#cincinnatus

by Bari Weiss

There was not a single conversation that I had in the week I spent in Israel where the person did not say a version of the following: There was an October 6 version of me and an October 7 version of me. I am forever changed. I am a different person. 

And that is another sense in which the story of the ancient Roman requires modification. The binary of war and peace, the pastoral and the military, is a retrospective luxury of powerful nations or empires. A small democracy, whose very existence is contested by populous autocracies, does not have the privilege, as Cincinnatus did, of going from the field of battle to the field to till. Israel’s citizen-soldiers are scientists, artists, and farmers, just as they are mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. Israeli citizens, whether they serve or not, are not—as one Hamas leader said of Gazans—someone else’s problem.

“It’s like after you knock your finger with a hammer, you don’t feel anything for a while,” the journalist Gadi Taub said, describing what Israelis have gone through since Hamas’s invasion. “People haven’t begun to understand the extent of this earthquake and how it will change Israel. The tectonic plates have moved, and nothing in the system has yet absorbed or changed to accommodate what happened.”

The public intellectual and Bible scholar Micah Goodman told me in Jerusalem that the country went through a collective near-death experience. Imagine an entire society that, between sunrise and sunset, peered together into the abyss. “For the first time in our lives, we had a moment where we could imagine that the whole thing was over. That the whole thing ended. You know how when individuals have a near-death experience, they’re transformed. Because they learned that life should not be trivialized. As a country, we had a near-death experience, and now we’re transformed because we know that Jewish sovereignty should not be taken for granted. It can’t be trivialized.”

Israel’s founding fathers and mothers, having known a period when Jews didn’t have a state—a period in which six million Jews were murdered—understood the difference between statelessness and sovereignty in their bones. The paradox of their extraordinary achievement is that modern Israelis, who might appreciate the distinction intellectually, could dismiss the dread alternative even when presented with visible evidence of a fragility they consigned to the past. Or at least they could until October 7. On that day, the thought exercise became real.

Cincinnatus abandons the Plough to dictate Laws in Rome

cincinnatus c.