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Later this week, a week which is already deeply suffused with memory in Israel, we will meet Dr. Renana Keydar, the visionary behind Edut 710 (“Testimony 710), to hear how she and her colleagues are working to preserve the memory of the unthinkable, on behalf of an entire nation.

That will be Thursday. In the meantime, here’s a brief introduction to Edut 710.

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Does anyone really listen to announcements at shul? I wouldn’t really know, because I’m usually out the door by the time the person giving them gets to the podium.

This past Shabbat morning, though, I was too busy chatting with a friend (for the record, the service was over, so this is no reflection on the depth of my piety 😌) to get out before announcements—so I ended up hearing them. The main announcement was that next week, on Simchat Torah, there would also be an early minyan.

In this new world of ours, nothing is innocuous.

I looked around, and everyone had stopped. No one was talking, no one was joking. For a second or two, it was pretty silent. I imagine that everyone was thinking precisely the same thing that I was: Wow, an early minyan on Simchat Torah, just like there used to be — before.

Before the world as it was ended. Before the country we live in stopped existing, and something else, very different, emerged in its place. Before the cosmos changed for the Jewish people, as it has time and time again, century after century.

An early minyan? And maybe hostages out? A normal world once again?

***

Last year, we didn’t have an early service on Simchat Torah. The decision had been made that given the catastrophic year that had preceded, and the horrific losses in our own community, we weren’t going to split up. Everyone would be together.

There was no way anyone was going to sing. No one was going to want to dance. But tradition still says that you have to do those seven hakafot (carrying the Torahs around, usually accompanied by dancing and singing with Torah scrolls). So no one sang. No one danced. We walked. Hundreds of people. Slowly, silently, carrying Torahs, hakafah after hakafah.

It was probably the eeriest, most surreal moment I’d ever seen in a shul.

***

Actually, no. Maybe not.

Because there was also the year before.

***

They were faint booms at first.

It was a characteristically crisp Jerusalem fall morning, and like we’ve been doing, weather permitting, ever since Covid, we were sitting outside in the courtyard of the community center that houses our minyan. Our early minyan, our regular place.

Shortly after we’d gotten started, you could see people wrinkling their brows. We all heard the bumps, the booms. Perhaps some rolling thunder far away? But that wasn’t it; it was the Middle East in October—there’s never thunder here in October. An engine backfiring? No, but something like that?

It kind of sounded like tank fire (everyone who’s lived here long enough knows what tank fire sounds like), but it obviously wasn’t that. This was south Jerusalem’s Bakka neighborhood, quaint and well-kept. There had been no battles here since 1948, during Israel’s War of Independence, when the now-paved streets were an embroiled borderline with the adjacent Arab villages. But that was three quarters of a century ago. The city had grown so far and so fast that we were now nowhere near its edge.

As the booms persisted and intensified people began to look at each other quizzically. For some reason, it was Aaron, who caught my eye, and we looked at each other. A half-smile, a vague shrug. As if to say, “Not sure what that is. It’s really kind of strange. But … whatever.”

Months before, as winter turned spring, Israel had been ripping itself to shreds. Israel’s “normal” internal issues—ultra-Orthodox draft dodging, increasing resentment between the religious and secular, cost of living and bottomless government corruption—seemed to take a relative hiatus in the face of a fresh challenge to our still young country: its democracy. The government had proposed a radical overhaul of the judicial system which would effectively defang any meaningful authority for the Supreme Court, which, many of us believed, would essentially end Israel’s democracy.

What resulted was the longest protest movement in the history of the western world. Per capita—with millions of protesters in a country of barely ten million people—it also quickly became the largest protest movement in modern history. Tech billionaires threatened to move their companies’ headquarters. Doctors said they’d leave and find work elsewhere. IDF reservist fighter pilots and cyberwarfare experts pledged to not return to the army should the reform go through. Many of the pilots stopped training, a “luxury” that many social leaders warned we could ill afford in our neighborhood.

But the country was being taken from us, many believed; why would a person risk their life in the cockpit of a plane for a country in which their grandchildren might not be able to vote? The rhetoric intensified, as did hostility between protesters and police on the streets. As it all got increasingly frightening, Israeli public intellectuals, judicial experts, and former political figures had warned that Israel was headed to civil war. After all, Israel had been there before. In July 1948, a small civil war had broken out in the “Altalena incident,” but it was quickly quelled. In 1995, similarly toxic rhetoric ended only when Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin lay dead. We’d been there before. Was that where we were headed once again?

Was it going to be us—and not the enemies who surround us—who would destroy our country?

Benny Gantz, a former IDF Chief of Staff and now a leader of the opposition, asked, “When will we stop? When blood is spilled? A civil war is coming, and the coalition is running toward it with its eyes wide shut.” Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned, “This is a serious threat… It’s never happened before and we are going into a civil war now.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who struggled to stay above the political fray so he could craft a compromise, could not have been more explicit: “Those who think that a real civil war, with lives lost, is a line we will not cross, have no idea. Precisely now, 75 years into Israel’s existence, the abyss is at our fingertips.”

But it wasn’t only the internal divide that was a clear and present danger. The internal divide, some said, had also heightened the threat from the outside. Ari Shavit, one of the grand statesmen of Israeli journalism, said that it wasn’t only civil war we ought to be worried about. We needed to fear attack from the outside: “Former chiefs of staff are warning that Israel’s strategic situation is more serious than it has been since the fall of 1973,” a reference to the Yom Kippur War. “Why? Because the intensification of the radical axis in recent years and the internal disintegration of Israel in recent months have created in our enemies the feeling that the gates of heaven have opened for them. Their time has come.”

The warnings—both of internal violence and attack from the outside—went unheeded. On July 24, 2023, the Knesset passed the first part of the judicial reform package, and struck down the “Reasonableness Standard” by a vote of 64-0 (the opposition, to signal its distress, left the plenum and cast no opposing votes). This standard, the ability for judges to adjudicate decisions based on their ‘reasonableness’, was perhaps the least damaging of the proposed changes. However, the government’s apparent lack of concern that the country stood on the precipice—as evidenced by its pressing forward with the reform—convinced many Israelis that it would continue with more dangerous aspects of the overhaul, despite the pleas of millions of Israelis that it stop.

On the Jewish calendar, July 24, 2023—the day the Knesset began the implementation of judicial reform—corresponded to the sixth day of the month of Av. Three days later, Israelis gat