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Following the events of October 7, I reached back to a poem I committed to memory when I first read it—a poem written when we Jews thought that the worst was already behind us. I was born in East Central Europe in 1936, and raised in Canada as a fortunate immigrant in the 1940s, and I consider it the greatest privilege of my life to have seen the establishment of the state of Israel. 

But our post-Shoah enemies never stopped trying to destroy our monumental achievement, and because they fail, they try to desecrate its glory. I will never let them. In its quiet, private way this Yiddish poem by Avrom (Abraham) Sutzkever, reaffirms how much is at stake in the Jewish return to the Land of Israel.

First published in November 1948 in the weekly of the Displaced Persons camp in Munich, the poem later appeared in the author’s collected works under the title Shehekhiyonu. Many Jews recite this prayer when first arriving in the land of Israel: Blessed art thou, Lord our G-d, King of the Universe, who has kept us in life (shehekhiyonu), and preserved us (vekiymonu), and enabled us to reach this season (vehigiyonu lazman hazeh). The poet maintains the triple structure of the prayer’s three parallel verbs, but in the conditional form, through the negative possibility that he might not have made it to the Land of Israel. 

By the time Sutzkever arrived in Palestine in November 1947, he was renowned in the Yiddish literary world as one of its greatest poets and bravest of survivors. Forced into the ghetto of Vilna with the rest of the Jewish population after the German invasion of June 1941, he continued to write poems and to inspire cultural resistance. He and his wife also joined the Jewish underground resistance and escaped in September 1943 to fight as partisans in the surrounding forests. He said that his subsequent life story reads like a maysele fun Tanakh—a legend of biblical proportions. 

Coming to Israel months before the declaration of statehood, he experienced himself as part of both the dead left behind and the Jewish people in their resurrected homeland. This lyric blends the two. Every word in the description of Israel’s birth pangs reverberates with echoes of liturgical and traditional sources. The rhyme of akeyde with zeyde, blending biblical Hebrew with homiest Yiddish, reassures us that not only did Isaac survive G-d’s test of Abraham, but generations of Jewish sons lived to become beloved grandfathers. Every pebble of the Land of Israel is our familiar ancestry.  

Speaking in his own voice, the poet expresses thankfulness for his great good fortune, haunted by the knowledge that most of his community failed to reach this destination. The word “not” appears six times in eleven lines, carrying the weight of those others. Had he not arrived, he would have expired, fargoyt—a deliberately untranslatable neologism, a word that Sutzkever creates to define a certain kind of dying, turned into a goy, dying as a member of the Jewish people. The Yiddish prefix far, which can mean “turned into,” joined to the term for gentile makes assimilation explicit. This is less a political rejection of galut than a post-war craving to be fully Jewishly at home.

Yet, this is not yet the end. An added line that requires a new rhyming scheme tells us that even had the poet not made it, his yearning would have come on its own. So powerful and sustained is the Jewish longing for Israel that even without any physical presence, the longing would have remained a metaphysical force. Supernatural power is here ascribed to the civilization that the people of Israel have forged. And the power of this longing speaks for those who have not lived to pronounce the Shehekhiyonu blessing.

By Abraham Sutzkever

If I were not at one with you, 

Not breathing air of joy and pain here, 

Were I not burning with the Land 

Volcanic Land in throes of labor; 

After my Trial, if I were not 

Being resurrected with the Land 

Whose ever pebble is my ancestor—

No bread would sate my hunger, 

No water cool my gums, 

Till Gentiled I’d expire, 

And on its own my yearning would come. 

This poem first appeared in the weekly of the Displaced Persons Camps, Af der vakh (On Guard), Munich, November 25, 1948. Dated 1947, the year of the poet’s arrival in Eretz Israel,,it was placed as the opening lyric of the section Shehekhiyonu in Abraham Sutzkever’s collection of poems,In fayer-vogn (In the Chariot of Fire) Tel Aviv: Di Goldene Keyt, 1952.

This article appears in the Spring/Summer 2024 issue of Lubavitch International, to subscribe to the magazine, click here.

In the days following October 7, when the scope and horror of the Shemini Atzeret massacre became clear, I felt my mother’s experiences during the Holocaust come to life before my eyes. I felt overcome with grief and fear. 

Yet, in the days that followed, something else became abundantly clear, and I was overwhelmed by its power. 

I saw and heard how, on that terrible day, people put their lives on the line—and indeed many gave their lives—for fellow Jews they had never met before; how a divided Israel and a fragmented Diaspora Jewry came together in love and unity. I saw a new Jewish consciousness emerge, a realization that Jews share an essential bond with Israel and with each other that transcends all our differences.

To quote the Tanya, “It is on account of this common root, shared by all the Jewish people in the One G-d, that all of Israel are called siblings—in the full sense of the word.” Like siblings, we can disagree but the unbreakable bond is always there.

But this new consciousness has come at a terrible price. A passage from tractate Brachot has come to mind more than once these last months: “Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai says: The Holy One, Blessed be He, gave Israel three precious gifts, all of which are obtained through suffering [yisurim]: Torah, the Land of  Israel, and the World to Come.”

The Talmud then brings a proof text: “As a man rebukes his son, so the Lord your G-d rebukes you” (Deuteronomy 8:5), and it is written thereafter: “For the Lord your G-d will bring you to a good land.” The Hebrew word yas-er, here translated “rebukes,” comes from the same root as the Talmud’s word for suffering. In this context, it is better translated as “challenges,” or “tests.” 

The Jewish presence in and allegiance to the Land of Israel tests our faith daily. We are a “sheep surrounded by seventy wolves.” Israel is threatened and attacked at every turn while the world condemns it, questions its right to exist, and, as we’ve seen in recent months, has made the Jewish people and our ties to Israel the object of horrible hatred and violence. After centuries of enduring such ignominy, it would make sense that we finally just give up—on our identity and our claim and connection to the Land of Israel, which we’ve held on to at such a great cost.  

Yet the Jewish people remain steadfast. There has been no mass emigration from Israel after October 7. Rather, Jews who left Israel have returned to serve in this war, and Jews continue to make aliyah. Every time during the last eighty years when things looked bleak, “G-d Blessed the work of our hands,” and we survived and thrived in the “Land G-d is giving you.” It seems impossible that our bond to the Land has become stronger yet. It seems impossible that the events that transpired in the Land of Israel, meant to destroy us, actually brought us together. 

What mysterious power does this Divine gift, the Land of Israel, hold! How awesome is Israel, the nexus—as the Kabbalah teaches—of spiritual and physical, of Creator and Creation, of G-d and G-d’s People.

Shlomo Yaffe is the Rabbi of the Alliance of Orthodox Congregations (Springfield/ Longmeadow, MA) and Dean of the Institute for American and Talmudic Law (Chabad of Midtown, New York, NY).

This article appears in the Spring/Summer 2024 issue of Lubavitch International, to subscribe to the magazine, click here.

When tragedy shatters belief, the conversation may continue in a different form