Nine months have passed since I last wrote a piece for TOI. A nine month pause in creating, a nine month pause for advocacy for the hostages, for anguish and angst. During these nine months I have found myself, like so many, paralyzed from writing, from imagining, what the day after October 7th might look like. Each time I put finger to keyboard, I contemplated how stale the piece might read “if only… something happened” between publishing and the next day.
Yet it is not only nine months of a pause on writing. It has been a pause on so much, at least for our community here at Midway Jewish Center. On October 7th, our congregational member, one of our local heroes, Omer Neutra, was kidnapped while on duty protecting Israel on its Southern border. Our rabbi has spent endless hours leading everyone in our community, in our synagogue and beyond, in the efforts to support the Neutra family, support the families of all the hostages and support their return home.
Nine months in, and we are asking ourselves, how do we remain passionately laser focused on this effort, on this ultimate mitzvah of pidyon shevuyim, redeeming the captives, and at the same time, release ourselves from some paralysis to look at the world around us that continues to grow and develop and create.
Looking back at the work we were doing through October 6th, I found myself reflecting upon the work on Artificial Intelligence which had been our foci for a year of education and programming. With a generous gift from Sinai and Synapses, we had hosted lectures, adult education sessions, teen education sessions and a parent class, all on the topic of AI in our lives. How fortuitous we spent the time immersed in contemplating the blessings of AI during the previous year. As the events and implications of October 7th unfolded, we found ourselves in so many spaces relying on the goodness of AI to help us get through and organize to survive the upheaval.
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