Speech to the Workshop-Shnat Kvutza from Shorashim Rakaz Adam Kausman
Kvutzat Chasa - Workshnat 73.
In the last radiant moments of the long Israeli summer, you landed. Just after Rosh Hashana, when the evenings were still warm and the sky bright blue until long after dinner time. You were 25, we were 5, and it seemed the long Israeli summer might never end.
Soon, the days grew shorter. At first, slowly, and then very quickly, all at once. The night took hold earlier, and sweaters emerged from your suitcases for the first time. The summer that, for a while, seemed like it would never end, faded into the background.
On October the 7th 2023, we were plunged into darkness. You all were luckily safe here on Kibbutz Ein Hashofet. But in the kibbutzim and towns of the Gaza Envelope, something truly dark was playing out. The worst single day for Jewish death since the Holocaust. The details are so depraved, so horrifying that the mere description of some events still plays in my mind 49 days later like a movie that I can’t turn off no matter how hard I try. The darkness was blinding and all-encompassing. We blinked fast through thick tears, our pupils struggling to adapt to the new conditions.
In those early days after the 7th, we all struggled to find our way in the dark. We, your madrichot and rakazot, knew that things would change for your program. I know you knew it too. But we were still stumbling in the dark, all of us, trying to latch on to something, anything, that would tell us we were safe and that the dark would dissipate at some point. Those were the days that it was too early to really hope, to really believe, that the dark would ever subside. Still, I often feel like we are in those days. But now, our eyes have adjusted to the dark, even just a little bit.