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.
Read more on Israel Studies: https://www.academia.edu/117537766/David_G_Roskies_The_Next_Chapter_Israeli_Responses_to_Catastrophe_Israel_Studies_vol_29_no_1_Spring_2024_7_20