I entered Kissufim with my military reserve unit two years ago to scenes of carnage - blood smeared on walls, terrorist bodies littering the streets, the miasma of rotting flesh clinging to every corner of the kibbutz.
But one of the sights that I have continued to digest until the second anniversary of the October 7 Massacre was the sukkahs. Filled with fruit decorations and the drawings of children, booth tarp walls and frond ceilings fluttered weakly in the wind blown from the Gaza coast.
During the holiday, they would have been filled with festive meals and visits from neighbors, but the silence that occupied the booths made the town seem more desolate than the abandoned homes shredded by shrapnel and bullets.
A sukkah is meant to be a temporary structure to celebrate the holiday of Sukkot, removed after Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.
Sukkahs were left standing
However, they remained as tents of mourning, lingering long after they were supposed to be stowed away. Like so many things early in the war, the booths were left to stand - they weren't a priority as we cleared houses, restored power and water, and secured the territory under mortar bombardment. The sukkahs would stay until the opportunity to store them away, whenever that would be.
Two years later, the demands of survival remain the focus: The hostages, Hamas's defeat, and rising antisemitism abroad.
What was supposed to be just one dark day lingers as sure as the sukkahs in Kissufim. The Jewish people are still inside October 7, the fronds rotting above and the walls stifling. The trauma is ongoing, though the original injury was so long ago. So long ago, but still a fresh wound.
October 7 was more than a day
For many, it seems as though October 7 was yesterday, yet it festers as if it were left untreated for a lifetime. Just yesterday I entered Kissufim to clear it of terrorists, and lost two years of my life. All of a sudden, my hair is grey and my hearing weak, but I never had the time to age. The longest day became the longest week, and then the longest year.
Every day is October 7 when the blades that split apart our flesh remain embedded inside. Two years later, there are still hostages seized by Gazan terrorist groups languishing in captivity. Their families live in a liminal state, caught between the moment of their loved one's capture and the hope for their release. The yellow ribbons decorate every corner of the country, a ubiquitous reminder that has become as much a symbol of the nation as the flag.
For those hostages who have been released, they speak of a kinship with those still held in captivity. They have shared in interview after interview how they cannot breathe, still holding their breath until the ordeal is finally over, and the last pieces of themselves held in Gaza tunnels will be freed.
When we moved to Reem, our company provided security to small, tense funerals under the spectre of rocket fire.
No time for proper mourning in a warzone. The entire country is still at war, besieged at every angle. The war has progressed, and our enemies have staggered. Yet in our victory, it is uncertain if we honored those burned alive, mutilated, murdered, and raped.
Endless tributes are made to their memory, but with so many lost at once, names are lost among one another. Each one deserves to be remembered, deserves justice.
Still on guard for future victims
Many of the key perpetrators have met their just fate. Yet when the hand that plunged the knife into the Israeli body still reaches for the knife, it is difficult to relax enough to lower oneself to sit on the floor and mourn. As long as Hamas and its ilk say that they would revisit the moment of the pogrom again and again, it is difficult to pay tribute to the victims of the past.
We are still on guard for future victims. As my platoon patrolled the site of the Nova Festival just a week after the Massacre, our minds were toward weapon caches, hidden terrorists, and booby-traps. There wasn't much time to think about the bodies that had all been removed, the empty tents and belongings that remained.
Many soldiers fell defending Kissufim. In every town we went to, there had been losses.
We were the first unit to be stationed at the Nahal Oz outpost. We watched as the cleaning crews came in to wash away the blood and gore. Then the families of fallen soldiers came, in desperate search for the faint memories that could write the last sentence in their stories.
Yet the story continues, as their battles were part of an ongoing war. The families place stickers bearing fallen soldiers at bus stops, at city corners, desperately hoping to keep their names alive for just a little longer, until the question of their sacrifice can be answered. For the families of the fallen, and the thousands of warriors who have lost limb and sense in battle, the phantom pain of whether their sacrifice was worthwhile flares with every ceasefire proposal, every negotiation announcement, every operation commenced.
The question of sacrifice can only be answered when the war is over, but tomorrow seems just as likely to be October 7 as the day before.
October 7 was not confined to Israel. The bodies were still warm when Diaspora Jews saw their neighbors take to the streets in celebration and lust for more blood.
