Reflections on October 7

October 7 comes around again, and the question is not whether the pain is still there. It is. The question is: What are we doing with it?

Brother, pain does not disappear simply because we refuse to speak about it. We can bury it under work, responsibility, anger, distraction, silence, or the insistence that we are fine. But unaddressed pain has a way of finding another language. It can become impatience. Cynicism. Withdrawal. Rage. Numbness. It can harden the way we speak to the people closest to us and narrow the way we see the world. And there is another danger: we can begin to build an identity around our pain.

What happened hurt us. What happened frightened, enraged, and changed us. But when pain becomes the primary lens through which we understand everyone and everything, it asks too much of us. We begin carrying yesterday’s wound into every new encounter. We become suspicious where we once were curious. Defensive where we once were open. Certain where we once knew how to listen.

Holding onto pain can feel like loyalty. Sometimes letting go can even feel like betrayal—as though healing means that what happened no longer mattered. But letting go is not forgetting. It is not excusing. It is not pretending the wound never existed. Letting go means deciding that the people who hurt us, the events that shattered us, and the memories that haunt us will not be given permanent authority over the people we become.

Pain on the other side of healing is still pain. But it becomes different. It becomes a scar instead of an open wound. A scar remembers. It tells the truth about what happened. But you can touch it without bleeding. Perhaps that is part of our work on this anniversary: not to ask ourselves whether we have stopped hurting, but whether our hurt is still controlling us.

Can our grief deepen our compassion rather than shrink it? Can our anger become responsibility rather than destruction? Can our fear teach us what we value without teaching us to fear everyone? And can we remember October 7 without allowing October 7 to determine every October that follows? We owe that much to those we lost. And perhaps we owe it to ourselves as well.

In Brotherhood,
Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed
Executive Director, FJMC International
Friendship. Judaism. Mentorship. Community.