While it is not my practice to send out emails on a festival, today's brutal and unprecedented attack on the people of Israel requires us all to be on emergency footing. What happened today is being called Israel's 9/11, and for good reason. Current reports cite 250 Israeli fatalities and 1,500 injuries, with a large number of hostages.
There will be plenty of opportunity to investigate how Hamas was able to inflict such damage, but now is not the time for that. There are parallels to the outbreak of Yom Kippur War, whose 50th anniversary on the secular calendar was Friday, Perhaps that was intentional. But again, it's not relevant now.
What matters now is that we come together on behalf of the people of Israel. I hope an emergency war government can be formed, as has been suggested by leaders of the major parties. That would go a long way toward unifying the people for the battles that undoubtedly lie ahead. A prerequisite for the opposition leaders joining would be the sidelining of the current government's most radical elements. Yair Lapid stated that today. That would in turn place on hold their radical agenda for judicial overhaul and it might help preserve the Saudi peace initiative, which was undoubtedly Iran's main target in (likely) orchestrating today's attack.
Hamas's increasing brazenness had been tolerated too much for the past decade. But this goes way beyond anything that has happened before: premeditated slaughter on an industrial scale. These are not crimes of passion. They are crimes against humanity. The sheer cruelty of these murders has shocked even those who normally are inclined to blame Israel for everything, Just look at the headlines in Sunday's British press (see below and click on them for larger size). Show these front pages to your college student or anyone else who has been on the front lines of Israel's defense. There are things that Israel has done that are hard to defend. But this can never be justified. I suspect Gaza's governing structure will look quite different when the dust settles. Let's hope Israel can accomplish its aims with maximal diplomatic dexterity and minimal loss of innocent life (including the hostages taken by Hamas).
As for us, we need to be prepared to closely follow events on the ground, to separate truth from fiction, and plain facts from spin. That is always hard to do in the fog of war, and especially with regard to Israel.
Our most immediate question involves Simchat Torah. It's hard to imagine being able to celebrate with the Torah scrolls tomorrow morning, what with literally hundreds of funerals of terror victims taking place at the same time in Israel (where the holiday will have ended). And yet, that is precisely what we must do. Below is a passage from a book written just after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when the same question was asked as Simchat Torah approached. | 
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