Shabbat the 7^th of October 2023

This is so far from a Shabbat Shalom. Our morning was broken with sirens and booms quickly followed by the cracking boom of Iron Dome. We thought that was frightening but we went into our cosy safe rooms, unlike those on the border with Gaza and all the way up the coastal region to Tel Aviv who suffered a constant battering. We turned on the news and discovered that Hamas operatives, aka terrorists, had brazenly broken through a border control and poured into the southern towns, villages and kibbutzim on a killing spree and worse still, kidnapping soldiers, the elderly, men, women and young children and taking them to Gaza where they are suffering the worst kind of torture.

We were taken unawares; Israel was taken unawares for the first time in 50 years. Sadly, our troops were posted in the wrong places, there were insufficient troops in the South and if we are truly honest, Hamas laid a trap with brilliant precision.

It is believed that if a ship runs aground the Captain is to blame and so it is in war. When Golda understood that she was mistaken in her judgement during the Yom Kippur War she took the blame and resigned. While the current government missed the indications of trouble, so did the Chief of Staff, the Secret Services and the Mossad. Where were our moles within Hamas and why didn’t they know? All questions for the future but right now, politics must be put aside, accusations of failure are irrelevant.

If ever we need our allies it is now before those poor hostages suffer horrors beyond our ken. We need our allies to free the 50 villagers held hostage in the Be’eri. We can’t bring back the 100+ dead, heal the 800-1,000 wounded but maybe, just maybe we can return our Israelis from the hands of the devil.  We need you to make sure that your journalists get the whole truth, that they see the gory, inhuman clips on social media to understand who our enemy is. Write to whoever you can, politicians and journalists alike to ensure honest reporting.

There will be no dancing with the Torah Scrolls tonight; we have nothing to celebrate. We are in deep mourning for those who we lost, for the hundreds in hospital, many in critical condition, and for those who saw horrors that no-one should see.

With love

Sheila