“Surely this is a clear case of Divine Hashgachah; a miracle meant to afflict us and open our eyes”

AS I rewatch the videos of Hamas terrorists streaming exultantly across the border in the early Simchas Torah light, I’m haunted by one thought: how easy it would have been to stop them had the IDF taken the threat seriously.

A handful of tanks, a few attack helicopters aloft, some strategically placed infantry, and Hamas’s attacking force could have been wiped out before they’d stepped foot in Israel. Instead of the greatest Jewish disaster since the Holocaust, images of Nukhba men killed as they assembled at their jump-off points would have echoed throughout the Middle East.

What plagues me is the thought of how many things could have gone wrong for Hamas, yet didn’t; how many things had to go wrong for Israel, and did. Like the Six Day War but in reverse, Israeli commanders were left reeling by the audacity of the surprise attack. On that black morning 100 days ago, seemingly everything that our enemies touched succeeded; everything that we did turned to ash.

It takes a great person to find the right words for a situation of this magnitude. That great man was in fact Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, whose thoughts about the onset of the Second World War seem to describe our times as well.

In a striking passage in Michtav Me’Eliyahu (Vol. I, p.203) he discusses the meaning of the Jewish People being struck by disasters that seem to transcend the normal course of events.

“The definition of the miraculous is when Hashem shows His Providence in a way that any thinking person recognizes that the events are not natural — rather a revelation of the Divine Hand,” he writes. “Therefore, just as there are miracles for our good in this world, so too, there is a miracle that is revealed in our suffering, when Hashem shows His clear Providence by helping our enemies.”

The rise of the Nazis, Rav Dessler continues, is an example of what we might call a negative miracle. From Hitler on down, the Reich’s leadership was comprised of men with no previous qualifications to lead a country — never mind the empire that they governed within a few years. Germany had a military and leadership class, but they were eclipsed by the Hitlerian putsch.

“The way of the world is that those with the qualities of statesmanship lead the countries. But is it possible in the course of nature that a group of men devoid of any experience who gather in a beer cellar — all of them unknowns — should suddenly rise to govern entire states? This is what we’ve seen with the wicked oppressor and his henchmen, who for decades were common people, who suddenly rose to leadership, excelling in their evil.

“Surely,” Rav Dessler concludes, “this is a clear case of Divine Hashgachah, a miracle meant to afflict us and open our eyes.”

These words have been echoing in my mind for weeks. Because when you step back to look at the big picture of October 7, the same dynamic emerges.

Yes, static defense lines such as Israel’s Gaza fence often fail. It’s such an established phenomenon that the term “Maginot Line” — referring to France’s supposedly impregnable defensive fortifications that Germany bypassed at the beginning of World War II — is synonymous with a false sense of security. Israel itself experienced the failure of the Bar Lev Line on the Suez Canal in 1973.

But the scale of the slaughter committed by these terrorists stands out. It was barbarism without parallel in the postwar world — per capita, 30 times as deadly as 9/11.

The layer upon layer of failures that led to the Hamas breakthrough are startling: ignored warnings, hi-tech systems blinded, absent commanders, and a billion shekels of hi-tech breached with contemptuous ease by tractors.

So too, was the utter collapse of the IDF. Israel’s military and security establishment remain one of the most advanced in the world — witness the pinpoint liquidations of shadowy Hamas and Hezbollah figures in Beirut last week.

Yet on that bitter day, the chain of command ceased to exist. Quite incredibly, helicopter pilots roaming the skies over the Gaza area in search of targets were told to choose their missions based on the calls for help emerging on social media.

In one of the first interviews that I did after Simchas Torah with a shocked survivor of one of the kibbutzim, he told me that it was the silence in between the firing that was most dreadful.

“I told my sons to listen for the sounds of the tanks,” he said, “but they never came.” That silence was the soundtrack of the bewildering collapse of the IDF.

Strangest of all was that Israel had spent months reliving the great intelligence failure of the Yom Kippur War 50 years before. In the run-up to Yom Kippur, the subject of documentaries, newspaper articles and newly declassified reports was the hubris that led to the war. At the very moment that Hamas was rampaging through the kibbutzim, I myself was sitting in a succah in London telling a story about the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, remarking on that breakdown.

How was it possible that such catastrophic blindness could strike a country in the middle of a national debate about that very same blindness?

If Rav Dessler were among us today, he would no doubt point to the words he’d written in the middle of the Second World War.

“Surely this is a clear case of Divine Hashgachah; a miracle meant to afflict us and open our eyes.”

In the months ahead, as the battle for Gaza becomes a low-intensity campaign, an official enquiry into the October 7 failures will get underway. As part of that investigation, we’ll know exactly who knew what and when, which systems failed and why. Some leaders will resign; others will spend the rest of their days contesting their culpability.

For those responsible for Israel’s national security, it’s indeed vital to understand what happened. But for the rest of us, it’s important not to become lost in the blame game.

The survivors of the massacres of the First Crusade in 1096 and Chmielnicki’s pogroms of Tach v’Tat undoubtedly engaged in shtadlanus to try to ensure that they were never butchered again. But first and foremost, they remembered the Heavenly source of their troubles.

So too, as the dust settles on the aftermath of Simchas Torah 5784, we face a fork in the road. One way is to go back to business as usual, forgetting the sense of cataclysm that enveloped us after the attack.

But miracles are meant to inspire a sense of wonder; to force us to take notice of the giant wheels turning according to a Heavenly plan. And in their own terrible way, the astounding events of October 7 are equally wondrous.

For anyone who saw Hamas’s disbelieving cries of “Allahu Akbar” as they drove unopposed across the Gaza border, there’s a duty of memory. The meteoric success of our enemies — the terrible miracle of October 7 — is a Divine Red Alert that must never be forgotten.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 995)