Can progressive coalitions survive rising physical threats

An armed attack on a Belleville synagogue during Kol Nidre shattered the long-held assumption that diaspora communities can entrust their safety entirely to local law enforcement. When bullets hit an officer stationed outside, the boundary between state protection and communal self-defense dissolved in an instant.

I'm Tamar.

And I'm Eli. This is another episode of Tribe & State, a Daily Lion production, where we follow where Israel and the Jewish world are pulling together, and where they are pulling apart. Today we are looking at a shooting at an Ontario synagogue, Orthodox students protesting New York's mayor, the Church of England pulling an interfaith award, Michigan Democrats dividing over an endorsement, a draft exemption showdown in Israel, and a stadium tour thrown into chaos. And then we go deep, two years back, on what the first High Holidays after October seventh did to the oldest prayers of the season.

On the evening of Yom Kippur, a twenty-nine-year-old man armed with a shotgun arrived outside the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville, Ontario. Just after seven o'clock, as about two dozen worshippers were preparing for the Kol Nidre service inside, the gunman opened fire. He shot at an on-duty police officer stationed in an unmarked cruiser outside the building.

What happened to the officer?

He returned fire, and both men were hit, leaving the policeman in critical condition while the shooter later died in the hospital. The congregation actually took cover on the sanctuary floor as bullets pierced the building's stained-glass windows. Luckily, no one inside was injured.

Right. One congregant believes that if the police hadn't been there, and the gunman had managed to get inside, the phrase she uses is it definitely would've been a massacre. That gun battle lasted just two or three minutes. But the attacker still managed to discharge an estimated thirty shots at the building.

Twenty-three of those bullets shattered the sanctuary's fifty-year-old stained glass windows, all while the worshippers hid behind kitchen counters and against the walls. One congregant noted that the people inside had absolutely no weapons, and no way to tackle a man with a shotgun if he had breached the doors. Ontario's Solicitor General concluded that the officer's heroic and quick response likely prevented an unimaginable massacre from occurring.

So an opinion column in The Jerusalem Post points out a major practical issue with the response. They note that while the federal government recently announced seventy-five million dollars for a community security program, that money actually comes with prohibitive administrative hurdles.

Yeah, the program only covers up to seventy percent of the eligible costs for hiring temporary guards. That requires the applicant communities to raise the remaining thirty percent themselves. And a synagogue has to fill out the application, and then wait for a signed agreement, before they can spend a single dollar.

The core argument now is that the state owes its vulnerable Jewish citizens direct, fully funded physical safety, just so they can pray openly in their own country. And the threat environment is escalating rapidly. There were a record-breaking six thousand eight hundred anti-Jewish incidents recorded across Canada in twenty twenty-five.

And official figures from that same year revealed something else. They showed that more than seventy percent of all religion-motivated hate crimes reported to the police targeted Canadian Jews. That's a group that accounts for less than one percent of the national population.

So political leaders are now acknowledging that a system requiring private guards for public prayer is a complete failure of the civic compact. The mayor of Toronto noted that Jewish residents shouldn't need a police presence simply to observe Yom Kippur.

Does the federal government agree?

They do. The Canadian Prime Minister weighed in on this exact point, and he added that Jewish people must be able to practice their faith safely. He said they absolutely deserve to live their Jewish lives proudly, freely, and openly.

And that's exactly where this situation leaves us. If basic freedom of worship requires an armed guard standing at the sanctuary door, the entire debate shifts. It really just becomes a question of who is ultimately responsible for putting one there.

Students from elite Modern Orthodox day schools gathered outside Gracie Mansion in New York City for a morning prayer demonstration. The target was Mayor Zohran Mamdani. His vocal criticism of Israel has drawn fierce opposition from the community. Attendees put on tefillin. The event was billed as a display of Jewish pride ahead of the high holidays. But it quickly became a flashpoint over whether religious schools should mobilize teenagers for direct political confrontation against municipal leaders.

The school leadership and organizers argue public prayer outside the mayoral residence lets students assert their Jewish and Zionist identities. They're insisting on their right to feel safe in New York. SAR Academy's principal explained the gathering was designed to help kids feel proud to express who they are, especially when doing so has become increasingly uncomfortable in the city. And this mobilization follows a long tradition of civic education and Jewish activism.

What does that tradition look like?

