There is a passage in the Talmud that describes the limits of language: if all the seas were ink, and all the reeds were quills, and all people were scribes, they still could not exhaust the wisdom contained in the Torah. It is not a claim about length. It is a claim about a category of thing that writing simply cannot contain. I have found myself returning to that image in considering the rupture of October 7. There is a before and an after, and I do not mean that as a figure of speech. I mean it as two worlds, discontinuous, with no word carried over from one that lands the same way in the other. The seas-and-scribes formula keeps surfacing in my mind because when faced with the enormity of such an event, with its countless reverberations and emotions, the best one can do is gesture at the impossibility of describing it. What follows is my attempt.

Almost 1,000 days ago, at 6:29 a.m., the old world ended and a new world began. That new world was born in a conflagration of the old—over 1,200 killed, hundreds kidnapped, all of it filmed, uploaded, and celebrated in real time—as Israel’s enemies gloried in the atrocity. Israel, for those first hours, could do nothing but watch. The infamous conceptzia—the notion that Israel’s enemies could be deterred or bought off—evaporated on that day. The foundation of the state as a place where Jews are safe from massacre was irreparably damaged. The country was left in shock: exposed, without a way to engage with what it had experienced, and without a clear sense of where to go from there.

Israel has spent every day since trying to rebuild, to restore a semblance of what it was. On day 128, it proved that it will rescue its hostages by any means, not just negotiation, when a raid in Rafah freed two men alive. On day 245, Operation Arnon proved it again—four hostages walked out of Gaza alive, pulled from the center of the enclave in daylight. On day 356, it proved that even the most protected man in Hezbollah was not, in fact, protected, when the strike that killed Hassan Nasrallah reached a bunker its target believed was unreachable. On day 375, it proved the same of Yahya Sinwar, hunted into an alley in the city he once ruled. And on day 615, Israel struck Iran itself—not the tentacle, but the head, without which October 7 could never have happened, and which Israel had vowed never again to allow to threaten its existence. Two hundred sixty days later, on day 875, it proved this once more.