"Where were you on October 7th?"

"Where were you on October 7th?"

It's a question that you hear over and over here in Israel. It's a question people ask, morbidly, to residents of the Gaza Envelope. It's a question people ask soldiers, hoping for some heroic story. And it's a question you get asked almost as a means of small talk; what better way to get to know someone than to hear what their experience was of an event that traumatized the nation as a whole?

The answers to the question, of course, vary. "Oh, I was traveling abroad," some people will tell you. "I flew in as soon as I heard what was going on." Or, "I was in Tel Aviv - we spent the day in the bomb shelter." Then there are the worse stories: "I was at the Nova festival." "I was at home in Sderot." "I was serving in the army and got sent into the battlefield." It's a dangerous, personal question to ask, and yet people ask it anyway. So: Where was I on October 7th?

"Leave it unlocked."

I was not at the Nova festival. Unlike my cousins, I was also not in Sderot. I was three months after finishing my mandatory service, so I was not in the military at the time. Instead, I was in a bomb shelter.

Not because of rockets and missiles, though, as opposed to those in the south and in Tel Aviv. Instead, up in Israel's north, I was leading holiday prayer, standing in a bomb shelter simply because that's the space that we were using as a synagogue.  It was a holiday, as well as being Saturday; my family was all together at my parents' house, spending the holiday together normally. That's how it began, at least.

That morning, at around 8:00AM - an hour and a half after the attack started - I got up out of bed and made my way over to the synagogue. We went through the prayers, with myself leading part of them. At one point in the prayers for that holiday, there is "Yizkor" - prayers for those who have passed away. There's a tradition for those who have not lost an immediate family member to leave the synagogue for that prayer, and so that's what I did; I went up the stairs, out of the bomb shelter, into the outside courtyard that we shared with a larger synagogue.

There in the courtyard, at probably around 9:45AM, I heard the first murmurings. Someone mentioned that people who had been praying in synagogue had been suddenly called into emergency reserve duty. There was mention that something had happened in the south, but nobody seemed to know what. There were rockets being fired at Tel Aviv, someone said. Right before those of us who had gone out for Yizkor went back down into the bomb shelter, someone approached us and told us that the mayor of the town had ordered that all bomb shelters in the town remain unlocked - "just in case." The person delivering the message didn't know exactly what was happening either.
Nobody there had a phone turned on. Nobody knew exactly what was happening.

"I don't want to say."

We finished the prayers around 11:00AM, aware that something was happening, but not what, where, or what scale. It was just another rocket attack, people figured - concerning, but not unduly so; we had the Iron Dome, after all, and Israel's handled plenty of rocket attacks in the past. My family started headed home, discussing the rumors but also normal things - I recall mentioning that I had picked the wrong key for singing a section of prayer, and then had trouble hitting the notes. Everyday concerns.

On the way home, we bumped into someone; a man in his eighties, non-religious, who my family is friendly with. He looked worried. Returning our holiday greetings, he then asked, "I don't suppose you've heard what's happening." We confirmed that we had heard that something was going on, but that we didn't know the details. He sighed. "Terrorists broke through the border down by Gaza," he told us. "They've taken over entire towns, and... I don't want to say what they're doing in them. It's a massacre."

The walk home was fairly silent.

And after

That night, as soon as Shabbat and the holiday were over, we opened our devices and saw the news, getting a glimpse for the first time of what the scale was. The tales of what relatives in Sderot were going through was waiting in a groupchat on my mother's phone. I had messages from friends online asking if I was safe. We watched the news as seemingly endless rockets pounded the country, all with the concern that Hezbollah, Hamas's much stronger ally based in Lebanon and Syria - in other words, close to where I was - was going to join in on the action.

And, of course, they did. On Sunday, October 8, the first Hezbollah rockets were launched. And on Tuesday, an alert went out across huge swathes of northern Israel, including for me, that Hezbollah drones and maybe even paragliders, Hamas-style, were crossing over the border. We were instructed to hole up in our safe rooms, close and lock the doors, turn off outside lights, and pretend the house was empty.

We sat in the dark, hearts pounding, holding hammers and kitchen knives, long minutes ticking away. Everything was silent outside. Until eventually, an update finally arrived - it was a false alarm.

Having recently finished my mandatory military service, albeit in a non-combat position, I was expecting to be called into reserve duty at any minute. I sent a note to teammates I had been with who were still in their service, reminding them to stay safe. But the days continued to pass and I still had no call-up orders.

And so, while I waited, I worked on other things. I knew I wanted to pursue an academic degree, but as I was homeschooled my entire life, I needed something that would help my in my applications. I started brushing up on basic math skills in preparation for taking the SAT. In addition, in the online world, I could distract myself from everything going on in the country by focusing on performing social experiments. At the same time, Hezbollah did begin to regularly launch rockets; I could no longer safely travel through the upper Galilee and the rest of the north to places I used to regularly visit and cycle through before the war. 

At the time, for those first few months, nobody expected that this war would last on the timescale of years. A few months and everything would be back to be normal. That, of course, isn't what happened, and I found myself doing several months of training and reserve duty in the first half of 2024 (my commander apparently didn't want to call me in immediately when the war broke out due to just having been released from mandatory service). During my reserve duty, I continued brushing up on my basic educational skills, and I took a day off to go take the SAT, getting an acceptable score. After a few months, they let me off of reserve duty, and I went back to my life - still dodging Hezbollah rockets, though.

Today

It's now March 2025. The war is still ongoing; with a fragile ceasefire in Lebanon, the fall of the al-Assad regime in Syria, a collapsed ceasefire deal in Gaza, Houthi attacks on central Israel while the United States bombs them in Yemen, an uptick in terror attacks (such as attempted bus bombings), and increasing tension in the West Bank, there's a lot going on. I've started at university in central Israel in the meantime, the Houthi missiles helping to spice up day-to-day life. There are still 59 hostages being held in Gaza. Social rifts are flaring up again, as the government attempts to take legally-dubious actions to dismiss top officials, people taking to the streets in protest. Internationally, Israel became a pariah almost immediately, as large segments of the global population immediately set out to support Hamas's attack and to take every opportunity to delegitimize Israel's very existence; and even the democratic world lost all sympathy for Israel only weeks after the war broke out, not helped by actions Israel has taken that even former defense officials have decried as immoral and unnecessary, with morally-problematic tactics.

There's no doubt that the October 7th massacres have changed the face of Israel and the face of the entire Middle East. The Iranian proxies around Israel have been weakened, and more attention than ever is being directed toward a long-term solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a whole. The question is whether Israel will be able to take the lessons learned and the opportunities available to make a lasting change, making sure that October 7 can never happen again, or if we will fall back into old rifts and habits until we revert back to where we were on October 6, 2023. 🎗️