Decades ago, these schools brought students to fight for Soviet Jewry, helping two million people emigrate. Today, surging antisemitism and municipal rhetoric targeting Israel require the community to confront city leadership again. With anti-Jewish hate crimes up one hundred and eighty-two percent in the mayor's first month in office, organizers say he must be a mayor for all residents and stop rhetoric making the community feel unsafe. Activist Avi Weiss argues if someone denies the right to a Jewish land and uses words like genocide, the community must take it seriously. With ninety-four percent of the Modern Orthodox community identifying as Zionist, Weiss argues denying the right is antisemitism. Ramaz associate head of school Joshua Lookstein warns others are communicating they have to choose between their Jewishness and Zionism. That pressure has been weighing on him.

Ask the dissenting parents and alumni, and this demonstration looks like a dangerous escalation that needlessly inflames municipal conflict. Over one hundred and eighty people signed a petition urging the schools to cancel the event. They argue targeting the mayor's personal residence destroys any chance of constructive dialogue. By choosing a politically targeted site instead of a neutral setting, organizers threw away the opportunity to engage the administration on shared security concerns.

What do they say about the students being there?

Mobilizing minors for an adult-organized political protest effectively uses teenagers as pawns. Roughly three hundred students were brought to the park. Petition organizers warn presenting children as leading the way is dishonest when they're being brought to an event planned by adults. They argue gathering outside the mayor's residence falsely portrays the Modern Orthodox community as a political monolith opposed to him. Thirty-one current students signed the petition against the rally. That highlights the internal division the event has caused.

The argument over Gracie Mansion is ultimately about how a community secures its future in a hostile moment. It asks whether safety is best guaranteed by projecting unapologetic strength in the streets. Or if turning classrooms into political battlegrounds risks isolating the very students it aims to protect.

The Church of England is dealing with two sudden reversals involving its relationship with the Jewish community and its vetting of foreign conflicts. In London, Lambeth Palace rescinded an interfaith award it had just given to a Pakistani cleric after his past statements came to light. And at the same time, a church in northern England, Leeds Minster, abruptly shut down a memorial exhibition for Gaza.

That closure in Leeds happened after the local Jewish community presented evidence that the display commemorated at least eighteen identified Hamas fighters. It listed thousands of names. The church took down the panels and issued a statement condemning the killing of civilians and taking of hostages on October seventh, two thousand and twenty-three. So the argument now is over how the Anglican church ended up in both situations in the exact same week.

Look, the harshest criticism of the church's governance sees a crisis of moral leadership driven by a dangerous naivety. The interfaith award was handed out on the anniversary of the September eleventh terror attacks, which killed nearly three thousand people. For secular advocates and conservative voices within the church, handing an honour to an extremist on that date is a catastrophic failure of judgment. It's one so severe that it raises questions about whether a church with such poor oversight should retain its constitutional privilege of having twenty-six bishops making laws. That same bureaucratic incompetence was on display in Leeds, where the church failed to carry out the basic checks it promised.

What kind of checks?

Church officials had been warned that twelve names on the wider artwork belonged to terror operatives, but they allowed the exhibition to open anyway. It was left entirely to the local Jewish community to photograph the panels and do the research to prove who was actually listed. The vetting failure at Lambeth Palace also betrayed the very people the award was supposed to champion. The honoured cleric openly supports Pakistan's blasphemy laws, under which twenty Christians were accused this year, with nine sentenced to death or life imprisonment. He was part of a council that declared minimum marriage ages un-Islamic. For rights activists, calling this a victory for interfaith harmony makes a mockery of the phrase. It ignores the reality that a mere accusation of blasphemy in Pakistan can cost someone their life.

But Jewish communal leaders look at the same sequence of events and see something deliberate. In this view, the church under its current leadership is actively pushing a hostile, anti-Israel ideological agenda. These controversies arrived just two months after the church's General Synod voted to hear a theological document that defines the Jewish state as a colonial enterprise built on racism. The archbishop herself spoke in support of that statement in July, establishing a pattern of embracing extreme positions. That's doing severe damage to the church's relationship with British Jews. The exhibition in Leeds displayed ninety panels containing over sixteen thousand names, drawn from a larger project that commemorates more than fifty thousand Palestinian deaths recorded by the Hamas-run health ministry.

How do Jewish representatives view that memorial?

