came home. We should remember the families murdered, the elderly dragged away, the children taken hostage, and the soldiers who ran toward communities under attack.
But Jewish memory demands something more difficult of us: It demands that we remember Kishinev too, and Hebron, and Baghdad, and York, and the countless Jewish towns whose populations disappeared so completely that today almost nobody knows Jews once lived there.
There is a reason Judaism is obsessive about memory. We remember Amalek. We remember Egypt. We remember the destruction of the Temples. We recite Yizkor. We say Kaddish. We name children after people who died generations before they were born. This is sometimes described as a Jewish fixation on tragedy, but that misunderstands what memory is supposed to do. Jewish memory is not morbidity. It is an early-warning system developed by a people with an unusually long historical data set.
Our ancestors learned something uncomfortable: Civilization is not as permanent as it feels while you are living comfortably inside it.
People believe massacres happen somewhere else until they happen on their street. They believe mobs belong to another century until one gathers outside their building. They believe educated societies cannot descend into barbarism until educated people begin explaining why barbarism is understandable. They believe institutions will protect them until the institutions hesitate, and they believe someone will come until nobody comes. Jewish history is filled with moments in which people discovered, too late, that what felt impossible had simply become normal one concession at a time.
The lesson is not that everyone hates us, but that Jews cannot outsource responsibility for Jewish survival and assume that somebody else will always recognize danger before we do.
There is a difference between paranoia and vigilance. Paranoia says catastrophe is always about to happen. Vigilance says catastrophe has happened before, often after warning signs were ignored, so we have an obligation to recognize the conditions that make it possible.
Vigilance means taking threats against Jewish communities seriously before somebody is murdered. It means securing synagogues even when we wish synagogues did not need security. It means teaching our children Jewish history beyond the Holocaust, because the story of Jewish vulnerability did not begin in 1933 and did not end in 1945. It means understanding that antisemitic language matters long before it becomes antisemitic violence.
It also means refusing to become so comfortable in any society — not America, not Britain, not France, not Australia, not anywhere — that we convince ourselves history has granted us an exemption it never granted previous generations. Jews have been deeply rooted in many countries that later became dangerous for them. They spoke the language, built businesses, served in armies, wrote literature, created institutions, and believed their place in society was secure.
Sometimes it was secure for decades or centuries, until suddenly it was not.
That history also helps explain the meaning of Jewish sovereignty. For most of Jewish history, when a Jewish community was threatened, Jews had to hope somebody else would protect them. Sometimes somebody did. Often nobody did. Whatever arguments Israelis have among themselves (and they have many), the existence of Israel changed that equation. For the first time in nearly 2,000 years, millions of Jews possess a state, an army, intelligence services, rescue forces, hospitals, aircraft, and the sovereign ability to organize our own defense.
October 7th exposed the terrible truth that even those protections can fail. But it also reminded us why they exist. Israel was not created because Jews believed danger could be eliminated. It was created in part because Jewish history had demonstrated the danger of relying entirely on the goodwill, stability, or courage of others. Jewish sovereignty does not guarantee Jewish safety. October 7th proved that with devastating clarity. But it gives Jews something most previous generations never possessed: the ability to fight back, rebuild, investigate failure, strengthen institutions, and take responsibility for their own defense.
Three years after October 7th, the danger is that remembrance becomes ritualized. There will be ceremonies, candles, photographs, speeches, names read aloud, and moments of silence. All of those things matter, but remembering the dead without learning from the world in which they were murdered is incomplete remembrance. Jewish memory is supposed to make demands on the living. It is supposed to shape how we think, what we build, what we protect, and what warning signs we refuse to ignore.
The demand of October 7th is not that we spend the rest of our lives frightened. It is almost the opposite: that we live loudly as Jews while understanding what is required to preserve that life. Build, study, congregate, celebrate, defend, and never confuse acceptance with permanence.
One of the most dangerous sentences a Jew can utter is: “It cannot happen here.” Every Jewish community that was eventually destroyed once lived somewhere where destruction seemed impossible. Baghdad was home. Kishinev was home. Hebron was home. Germany was home. Pittsburgh was home. The communities of southern Israel were home. The point is not that every Jewish home is doomed. The point is that history gives us no permission to become complacent simply because life feels secure today.
On this third anniversary, we should remember the victims of October 7th not as the beginning of a story, but as the newest names in an ancient book we desperately wish had stopped being written. We should honor them alongside the Jews of Kishinev, Hebron, Baghdad, York, Pittsburgh, the Holocaust, and the countless other places where Jews were murdered for being Jews — because Jewish history teaches us that survival is not inevitable. It has to be protected, taught, defended, and remembered. That is not a call to live in fear. It is a call to refuse forgetfulness.
October 7th did not happen in a vacuum, and if we truly honor those who we lost on that fateful day and thereafter, we should make sure our memory does not exist in one either.
This is wisdom. Prophecy is clear that soon every nation will come against Israel—every nation. Not every person, but every nation. I'm just a Gentile who believes that He is accepted in the New Covenant prophesied by Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36. But Daniel's Seventieth Week is coming upon the world soon. We are all called to be ready for that. I may be 82 and headed home soon. But the end of Western Civilization is coming before the Messiah comes. It is going to get very rough. Ask YHWH what He wants you to do.