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 Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.