For them, a church publicly memorialising combatants and associating with extremists is consistently picking a side in a distant conflict, allowing its institutions to be hijacked at a time when domestic antisemitism is rising. The choice of who to honour at Lambeth Palace fits the same mold. The cleric who received the award has a long record of attacking Israel's legitimacy and promoting conspiracy theories, claiming that Jews and Christians are using the threat of war with Iran as a pretext to target Pakistan's nuclear power. When Britain knighted Salman Rushdie in two thousand and seven, he responded by praising the mastermind of the September eleventh attacks, arguing that a militant fighting Western forces deserved the highest title for a Muslim warrior. In two thousand and thirteen, he publicly justified suicide bombings against NATO troops in Afghanistan.

But ask the church hierarchy, and the story is about institutions correcting their mistakes the moment the facts became clear. The interfaith award was one of twenty-seven honours presented in September to recognize extraordinary contributions to society. The cleric was chosen specifically for his longstanding support for religious minorities in Pakistan, including his intervention in the two thousand and twelve case of a young Christian girl falsely accused of blasphemy. The church maintains that engaging with people across deeply held differences is a fundamental principle of interfaith dialogue. But when the cleric's previous comments praising terrorism came to light following the ceremony, Lambeth Palace reconsidered the decision.

What did they decide to do?

They formally withdrew the award less than a week later. And that same immediate correction happened in Leeds. Church officials had checked the display before the exhibition opened and confirmed that the dozen names originally flagged as terror fighters were not on it. When the local Jewish council provided new evidence that other known fighters were in fact included, the minster closed the exhibition to the public that same day. The rector apologized for harming the church's relationship with the Jewish community and committed to rebuilding trust.

The Anglican communion is trying to hold together a vast, fractured global membership while navigating the intense domestic politics of the Middle East. What these overlapping controversies test is whether a church built on broad tents and interfaith dialogue can still draw hard lines, and whether its vetting systems can catch up to its theology.

In Michigan, the state's attorney general is finishing an eight-year tenure by endorsing a Democratic Senate nominee who has deeply alienated Jewish voters. Abdul El-Sayed's candidacy has split the electorate over his record on Israel and his past rhetoric regarding antisemitism. On September eighth, a group of local Jewish leaders launched a campaign demanding he accept Israel's existence to earn their votes. But high-profile Jewish Democrats are actively campaigning for him. They argue the stakes of this election override any discomfort with his foreign policy platform.

Look, the case for backing the nominee starts with the sheer danger of the alternative. For the state's top law enforcement officer, the choice isn't easy. But there's simply no choice at all, because voting Republican violates her core values. Polling shows fifty-four percent of Democratic voters are motivated primarily by the need to stop Donald Trump. Against that threat, single-issue disagreements can't dictate the ballot. A retired congressman who spent thirty-six years representing the Detroit suburbs argues the nominee will be a strong advocate for shared domestic goals like healthcare and labor. Defending the historic homeland means little if the planet itself is no longer inhabitable. That makes it necessary to prioritize the needs of the world above narrow self-interest.

What does prioritizing the rest of the world over their own interests actually secure for them?

Institutional power. In a race where a single percentage point separates the candidates, and Jews make up just one point four percent of the electorate, holding out for ideological purity is a luxury voters can't afford. Black Americans have never had a pure choice at the ballot box. They moved to the Democratic Party in nineteen thirty-six. And in nineteen sixty-four they gave Lyndon Johnson about ninety-four percent of their vote, seven years after he had stripped the enforcement out of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen fifty-seven. By staying inside the coalition, voters retain the ability to engage. The nominee himself describes a big tent where members march in lockstep on most issues and debate where they disagree. A national coalition of Jewish Democrats insists his principled commitments align with Jewish values, and his foreign policy views sit much less outside the mainstream than the charged rhetoric suggests.

Right, but the voters drawing red lines look at the same ballot and see a demand to surrender their fundamental identity. For this camp, recognizing Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state is a non-negotiable baseline for support. Eighty-six percent of American Jewish voters describe themselves as pro-Israel, and eighty-seven percent affirm the country's right to exist as the Jewish homeland. A prominent Democratic official says he isn't comfortable voting for the nominee at this point. And the president of the Michigan Board of Rabbis notes the candidate is silent on their right to define their own identities as American Zionists. The nominee still won't say the word Israel, preferring to call it the Holy Land. That rhetorical avoidance sits alongside a record of excusing actual violence.

How does he excuse actual violence?

