Why do we refer to last year’s attack by Hamas as Oct. 7? That date is irrelevant. Hamas did not attack because it was Oct. 7. They attacked precisely because it was our doubly holy day. They attacked us on our Shabbat. They attacked our festival of Simchat Torah — a holiday whose name means the Joy of Torah. And by doing so, they also attacked our Torah.
I toured Cairo in 1982, on an Israeli tour, after the Egypt-Israel peace treaty opened up Israeli tourism. My hotel was on the west side of the Nile, near the 6th of October Bridge. It took me a while to figure out that its name refers to Oct. 6, 1973, the day the Egyptian military crossed the Suez Canal, sparking the conflict Jews now call the Yom Kippur War.
I was surprised to find out that in Egypt, the war I knew as the Yom Kippur War was called either the Ramadan War or the October War. For Jews, the Yom Kippur War began on the 10th of Tishrei, but it was the 10th of Ramadan for Muslims.
Jews never refer to the Yom Kippur War as the October War, nor is Oct. 6 remembered by Jews anywhere as a significant date. So why do we always refer to the war that was started by Hamas’ inhuman attack on Oct. 7, 2023 as anything to do with the seventh day of October?
Instead, we should call it the Simchat Torah War.
Oct. 6, 1973 was a Saturday — a Shabbat.
Oct. 7, 2023 was also Shabbat. In Israel they now call this day haShabbat haSh’chorah — the Black Shabbat.
Both attacks were intended to insult our weekly holy day as well as an annual festival.
According to the New York Times’ report on the secret minutes of 10 meetings among Hamas’ leaders, this attack had been planned for over two years, and they debated whether to conduct it on either Yom Kippur or Simchat Torah.
In other words, it was not enough to create a day of tragedy; Hamas wanted also to taint forever our sacred observances, just like Israel’s antagonists did in 1973. For this reason, many will prefer to observe the secular date of Oct 7 rather than spoil the joy of Simchat Torah.
But many of us do not forget that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began on Erev Passover, as did so many pogroms over the millennia. So I do not want to secularize the date of this war, when we do not do so with the Yom Kippur War.
I could explain this secularization of the date by admitting that Simchat Torah (or Shemini Atzeret, which is what holiday it was outside of Israel on the day of the surprise attack) are less popular or well-known than Yom Kippur.
But that is not the point. What is important is that we tell the world that those were our holy days upon which Israel was attacked. Then we can publicize our holy day of Simchat Torah — the Joy of Torah — to the world, as well as to those of our fellow Jews who are unaware of this day.
The resultant war is still ongoing. Maybe the name will evolve. But for the time being, let’s call this war what it was, is, and continues to be: “The Simchat Torah War.”