How has it been 627 days since October 7, 2023?
Where has the time gone? How have our souls changed?
627 days since we woke to the unfathomable. 627 days since the rupture. Since the screams on WhatsApp. Since the red alerts. Since the Nova music festival became a slaughterhouse. Since Sderot was overrun and kibbutzim burned. Since Jews across the world felt—some for the first time, others again—what it means to be hunted.
Since then, we have buried our dead, prayed for our captives, argued with the world, and argued with God. We have marched in the streets and wept in private. We have reposted, boycotted, donated, unfollowed, unfriended. We have said Kaddish for children, for elders, for soldiers, for hope. We have screamed at silence and whispered to each other, “How could this happen?”
And now—627 days later—we ask: how have we changed?
The Jewish soul is elastic. It is built to stretch across centuries, across traumas. It is not fragile. But it is tender.
627 days later, we are not the same. We are angrier. And prouder. More connected to our people and more suspicious of our surroundings. We are lonelier in the world, and closer to each other. Our Jewishness no longer feels like an optional identity—it has become a lifeline, a burden, a gift, and a scar.
We used to explain ourselves. Now we assert ourselves.
We used to ask permission. Now we demand truth.
We used to fear being “too Jewish.” Now we fear erasure.
For many, especially the younger generation, October 7 was the day Jewish innocence died. Or perhaps, more accurately, it was the day the illusion of innocence shattered. The fantasy that we were safe because we were moral. That we had earned our place at the table. That our progressive values would protect us.
627 days ago, we were reminded that history is not linear. It loops. It haunts. And it returns.
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik once wrote that the essence of Jewish existence is “re-experiencing the past.” In Judaism, memory is not passive—it is sacred technology. It links the living and the dead, the past and the possible.
Memory is our sixth sense.
We don’t just recall Egypt—we remember it as if we ourselves left it. We don’t just study destruction—we sit on the floor each Tisha B’Av and feel the ash of the Temple on our tongues.
And now, October 7 is part of that memory. Not as a footnote, but as a chapter.
To be a Jew is to carry it forward.
To remember the face of every hostage.
To remember the videos we wish we hadn’t seen, and the ones we had to watch.
To remember who showed up for us—and who didn’t.
To remember not because we are stuck in the past, but because the past is now a part of our blood.
And yet, as our memory grows sharper, our capacity for understanding has shrunk.
It is hard to be generous when you are grieving. It is hard to explain nuance when people deny your pain. It is hard to love when the world calls your mourning a war crime.
Some of us have withdrawn. Others have raged. Many have lost friends. Some have lost illusions. And still others have lost their belief that empathy is always reciprocal.
We have learned what it means to be gaslit on a global scale. What it means to shout truth into a vacuum. What it means to be too Jewish for the left and not Jewish enough for the right. What it means to carry the unbearable weight of being the world’s symbol—of power, of privilege, of propaganda—while carrying the wounds of your dead.
But we are still here.
We light candles. We say Shema. We send our kids to Hebrew school. We sing Hatikvah. We argue in shul. We hold hands at funerals and weddings and rallies. We bake challah and fight online and learn daf yomi and visit the sick.
627 days later, we are tired. But we are not broken.
627 days later, our pride has grown. Our courage, too.
And we are still dreaming of the day they all come home.
May it be soon. May it be complete.
And may we remember them not only as symbols or victims—but as sons, daughters, siblings, lovers, artists, teachers, dancers, builders, believers.
As Jews.