Six months ago, an attacker rammed a truck loaded with thirty-five gallons of gasoline into a synagogue while one hundred forty children were inside. The nominee responded by saying that hurt people hurt people. A teacher at that synagogue, a lifelong Democrat who agrees with his progressive policies entirely, says she can't support someone who harbors a hatred of Jews and won't keep her family safe. Hundreds of Michigan Jews have now publicly pledged to vote for the Republican instead. Communal self-preservation isn't an expendable bargaining chip for broader political aims. Perceptions of the Democratic Party as pro-Israel dropped twenty-two points since two thousand and eighteen. His callous words and violent tone remain hard to forget. And a source informed of his private remarks confirms he's who he is and won't change his position on Israel at all.

Yeah. The tension in Michigan tests the limits of the traditional political coalition. The question is no longer just which policies a candidate supports. It's whether a community can remain inside a political home that demands it compromise on its own security. The answer will determine how minority groups negotiate their safety in a polarized electorate.

United Torah Judaism has laid down an ultimatum for the next election. They are declaring they will refuse to join any future governing coalition unless a law is passed guaranteeing military draft exemptions for yeshiva students. But at the exact same time, a newly formed faction called the Haredi Public party is advancing a platform that explicitly supports ultra-Orthodox integration into the armed forces. This clash arrives just as legal deferrals expire across the country. It forces a reckoning over whether a cloistered society can step into the national draft without destroying its traditional identity.

For the mainstream ultra-Orthodox political leadership, autonomous Torah study is the spiritual foundation of the Jewish people and must be shielded at all costs. Preserving this world relies on keeping young men immersed in religious texts, with the vast majority remaining in yeshivas from the age of eighteen until their early twenties. This isn't a fringe enterprise. More than a quarter of all Israeli school pupils are currently enrolled in the Haredi education system. For these leaders, the hierarchy of obligations is absolute. It echoes early statehood declarations that if forced to choose, the community will violate the laws of the state before transgressing the laws of Moses.

How do they view the current push to draft those students?

They don't view the push as a genuine solution to military personnel shortages, but as a veiled, existential campaign to dismantle the orthodox way of life. Proposed legislation demanding forty-five hours a week of yeshiva study or immediate conscription is seen as an attack on their autonomy. Because previous legal arrangements expired, ninety thousand ultra-Orthodox youth are technically considered criminals subject to arrest. So the political alliance with the rest of the right is entirely conditional on resolving this crisis. The eighteen ultra-Orthodox members in the government coalition have a singular operating goal to ensure no member of their community is forced to serve in the military.

A completely different vision for the community is taking shape around the newly formed Haredi Public party. They argue that ultra-Orthodox citizens can actively share the burden of national defense without abandoning their religious soul. They point to the fourteen existing Haredi hesder yeshivas, which have spent years successfully combining rigorous military service with ongoing Torah study, strict kosher food, and prayer. The rabbinic leadership behind this new faction describes the initiative as a move from fear to hope, insisting young people shouldn't have to choose between belonging to their community and building a responsible life within the Jewish state. This reform movement argues rapid demographic growth makes the old model of complete insularity physically and economically impossible.

What do the numbers on that growth look like?

The ultra-Orthodox community makes up roughly thirteen percent of the country's population. And demographers project it will climb toward twenty or thirty percent within a generation or two. Earning a living is becoming an emergency. But lacking core secular education means about half the students attempting post-secondary studies drop out from starting too far behind. Reformers blame this stagnation on entrenched traditional politicians, accusing them of sabotaging vocational and military pathways benefiting the wider public. When school administrators consider adopting state curricula, they face violent intimidation from sitting party leaders, including threats to drop a torpedo on their homes. Despite this pressure, the new party is testing electoral waters by placing two women near the top of its Knesset candidate list. That draws about ten percent of ultra-Orthodox voters, or roughly one hundred thousand ballots.

The argument is no longer just between the secular state and a cloistered minority. It's a fracture inside the ultra-Orthodox world itself. It tests whether a society built on strict separation can survive its own massive growth. The answer will determine the makeup of the next coalition, and the future shape of the country's economy and defense.

A massive pop tour is crossing the United States. During a stop at a New Jersey stadium, the opening act used his set to speak in support of Palestinians and declare the phrase Free Palestine. In response, the billionaire owner of a Massachusetts stadium threatened to cancel the tour's upcoming dates there unless the rapper was dropped. The promoter removed the opener, and the fallout was immediate. The remaining supporting acts quit. The headliner scrambled to distance himself. And the tour was thrown into chaos.

