The suddenness of the most recent assault on the Jewish state, as well as its date, has prompted numerous comparisons to the Yom Kippur War. That conflict brough about much political and strategic reconsideration among Israelis. For Religious Zionists, still filled with the messianic hopes inspired by the Six-Day War, it also raised some serious theological questions.
A few weeks after the war ended, Rabbi Yehuda Amital (1924–2010), the head of the prestigious Har Etzion yeshiva and a leading Religious Zionist thinker, delivered a discourse to his students about the theological implications of Israel’s near-defeat, which was soon thereafter published in a Hebrew journal and has recently been rendered into English by Ramon Widmonte. A native of Romania and a Holocaust survivor, Amital fought in Israel’s War of Independence. In this essay, he urges his disciples to search for the hand of God in historic events, and to avoid an attitude of recrimination:
According to what is happening now, it is clear that we are in the stages of the redemption brought about through suffering; however, the possibility that the redemption could come in another way draws us into a halakhic obligation—a positive commandment that is a function of our present time. That is, the obligation of crying out, described by Maimonides [in his code]. . . .
This fact—that the redemption could come without suffering, but that it is coming [currently] accompanied by suffering—obligates us in the positive commandment of crying out to God, of introspection, of reflection on our deeds, and knowing that God expects us to repent. . . . What is demanded is our own repentance; not that of others.
Amital also recounts a moving story that he heard from a fellow rabbi:
[The rabbi] had to inform a certain family that their son had fallen in battle. After about half an hour, the bereaved father said, “I survived the Shoah; in it, I lost a wife and five children who did not even merit a Jewish burial. My son now merited to be born in the Land of Israel, to live in it, to learn in it, to give his life on its behalf, and to be buried with a Jewish burial. Despite everything, there is some progress.”
I would not say it is only “some progress”; indeed, I testify that in my youth, when we were caught in the thick of the Shoah, our sweetest dream was that if it was decreed upon us to [one day] be killed, that at least we should fall in a war for the Land of Israel.
Read more on Tradition: https://traditiononline.org/towards-the-meaning-of-the-yom-kippur-war/