Jews turned into enemies
The masks came off that day, and though most were quickly returned when activists sobered from the momentary taste of victory, it became impossible for Diaspora Jews to forget what they saw, to ignore every time the mask slipped again.
Though they marched alongside them for other causes, though they broke bread together, worked together, when the time came, Jews were turned into the enemy.
For Diaspora Jews, the knife was slid into their back, and there it remains. There is no escape from the constant reminder of October 7 when it is ever-present at schools and workplaces, when those chanting "long live October 7" or "globalize the intifada" invade the streets.
At every turn, Diaspora Jews are excluded and ostracized from society unless they turn on their brethren.
In a pincer movement from the far-right and far-left, everything about their identity is questioned - their religion is evil, their nation a lie, and their homeland the locus and scapegoat of every ideological ill.
At least in Israel, we can still be Jews, but in the Diaspora wearing a kippah, a star of David, tzitzit, marks you as a target.
In a slow-motion October 7, Diaspora Jews are hounded, and more attacks like the Wednesday Manchester synagogue attack are foiled every week. Every holiday close comes with the threat of another atrocity revealed.
Synagogues and community centers have been vandalized, firebombed, and besieged by protesters wearing the masks of righteousness. It is impossible to heal when you have no safe place for respite, and you cannot be safe when you are so utterly alone.
When Diaspora Jews are angered or denounce their hounding, the swastikas spray-painted on their synagogues, or the beatings on the street, they are met with empty platitudes at best. More commonly, they are told their pain is inconsequential.
The suffering of Israelis or Diaspora Jews is incomparable to that of the Palestinians living in the crossfire of Hamas and the IDF; they're told by the entitled and privileged who dabble in revolution as a luxury, who demand every heart bleed for every woe and malady to befall them.
Only Jews are told to suffer in silence because others oceans away suffer more. For their friends, sympathy; for their enemies, suffering is always relative. It is only one side that offers a bridge of empathy, acknowledging the pain of Palestinians living in a battlefield. Still, it has never crossed the other way to accept the suffering of Jews and Israelis.
Others lie, saying that the suffering was self-inflicted, creating alternate realities that drive all to madness. They gleefully try to rewrite the events that left the wound on Jewry's body, and though it aches and bleeds, we're told that it was never there.
Jews bear the wound, desperate to have their experience acknowledged so as to affirm their sanity in a world gone mad, but acknowledging Jewish suffering is treated as ground ceded in a battle. When it suits such people, then October 7 was a necessary means toward a just end, to right a grocery list of grievances whose debt the entire world couldn't pay.
Those murdered, mutilated, or beaten were settlers, soldiers, or Israeli. No matter what, there is always another justification for the abuse of Jews. When the abuse is denied, and the victim devotes all their effort to maintain the truth, it is impossible to fully grasp what one has endured. The issue is the same when the pain is belittled because it is inconvenient to the war effort. While there are some righteous among the nations, by and large, the suffering of Jews is a Jewish concern.
It is impossible to make those who deny, justify, or diminish the ongoing trauma of October 7 understand why the wounds go so deep. They don't care that in Israel, everyone knows someone who was killed, or maimed, or has one degree of separation from those taken hostage.
Israel is a small country, and it is impossible not to have been impacted by the pogrom even in some small way.
Every day, the impact seeps deeper as October 7 continues to unfold. The Diaspora is not disconnected. Israel is smaller than the Jewish nation at large, but not by much. The ties that bind have become ties of loss for a great number of Diaspora Jews. Family, friends, colleagues; everyone has an October 7 story that no one hears.
I don't know when the Sukkahs were removed in Kissufim, but it had to have happened eventually, when the site was relatively secure and the residents returned home. They were temporary after all, but their end date had become uncertain.
In war, nothing is certain except for uncertainty, according to the common refrain bandied about in my reserve company. The Jewish people are still at war, and so the right time to address the trauma is unclear. When reminders are constant, when there is no time to mourn properly, when the merit of sacrifice is in question, when you are hounded and then gaslit about the persecution, then the point at which one can move on becomes obscured.
It is uncertain when October 7 will end, but that day is not today. It is still October 7.