The other day, I wrote about miracles and the challenge of reconciling one person’s miraculous survival with another person’s tragedy. I found myself returning to the Book of Daniel, where three men facing a fiery furnace declare their belief that God can save them, but that even if He does not, their faith will remain unchanged. Because ultimately, faith cannot depend on whether we receive the miracle we’re praying for. This morning, I heard someone speak about his decision to stop waiting for a particular miracle, one which he was sure would never come, and instead live faithfully with the life he had been given. The miracles he will experience in his lifetime might not be the ones he was praying for, but they will be miraculous nonetheless. And then, this morning, I came across a video in Hebrew about October 7th. I thought I was watching another reflection on that terrible morning. Instead, I found myself confronting the very questions I had been wrestling with.
It began with a simple conversation between two people.
“Do you remember where you were at 6:30 in the morning on October 7th?”
“Of course. I was in synagogue, reading Psalms.”
“Then you must know the verse from Psalms.”
“But where was that Guardian on October 7th?”
That morning, Inbal Rabin-Lieberman, the 25-year-old security coordinator of Kibbutz Nir Am, was among the first to recognize that something was terribly wrong. As rockets began flying overhead and reports of terrorists infiltrating nearby communities emerged, she quickly mobilized the kibbutz’s security team, distributing weapons, positioning defenders, and preparing them to confront the approaching attackers. Thanks to her quick thinking and the courage of those who fought alongside her, the terrorists were prevented from entering the kibbutz, and the community was saved.
While much of the country was still sleeping, Inbal was awake, protecting her community.
“But what about the thousands of young people running for their lives from the Nova music festival? Where was God as they fled through the fields?” The speaker continued.
Youssef Ziadna, a Bedouin minibus driver from Rahat, had driven a group of young people to the Nova music festival the night before, planning to pick them up the following afternoon. But early on October 7th, he received a desperate phone call asking him to come rescue them. He immediately got into his minibus and headed toward the festival. As he approached, people fleeing the massacre warned him to turn around. Gunfire erupted around him, but he refused to abandon the young people waiting for him. He continued toward the festival, eventually cramming some 30 terrified and wounded people into his 14-seat minibus. Using his knowledge of the surrounding fields and dirt roads, he managed to navigate around the terrorists and bring his passengers to safety.
Meanwhile, in Ofakim, 65-year-old Rachel Edri and her husband found themselves in an unimaginable situation when five Hamas terrorists broke into their home on October 7th and took them hostage. With armed men threatening their lives, Rachel realized that she needed to buy time. Rather than panic, she began talking to her captors, offering them coffee, tea, and cookies. She even engaged them in conversation and song, doing whatever she could to keep them calm and distracted. At one point, she managed to secretly signal to police that there were five terrorists inside. For approximately 17 hours, she maintained her composure until Israeli special forces finally stormed the house and rescued the couple.
Rachel’s extraordinary strategy calls to mind another Jewish woman who faced a dangerous enemy with patience, courage, and a carefully planned meal: Queen Esther. When Esther faced Haman, she did not confront him with a sword. Instead, she invited him to a banquet. Through patience, careful timing, and an understanding of her enemy, Esther created the opportunity to save her people. More than two thousand years later, Rachel Edri demonstrated that same extraordinary courage and presence of mind, using hospitality to buy precious time in the face of unimaginable danger.
Near Re’im, a kibbutz in southern Israel, not far from the Gaza border, dozens of young people fleeing the Nova music festival crowded into a roadside bomb shelter, desperately seeking refuge from the terrorists pursuing them. Among them was 22-year-old Aner Shapira, a young soldier who took it upon himself to protect the people inside. When terrorists began throwing grenades into the shelter, Aner stood near the entrance, catching them and throwing them back outside before they could explode.
The Book of Proverbs tells us:
Aner caught a grenade and threw it back outside. Then another. And another.
Seven times he threw a grenade away from the people sheltering behind him.
The eighth grenade killed him.
Aner did not rise again. But because of his courage, others survived.
In his Holocaust memoir Night, Elie Wiesel describes witnessing the hanging of a young boy in a concentration camp. Someone behind him asks where God is in the face of such horror. Wiesel recalls an inner voice answering that God is there, hanging on the gallows.
So where was God on October 7th?
The Bible tells us that God created humanity b’tzelem Elokim, in His image.
Perhaps part of the answer can be found in the people who reflected that image through their actions.
In the young woman who protected her kibbutz. In the driver who returned again and again to rescue strangers. In the woman who kept her captors occupied until help arrived. In the young man who stood at the entrance to a shelter and gave his life so that others might live.
And in countless other soldiers, civilians, and ordinary people who chose to confront evil that dark morning, often at tremendous personal cost.
Jewish tradition speaks of hester panim, the hiding of God’s face. There are moments in history when we struggle to understand where God is, when His protection seems painfully absent.
But here’s a remarkable thought:
On the day He hid His face, we were His face.
The heroes of October 7th could not know how their stories would end. They did not know whether they would survive, whether the people they were trying to save would survive, or whether help would arrive in time.
But they acted anyway. I beleive that is one of the deepest expressions of faith. Not the certainty that a miracle will come, that salvation will come, but the decision and then determination to live according to what we believe, even when we have no guarantee of the outcome.
The video ends with one final exchange.
“How do we make sure this never happens again?”
“Never forget who we were that morning. And never again be who we were the night before.”
We can pray for God to reveal His face. But being created in His image also carries a revelation of it’s own. We have a divine responsibility to act.
And on October 7th, in the face of unimaginable horror, so many extraordinarily ordinary people did exactly that.