The case for the cancellation starts with the venue's basic right to set the terms of its own space. The stadium owner argues that he's spent the last decade focused on the fight against antisemitism and hate of all kinds. In that view, concert venues have a longstanding commitment to providing a welcoming environment for all guests. And that means ensuring that events held at the venue don't provide a platform for hate speech.

What makes this specific performance hate speech?

Anti-defamation groups point out that the rapper has a record of demonizing Israel and Israelis. They say he falsely accuses Israel of genocide and engages in antisemitic rhetoric and behavior. One prominent pop star noted that Jewish families bought tickets for a night of music, only to be confronted with violent screen imagery and a lecture that dismissed their fears. She argued that the performer doesn't get to decide what frightens Jewish audiences. Look, the stadium owner matched the headliner's relief pledge. He committed two million dollars to fight this humanitarian crisis in the Middle East. He stressed that he's spent decades supporting efforts that create opportunity for Palestinians. And he added that standing with the Palestinian people and standing against Hamas, antisemitism, and hate shouldn't be mutually exclusive.

The artists who walked off the tour look at the same cancellation and see a wealthy elite using its leverage to crush vital political dissent. For the rapper, speaking out from a massive stage is a moral obligation. He insists that his criticism of what he called apartheid and genocide in no way is a criticism of you to Jewish listeners. A children's entertainer who matched his charitable donations argued that people with platforms have a moral obligation to use their privilege and platforms to protect children and human rights.

How do the supporting acts view the stadium owner's role in this?

The supporting acts who quit in solidarity argue that wealthy donors shouldn't dictate public discourse. One Irish singer stated he couldn't allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence the rightful voices of those who speak up against Israeli genocide and who highlight the savage murder of children. And the fired rapper gained hundreds of thousands of followers, bringing more attention to the cause. The other opening acts gained about one million six hundred thousand new ones, while the headliner lost fans. For them, that proves that audiences and artists can't be forced into compliance.

The dispute leaves the music industry caught between two irreconcilable demands. A stadium is either a neutral sanctuary where families can escape the news, or it's a platform with a captive audience that demands to be used. The question now is whether any shared cultural space can survive the pressure to pick a side.

Tamar, our deep dive goes back two years, to the first High Holidays after October seventh, and to what that year did to the oldest prayers of the season.

In the autumn of two thousand and twenty-four, the Jewish High Holidays fell exactly on the one-year anniversary of the October seventh massacres. Those attacks happened on the morning of Simchat Torah. That's the single most joyous day of the liturgical year, so the calendar itself became an inescapable site of trauma. Across the country and the broader diaspora, communities faced a profound chronological and theological collision. They had to figure out how to address this grief inside the sacred canon, especially with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel keeping an institutional silence on any formal updates to the official prayer books.

Right, for centuries, that Jewish liturgical canon has operated as a portable homeland for a diasporic people. It's famously resistant to sudden revision. Its core texts were finalized during the rabbinic period and the Middle Ages. And they were guarded fiercely to withstand the theological whims of passing political moments. When historic crises struck, the tragedy was occasionally absorbed into standalone dirges. But the core architectural framework of the prayers stayed immovable. The events of October seventh tested that rigidity. Congregations had to decide whether national trauma belongs inside the fixed text or alongside it.

The emotional centerpiece of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur service is Unetaneh Tokef. That's an ancient liturgical poem that forces the congregation to confront its own mortality. The prayer includes a chilling inventory of human vulnerability. It asks who shall live and who shall die, who by fire and who by water, who by sword and who by beast, who by hunger and who by thirst. For decades, modern congregations read this as a somber theological metaphor. But in the shadow of October seventh, the text suddenly read like a literal, forensic accounting of the atrocities in the Gaza border communities.

People were burned alive in their safe rooms. They were gunned down at a music festival, and taken hostage into subterranean tunnels to face starvation and execution. The history of Unetaneh Tokef perfectly captures the tension between an ancient text and present tragedy. Popular folklore attributed the prayer to Rabbi Amnon of Mainz. He was an eleventh-century figure killed for his faith. The thirteenth-century book Or Zarua recorded this legend. It copied the story from earlier writings and claimed Amnon composed the poem while dying of torture after refusing the local bishop's demand to convert to Christianity.

