“Learning to live with the break”

“In the Jewish tradition, forgiveness does not have that meaning at all. Forgiveness is a way of saying: what happened happened, and we will not be able to erase it, we will not be able to bring anyone back, we will not be able to repair it. Something is broken, and we will have to […] learn to live with the break, with the fault line, with what will be no more. That is what this book is about. Looking at the rubble and telling ourselves that perhaps there is hope of rising from it, but only if we look at ourselves in the mirror, and only if we do it together.”

“Rereading my speeches, I confess it was hard. […] I had a strong urge to add a word here and there, to temper my thinking, to soften it. I forbade myself from doing so, because I wanted others to witness, as I did, where my pain had taken me.”

“Today there is a vitality in Jewish life that, paradoxically, […] was sparked by 7 October. […] I meet many people who tell me: I refuse to let my only experience of my Jewish identity be one of pain and fear. I want it to be an experience of life, an experience of study.”

“For a few days, we saw a wind of empathy blowing across our country. That is not common. […] Social media is the shop window of an inability to talk to one another, to make room for the other, to listen to the other. And we saw a wind, a will to empathy, blowing across our country, which should inspire all of us, whatever our faith.”