October 7th anniversary weighs heavy as Jews enter the High Holy Days

NPR

On the table outside Rabbi Zachary Zysman’s office at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, six portraits of hostages killed by Hamas are weighed down by a small stone, placed there as an act of remembrance.

Nearby, a stack of brochures for a Krav Maga self-defense class leans against a pad of paper on which people can write prayers, eventually to be tucked into the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Zysman, the chaplain for Jewish life at Loyola Marymount, has carefully prepared for the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sunset on Wednesday and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, later this month. In the middle of the Jewish High Holy Days comes the anniversary of October 7, the deadliest attack against Jews since the Holocaust.

No matter when the one-year anniversary fell, it would have been difficult, but Zysman said it’s particularly poignant “at a time when we’re thinking about repentance, renewal and hope.”

His flock is small but close-knit. Loyola Marymount is a Jesuit university with about 10,000 students, 375 of whom are Jewish.

“One of the messages I’ve repeated over and over to my students is: What is our responsibility to each other?”

‘Who shall live?’ rings differently in the aftermath of October 7th

Along with other chaplains on campus, Zysman has hosted speaker series, workshops and roundtables discussions on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia during this past year, but the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur will be less about education and more about personal and communal religious devotion for students.

The motif of death is frequent during High Holy Days liturgies, and Zysman said The phrases “Who shall live? and ‘Who shall die?” take on a deeper resonance this year.

More than 1,200 Israelis, not all of whom were Jewish, died in the Hamas attacks of October 7, and 100 Israelis remain held hostage by Hamas, according to the Israeli government. More than 41,500 people in Gaza have been killed during the Israeli bombardment that followed, according to Palestinian health authorities.

Loyola Marymount senior Maya Golban says she has been reflecting on the lives – and deaths – of so many people since October 7.

“I can’t personally change the politics of the Middle East, but what I can do is honor the people who’ve lost their lives.”

Golban said she’s become considerably more active in Jewish groups on campus over the last year, where she’s sometimes felt on the defensive, having to repeatedly justify her beliefs.

As she enters the High Holy Days, she said she continues to pray for “the peace and safety of everyone in the region: Israeli, Palestinian and Bedouin.”

Students focus on intense spiritual preparation

During the weeks leading up to the High Holy Days, Rabbi Jocee Hudson has been teaching a lunchtime class on the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles. She’s the rabbi at the Hillel Jewish Center, just across the street.

“Welcome everyone. Let’s put our feet on the ground,” Hudson said as students finished the vegan enchiladas Hillel provides, while others snuck in at the last minute. “As we gather, the question for today is ‘What’s on your heart?’”

Hudson opened the class by leading the group of about ten through a centering exercise.

“We root ourselves in presence.” she said, “We root ourselves in the right here right now. As we say the blessing for Torah study.”

Together, the class recited the Hebrew prayer which translates, “Blessed are you, oh Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hallows us and commands us to study the words of Torah.”

Among those taking this class is senior Dylan Julia Cooper.

“Right in the aftermath of October seventh,” she said, “we held a memorial on campus, which was so beautiful. And it was also really hard because people came to protest. And it was really difficult in my grief to hold my friends crying in my arms and know that people were protesting 20 feet away.”

Cooper, who’s majoring in anthropology and theater, said it’s been a year of perseverance and that October 7 coming in the middle of the High Holy Days “serves as a reminder of how much we can endure as a community, as a universe.”

Cooper said he’s used the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah to figure out how to let go of disillusionment over protests.

“My Jewish friends, my Muslim friends, my Palestinian Friends, my Israeli friends,” says Cooper, “I want them all to feel supported and loved by me. And I don’t think that holding on to my anger or holding grudges is a good way to do that.”

Sitting next to Cooper in class was Matan Marder Friedgood, a junior at USC. He described this past year as one on edge.

“I have a friend who’s not Jewish who’s taking a Jewish studies course” he said. ”She goes, ‘Oh, Matan, you’re Jewish!’ And I feel myself tense up. I’m like ‘What is this going to be about? What’s going to happen?”

But in this story, it turns out he was more worried than he needed to be.

“She’s like ‘What’s a Shabbat morning service?’ It’s the most benign question,” he said. “That was the year in a nutshell: ‘You’re Jewish.’ Uh oh.”

But for Marder Friedgood, that intensity has meant the discovery of something about himself that he finds surprising.

“My connection to Judaism has grown stronger,” he said, “because of the pressure that’s been put on it. And my connection to other Jews has grown stronger because of the pressure. And I am much more willing to embrace it publicly.”

Students look for opportunities of ‘Jewish joy’

Marder Friedgood’s been asking himself how he and his community can put aside the fear and apprehension of the past year and welcome the Jewish New Year with sweetness.

“How do we bring back the Jewish Joy?” he wondered. “How do we just reincorporate all the positive — all of what it means to be Jewish, all of the great things, all of the reasons we love it — and hold the sadness and the grief at the same time?”

These are questions many Jews are asking themselves in the lead-up to both the High Holy Days and the October 7th anniversary. They’re questions with no easy answers.

“It is only through experiences of very real grief that I have come to understand the capacity for very real joy,” said Hillel Rabbi Jocee Hudson. “It comes in the context of time, following Oct. 7th where all of us in the Jewish community have experienced deep anguish.”

“As we have seen tens of thousands of Palestinians also killed, we have ongoing anguish,” she said. "And there are students who have deep reactions to that — deep moral outrage.”

That outrage is also why preparing for the High Holy Days this year has been so intense.

“When our hearts are broken open in grief,” Hudson said, “there are two possibilities: One is pulling back. The other is reaching out. And that’s the spiritual work.”

It’s spiritual work that asks a lot of 19 or 20 or 21-year-olds. But it’s spiritual work that college junior Matan Marder Friedgood wants to help his community do together, even on October 7 itself. He and a housemate are planning a vigil on the University of Southern California campus that day.

“We’re both musicians and so we’re trying to uplift the space through creating — I think we have a 10-piece band to try and play Israeli and Jewish music — an atmosphere that is holding all the sadness and holding all the grief and all the anger. And we’re looking toward the future.”

It’s a future – a new year – marked by the hope for peace rather than the carnage of war. Marder Friedgood plans to end the vigil by teaching those gathered to sing in Hebrew a prayer for peace.

It’s the closing line from the Medieval prayer known as the Kaddish. One translation reads, “He who makes peace in the heavens — may He bring peace to us and all the people of Israel. Let us say, 'Amen.'”