That story cemented the text into the Ashkenazi liturgy. But academic research and fragments discovered in the Cairo Genizah prove it was composed centuries earlier. Scholars note the poem was likely written by an early liturgical poet like Yannai in the sixth or seventh century, over in Byzantine Palestine. There's no factual basis showing that an individual named Rabbi Amnon even existed in the eleventh century. And the name Amnon wasn't even used among German Jews at that time, appearing only sporadically in Italy.

That revelation shows the fixed canon is actually a living document. Subsequent generations systematically re-anchor it to their own immediate catastrophes. Following the Holocaust, the prayer was mapped onto the gas chambers. It was preserved by survivors who risked their lives to retain the text. A meditation in JNS Opinion even maps the prayer's themes of arbitrary life and death onto the September eleventh attacks. It uses the liturgy to frame the destruction of the World Trade Center. It describes the victims buried in the rubble who were thirsting for life, the heroic passengers who fought back, and the emergency responders who climbed into the towers. That argument reflects on how mere seconds and arbitrary circumstances determined who survived and who died.

The natural historical comparison within Israel for a holiday shattered by war is nineteen seventy-three. That's when the Yom Kippur War devastated Israeli society. The trauma fundamentally altered the emotional tenor of the High Holidays. But it didn't explicitly rewrite the words of the printed prayer book. Instead, the primary liturgical legacy of that war was musical. Kibbutz Beit HaShita lost eleven of its members in the fighting. That transformed their view of the day into a memorial tied to Jewish communal judgement.

In nineteen ninety, the secular composer Yair Rosenblum wrote a haunting, mournful melody for Unetaneh Tokef specifically for the kibbutz. The poem's profound dread of divine judgement and human insignificance before God has continued to exert cultural influence. It even inspired Leonard Cohen's famous song Who by Fire after he performed for soldiers at the front lines. The kibbutz choir sang Rosenblum's melody with immense emotion and power. This musical intervention absorbed national grief into Israeli civil religion. It allowed the secular kibbutz movement to embrace a religious text without altering a single word of the printed canon.

Fifty years later, the response to the massacres goes far beyond musical interpretation. The trauma of two thousand and twenty-three was highly intimate. It was civilian, and it involved mass kidnappings. That led communities to actively interrogate whether the ancient words are sufficient to carry the weight of modern grief. What followed that first autumn suggests the canon belongs to whoever is willing to carry it through the fire. The liturgy remains alive not because it's perfectly preserved behind glass. It lives because it's continually shattered, argued over, and carefully stitched back together by the people who must live under its weight. And if the printed text of the High Holidays remains locked, the question turns to how religious authorities handled the summer fast of Tisha B'Av, a day explicitly designed for mourning.

The initial testing ground for wartime liturgical change arrived months before the autumn festivals. It happened during Tisha B'Av in the summer of two thousand twenty-four. The fast day commemorates the destruction of both Temples. And it centers on reciting poetic lamentations called kinot. Most synagogues eventually incorporated a kinah commemorating the Holocaust. But there remains a general reluctance to introduce contemporary prayers. The question of whether to write entirely new lamentations for the October massacres forced a theological crisis out into the open. The response split sharply along sectarian lines. It exposed a deep fracture over who actually holds the authority to draft sacred text today.

One side of that fracture looked at the destruction in the south and broadly embraced the necessity of authoring new kinot. That is the Religious Zionist and Modern Orthodox leadership. For decades, most of Israeli society felt secure. They knew there was no Temple but weren't particularly bothered by its absence. Rabbi David Stav is the chairman of the rabbinical group Tzohar. He pointed out that religious Zionists historically struggled to connect organically to the abstract loss of a Temple destroyed two millennia ago. October changed that instantly. It made the existential vulnerability described in the ancient texts deeply and painfully intuitive for Israelis. Stav argued that the sheer proportions of the catastrophe demanded a formal response. Because nothing similar had occurred since the Holocaust.

To bridge that gap, Tzohar actively disseminated a bilingual companion text to congregations. They placed the recent atrocities directly alongside the destruction of Jerusalem. The booklet featured an original lament for Kibbutz Be'eri written by an Israeli poet. The poem anchors the massacre in the geography of the western Negev. It concludes with the line, let us water Be'eri from the well of our tears. The text also drew harrowing historical parallels. It compared Talmudic accounts of Roman violence against women to a rape crisis center report documenting terrorists dragging women by their hair. Tzohar printed over one hundred thousand Hebrew copies for Israeli synagogues. And more than fifty Diaspora Orthodox communities adopted the text for their own services.

