The war is over, but I don’t feel relief.

This isn’t peace. It’s exhaustion, grief, and the fragile miracle of still being here.

The annual memorial ceremony for the fallen of Israel’s Home Front Command (photo: IDF/X)

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This is a guest essay by Daniel Saunders who writes the newsletter, “The Beginning of Wisdom.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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The end of the Israel-Hamas war has left me feeling strangely hollow.

Ultimately, the war finished because the American president said so. British author Douglas Murray famously said that only Israel isn’t allowed to win wars, while Right-wing Israeli intellectual Assaf Sagiv described Israel as being a vassal state of America now.

However, this is not a new development; the Suez and Yom Kippur wars also essentially ended when the American president of the day and his administration decided enough was enough.

In any case, Israelis are exhausted, physically and emotionally, and it’s doubtful how much a conscript army can continue fighting under these conditions. Marriages are breaking up under the strain, businesses are going under, even beyond the death count (even though that was much lower in recent months than at the start of the war) and the terrible toll of hundreds of soldiers with life-changing physical or mental wounds.

The IDF isn’t designed for years-long counter-insurgency campaigns, but for short, sharp, offensive ones, like the war with Iran in the summer. So maybe it is the best truce (I use the word deliberately, not peace) that is obtainable right now. But the Hundred Years War Against Israel will start up again, eventually, even if not through Hamas.

I have no real strategic insights to give. You can find those elsewhere. I just have emotions.

The dust from the last two years will take a long time to settle, literally as well as metaphorically. This is obvious. No one really knows what is going to happen to Gaza politically or militarily. No one really knows what is going to happen to Israel, strategically, politically, diplomatically or even psychologically. No one really knows what’s going to happen to diaspora Jewry, physically, economically or psychologically.

I’d say no one knows what will happen to Palestinians psychologically, but by this stage I’m fairly convinced that, if they’ve wanted to kill all the Jews for the last century, the events of the last two years won’t have changed that for many. The online videos out of Gaza, of angry young men declaring victory and shouting that they’re coming again as at Khaybar (where Mohammed massacred the Jews), just reinforces this.

I’m not sure that any Jews, anywhere in the world, really know what is going to happen to us psychologically in the coming months. Are we going to despair? Feel renewed commitment to Judaism? Anger at antisemitism? The exception is the self-hating “Pick Me Jews” who are as immovable in their self-righteous loathing of other Jews as the antisemites. I certainly don’t know what’s going to happen to me psychologically after the terrible thoughts I’ve had over the last two years, not all of which I am willing to share.

I’m afraid of being seen wearing my kippah on the street and the Tube. This was not the case before October 7th. When I started wearing my kippah all the time about 30 years ago, aged 12 or so, I thought my parents were ridiculously over-protective making me wear a cap in public to hide it. I don’t really think that now, although I still don’t generally wear a cap or hat unless I have some other reason to do so (sun, cold). I find myself wondering if there is significance when people stare at me on Tube now. They are probably blank Tube stares, but maybe not.

Since my daughter was born, I find myself thinking a lot about Israeli hostages Yarden Bibas and Eli Sharabi. I don’t know how they have survived losing their families and everything they had. This is no longer an abstract fear for me, but a very real one.

The word broken keeps coming up, from people on both sides of the conflict — mostly, it has to be said, from the antisemites who insist Israel “broke international law,” “broke the rules-based international order” or even (in the word of one pundit whose name I can’t remember and whose article I can’t find) “broke something in the world.”

Israel is definitely not at fault here, but I do think there is a lingering sense of brokenness in Western technocracy, in the legacy media, and in academia, all of which engaged in vile and extensive blood libels designed to prevent the Jews from defending themselves, as well as to avoid facing the consequences of 30 years of their own failed diplomacy. This is beyond the broken sense of safety and security that Jews now feel everywhere in the world.

When hostages Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Ori Danino were found murdered, I wrote in my private journal, “Now cracks a noble heart.”

It’s telling, in retrospect, that I quoted that, not the more famous next line, “Good night sweet prince [or princes and princesses] / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” What I noted intuitively was the idea of cracking, of something breaking under strain, certainly not of the dead going to rest. (I fear the dead of the last two years will rest uneasy for a long time, sadly.) It felt like the moment when a dropped object is seen to be cracked and, even if still usable, it will never be the same again.

A different understanding of brokenness comes from Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, known as the Kotzker Rebbe, who famously said: “There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.” Here, human wholeness is seen as consisting in emotional brokenness: humility, loss, contrition. I have criticised the moral solipsism of parts of the Jewish world, but I’d rather their overindulgence in brokenness, humility, and guilt than the self-righteousness, grievance, and irresponsibility of the Palestinians and their Western allies.

The Kotzker Rebbe wrote no books and his thoughts are preserved as an oral tradition of aphoristic teachings. Like any oral tradition, there are sometimes variant versions and the “broken heart” quote is sometimes related as, “There is nothing more whole than a broken heart, nothing straighter than a crooked ladder.” Only a crooked ladder leaning against a wall can be climbed. (In the mid-19th century, no one was screwing ladders vertically to walls.) Human beings are not angels (this is central to the Kotzker’s thought) and we ascend diagonally, not straight up, and one rung at a time. That seems an important lesson right now too.

I’m climbing the crooked ladder, trying to focus on the present, not the future. I try to prioritise the wisdom of the past over the anger and hatred of online discourse. I’ve retreated to family and local community, to the real as opposed to the online, the things I can influence as opposed to the things totally outside my control.

Despite this, the fear is there. That the brokenness, the crack in the world, will one day swallow me and my family too. The political turbulence of the West does nothing to calm these fears.

And yet, I remind myself that more than half the hostages came home alive (actually, close to two-thirds). On October 8, 2023, I thought that they had gone into Hamas’ catacombs forever, yet a miracle, or 151 miracles, happened. We must remember that too.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik noted that Jewish tradition often asks us to feel two contradictory emotions at once, and we see that here. There is brokenness there in those who did not come alive or, in some cases, at all. Yet there is the miracle too. We see the brokenness. And we see the wholeness too. One does not erase the other.

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