Over the weekend I read an article which filled me with both profound sadness as well as renewed hope. It also transformed my understanding of recent events, putting them into a context that I had not understood until the very moment the author pointed it out to me, and then, at once, I felt the “aah” of deep connection.

The author of this piece is Yair Agmon, a multi-talented writer, director, and film maker. He is also a columnist. Each week, I meet him on the pages of Makor Rishon, a National Religious Zionist weekly paper, despite the fact that he is a self-confessed atheist. But I don’t class people like recipes: meat, dairy, vegetarian. Whenever I read Yair, I find our minds and our souls are on the same wavelength.

Yair’s column this week started out with a description of a trip in high school to Auschwitz: “I remember standing opposite the crematoria, the train tracks, and the gas chambers with two emotions: On the one hand, I cried, I hurt, I was full of pain and regrets and longing. But on the other, I thought: ‘Wow, such luck this isn’t my story; that this nightmare is behind me. What luck that I and my children will live in a different reality where it isn’t possible to murder Jews with such ease.’”

For Yair, and for many Israelis, and no doubt many Jews who were far removed physically from the Gaza Envelope, October 7 changed all that. “The story collapsed in front of my eyes.” Yair’s sister, who lives in in Moshav Amiozthe in Gaza Envelope, right up to the boundary fence with Gaza, found herself locked helplessly in her bomb shelter with her family: “For two days without food or water. Two days! And no one came to save her,” Agmon writes, doing so, he tells us, “with shaking hands.” She escaped, miraculously, even as neighboring moshavim and army bases were overrun by terrorists. “Dark forces of evil, the Nazis of our day, crossed over the fence and turned our country into a killing pit, murdering and kidnapping soldiers and civilians.

The promise of Zionism, writes Agmon, in which all of us live, had one clear and simple purpose: to let us live as free people in our own land, an independent nation upon which no other nation or terrorist group could impose misery or slavery or death. “This promise allowed me to have children, whom I wouldn’t have brought into a world  where monsters can cross fences and murder children and old people; a world in which the Israel Defense Forces, who are there to defend the Jewish people in the land of Israel, takes two days to rescue my sister.”

And yet, despite it all – all the pain, outrage, and humiliation of having part of the land of Israel taken over by the most evil and degraded of men who raped and murdered and burned our babies in their cradles, and senselessly slaughtered young people at a dance party “at that very time, during those very hours, another story was happening as well.”

Agmon and a close friend decided to gather together amazing stories of heroism that happened on that day as well. Within twenty-four hours of searching out such stories, they came up with 250 amazing tales that Agmon turned into a book: One Day In October cowritten with Oriyah Mevorach. Another book on the same subject is:A War of Heroes by Hadassah Ben Ari. Both are in Hebrew, but let’s hope they will be translated.

“Yes, on the seventh of October the land of Israel fell apart in front of our eyes. The Zionist project failed. The land of the Jews did not succeed in protecting its inhabitants. This much is true. But – and this is a very important but— within that collapse heroes and heroines arose, by the hundreds and thousands” who pressed forward into the maelstrom, volunteering with private initiatives, knowingly endangering their lives to save those of their countrymen. “They had guns. They had ammunition. They had the courage of lions, of partisans, of Israeli…

“The day that the Zionist project was defeated, was also the day we realized it had succeeded. Even when our army fails, and our government is falling apart, there are fearless fighters amongst us who go forward. Our most Jewish day, turned out to be our most Israeli day too.”

Right after I read this column, I read the story of the policemen and women who were on security duty at the Nova festival and who, despite being only a handful and armed only with pistols facing hordes of terrorists armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and RPG’s, were able to direct the 3,000 festival goers to escape routes which saved thousands of lives. Out of the forty policemen and women who served as security guards, only half survived. They fought until they ran out of ammunition, or were wounded or killed, or killed the Hamas degenerates, or captured them as prisoners.

But even now, when they are sought out by thousands of grateful survivors wanting to thank the men and women who found them – huddled and terrified – and helped bring them to safety, they don’t consider themselves heroes. “We were only doing our jobs. And anyhow, I don’t think about how many I saved. Only about how many I couldn’t save.”

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