Other prominent figures in the religious nationalist camp took similar steps to weave the current war into the historical canon. The chief rabbi of Gush Etzion penned an original, complex poetic kinah. It balances the profound grief over the massacre and the hostages with a declaration of national strength. The elegy relies heavily on biblical motifs. It adapts a verse about the world filling with chaos by adding a single letter to create a direct wordplay on Hamas. The prayer was designed to remind the congregation that while they're crying and worried, they remain in a state of redemption and they're not weak. For those writing these new texts, expressing the tragedy through kinot means borrowing and shaping the exact language previously used to describe the Crusades, pogroms, and the Holocaust.

The traditionalist and Haredi leadership looked at the exact same catastrophe and deeply resisted composing new liturgy. Their refusal isn't a denial of the trauma. It's a theological insistence that the canon is essentially closed. They maintain that contemporary rabbis simply lack the spiritual authority and the clarity of the ancient sages to draft sacred text. This caution is rooted in a long-standing Orthodox reluctance to alter the prayer book. It echoes Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, who strongly objected to the idea of contemporaries writing original prayers. Soloveitchik argued that no living person possesses the indispensable qualities required to author new liturgy.

For this camp, the ancient words are seen as universally applicable. They're capable of containing the grief of every generation equally. That strict boundary governed how centrist Orthodox institutions approached the summer fast.

Rabbi Moshe Hauer is the former executive vice president of the Orthodox Union. He was asked to provide a response for those less familiar with the nuances of Jewish thought and practice. He refused to compose an entirely original prayer. He maintained the traditionalist view that the spiritual stature required for such a task no longer exists. Instead, Hauer chose to adapt an existing text. He selected Kinah twenty-five, an eleventh-century dirge. He argued that while standard prayer was canonized and closed early on, the kinot offer slightly more leeway for adaptation. Provided the core structure remains anchored in the words of the ancients. By working within the existing architecture of the canon, Hauer modified roughly a third of the medieval text to frame the modern tragedy. He incorporated the contemporary demonization of the Jewish people and the accusations of indiscriminate bombing into the prayer. He treated them as a profound source of Tisha B'Av pain. For the traditionalist camp, rolling in generations of tragedy isn't meant to depress the community. Instead, they argue that remembering historical catastrophes provides a necessary context. It helps the congregation understand that they've been down these roads before. The ancient words are trusted to carry the weight of the present. They don't require modern authors to presume they can match the spiritual clarity of the sages.

When faced with a day explicitly designed for communal weeping, half the religious world eagerly wrote new lamentations while the other half insisted the ancient texts were sufficient. But Tisha B'Av was only a test run for a much harder theological collision. The leadership split over how to add grief to a fast day. And the autumn calendar forced them to decide what to do on Simchat Torah, where Jewish law strictly forbids public mourning entirely.

That gridlock over Tisha B'Av set the stage for a much sharper collision on Simchat Torah. It forced local communities to invent Jewish legal workarounds to mourn on a day of mandatory joy. Because the commercial prayer book duopoly of Koren and ArtScroll didn't alter their core plates for the year, the official printed text offered no guidance for a congregation trying to hold both celebration and devastation. So wartime liturgy became thoroughly decentralized. It was negotiated congregation by congregation across the country and the diaspora.

Right, pluralistic and liberal institutions bypassed the central publishing houses entirely. They channeled their revisions into localized supplements instead. The Academy for Jewish Religion published a widely circulated volume titled These Holy Days, a High Holy Days Supplement After October Seventh. Inside these extra texts, the traditional boundary of universalist prayer was shattered to make room for the immediate reality of the war. One rabbi rewrote the traditional Rosh Hashanah table blessing over fruit to insert the hostages directly into the text. He explicitly named infant Kfir, Ariel, Shari, and Yarden Bibas. By naming specific people, the text put the ancient symbolism of the holiday back into the continuum of modern vulnerability.

Yeah, and another approach to adding material focused entirely away from the printed page. It focused on the physical rituals performed in the home. One educational organization revived a medieval Ashkenazi custom of dipping candle wicks that had been measured against graves. They directed worshippers to light these memorial candles before the festive holiday lights on every Shabbat and festival in the month of Tishrei. It physically altered the emotional experience of the month before the congregants even stepped foot inside a synagogue.

