One of my favorite books—one that did much to shape my understanding of Jewish history and literature—is an anthology with the sobering name The Literature of Destruction. Compiled by David Roskies, a scholar of modern Jewish literature, the work brings together canonical Jewish texts (in both the religious and secular senses of the term) composed in response to national catastrophes, from the book of Lamentations to poems and prose written in the wake of the Shoah. It’s a searing introduction to some of the greatest works of Jewish literature as well as a poignant look into one aspect of the Jewish soul.

October 7 is a wrenching reminder that this canon is not closed, and Roskies has now tried to incorporate it into the story he told in The Literature of Destruction. He begins with the straightforward question of how Jews will name this particular catastrophe:

Calling what happened in Ofakim, Kfar Azza, Nahal Oz, Be’eri, Re’im, and Nir Oz latter-day pogroms served to domesticate the horror, to make it more survivable. As the Jewish people had withstood pogroms in the past, so they would withstand the latest cycle of violence. Then again, if pogroms were now possible in the sovereign state of Israel, it meant that the Zionist revolution had failed to put an end to a history of persecution and powerlessness. And was not the very act of analogy itself a conceptual trap, a form of collective self-delusion that would lead to programmed, ahistorical thinking and prevent the Jews from generating a new set of responses?

What was needed, then, was a name that carried archetypal significance. If sacred time had been upended on October 7th, then the most time-sensitive name for what happened was “Black Shabbat.”

[T]he yoking together of two opposites, “Black” + “Shabbat,” rendered the event both timeless and punctual. It separated Time Before from Time After. Before October 7, Israeli Jews thought and behaved one way. From that Sabbath on, everything changed.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.