Then the calendar reached Simchat Torah itself. And the requirement to celebrate forced communities intimately touched by the violence into a complete halt. Jerusalem's Kehillat Hakhel is the home synagogue of slain hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and they cancelled all dancing. They replaced the mandatory celebratory dances entirely with the recitation of Psalms and Yizkor memorial prayers. For these bereaved congregations, the joy of the holiday was deemed utterly unrecoverable for the year. The core ritual of the festival was simply erased. It was replaced with the mechanics of grief, subverting the traditional joy of the day to acknowledge the reality of the missing.

For the secular kibbutzim in the western Negev, the crisis ran so deep that Rabbi Yael Vurgan proposed transforming the holiday entirely. She suggested renaming the festival Sichat HaTorah. That turns it into a conversation about the Torah rather than a joyous celebration of it. Because forcing secular kibbutz members to dance with a scroll already felt artificial in peacetime. Doing so after their populations were decimated felt like an agonizing gesture. She argued that the word joy itself had become deeply offensive to the survivors. And she said the community needed to engage in a critical study of the text instead.

I mean, this search for meaning outside the traditional framework reflects a broader secular awakening in the aftermath of the massacres. Writing in The Jerusalem Post, one secular resident evacuated from Kibbutz Nirim described how she immediately googled Birkat Hagomel upon reaching safety in Eilat. She noted that the terrorists had targeted her for her Jewishness. And her instinct was to find the traditional blessing for surviving a life-threatening event. Her action reflects a broader trend of secular Israelis independently reclaiming traditional blessings outside the state religious establishment. The trauma breached the secular and religious divide. It prompted a search for an ancient vocabulary to describe modern horrors.

A middle-ground approach sought to retain the structure of the dances while breaking their spirit of unalloyed joy. Educational groups and scholars guided communities to incorporate moments of complete silence into the seven hakafot. At the Ohr HaChaim synagogue in Jaffa, the dancing began with soft songs that gradually grew louder. But the final, seventh dance took place in absolute silence. That same congregation also inserted a Tisha B'Av lament into the traditional holiday Prayer for Rain. By bringing a dirge meant for a fast day directly into the autumn festival, they boldly altered the emotional arc of the service.

Look, the most widespread response to the dilemma opted to preserve the joyful dance while altering the ritual object itself. World Mizrachi spearheaded a strategy that commissioned sixteen hundred identical Torah covers for synagogues across thirty-two countries. Each mantle bore an Israeli flag, a verse from Ecclesiastes, and the embroidered name of a victim or fallen soldier. Sinai Temple in Los Angeles commissioned these mantles specifically to honor deceased hostage Amiram Cooper and victim Niv Raviv. This allowed communities across the diaspora to physically hold the memory of the fallen while participating in the global observance of the holiday.

By covering the Torah in a memorial garment, the physical act of dancing with the scroll fulfilled the strict legal requirement of the holiday. But it ensured the room was anchored in the memory of the victims. It allowed Orthodox and traditional communities to complete the joyful circuits without altering the ancient words or breaking Jewish law. The words spoken and the actions performed remained identical to centuries past. But the object held changed the entire emotional tone of the room. It was a masterful workaround of the canon. It let the community embrace the dead while still clutching the text.

These localized interventions drastically altered the emotional experience of the congregation without waiting for official consensus. The decisions made by synagogue boards, pluralistic academies, Haredi leadership, and secular kibbutzim reveal a permanent shift. The center of spiritual authority in the Jewish world has fragmented. What remains to be seen is what this decentralized, grassroots rewriting of the holiday cycle means for the future of Israeli civil religion and rabbinic authority.

What the liturgical response to October seventh ultimately reveals is that the sacred canon is no longer governed by a centralized rabbinate or locked inside fixed publishing plates.

Instead, the authority to shape Jewish memory has migrated outward to local communities, pluralistic editors, and secular kibbutzniks who are actively reclaiming ancient tradition on their own terms.

The real test taking place in these sanctuaries is whether a shared theological framework can survive when its core texts are being pulled apart and reassembled in real time.

And what would count as an answer is whether these decentralized prayers and legal workarounds will fade as emergency measures, or if they have permanently rewritten the boundaries of sacred ritual.

The texts carried through this war will not return to where they were kept before, because the people holding them have decided those words are now theirs.

That's Tribe & State, a Daily Lion production. Don't forget to tune in to the other Daily Lion shows: Sixty One, Crosswinds, and All Fronts. Wherever this finds you, have a good week, and see you next Thursday.