An Israeli soldier stands during a two-minute siren marking the annual Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day, at an installation at the site of the Nova festival where party goers were killed and kidnapped during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, in Reim, southern Israel, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad

This year, the one year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas massacre fell on the Jewish High Holidays, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. What did this signify? Do we need to seek a meaning in this peculiar, sorrowful, tragic lunar coincidence? Ten days of awe, ten days of repentance.

One of the ongoing themes of the Days of Awe is the concept that God inscribes our names into the Book of Life, writing down who will live and who will die, who will have a good life and who will have a bad one, for the next year. These books are written on Rosh Hashanah, and sealed on Yom Kippur. But during these days of awe, we can alter G-d’s decree.

If we look back at the year Israel experienced between October 7, 2023, and October 7, 2024, we see a small, ultra-modern, democratic nation surrounded by hostile states that openly threaten Israel and America.

On October 7, 2023, the Jewish nation endured one of its darkest hours since the Holocaust. Despite the world’s tepid sympathy, including what I regard as inadequate support from the United States, and widespread condemnation of Israel’s response to the attack, Israel has remained defiant in the face of relentless pressure from anti-Zionist and hypocritical forces. These forces include the farcical United Nations, with its cowardly, blatantly antisemitic chief; the International Court of injustice; and prominent figures from around the world, including many American politicians of Jewish descent, all of whom have sought to undermine Israel’s right to exist.

Still, against all odds, Israel has dismantled Hamas and severely weakened Hezbollah, and although it has not finished Hamas off in its entirety, it has nevertheless greatly diminished its militaristic might. Israel has also taken the fight to Iran, and the collapse of the Assad government in Syria shows how much Israel has accomplished, and Iran and its proxies have lost, since the Hamas pogrom in October 2023.

Now, like at no other time in its history, Israel needs true, strong, and honest allies who trust Israel and don’t try to restrain it out of calculating and cynical self-interest. Had America or the United Kingdom ever found themselves in a situation of a true existential threat, no other country or political body on earth would have been able to push them toward the self-restraint they continue to demand of Israel.

Israel again and again tells the world that we Jews matter — despite our small numbers and despite what has happened to us, and despite what has been happening to us for the past two millennia.

We are a sovereign nation, and we, and only we, shall determine our fate. Never again shall we be enslaved; our fate will never be in the hands of other people and other nations. Our nation shall never depend on the mercy of other people. As Jews, we will not allow ourselves to be taken away, humiliated, or abused — because now we have a country of our own that will protect us from our enemies.

The fate of the Jewish people has always been the extreme balancing act between survival and extermination, and in between those two extremes, we Jews have managed to make lives for ourselves. Our identity is rooted in life, in how we value it, how we fight for it, and whom we trust with it. Unlike so many of those who seek to destroy us, we are not a cult of death, but a nation of life. We search and find meaning in everything life throws at us, even suffering and tragedy.

Our eyes are still filled with tears, our hearts are heavy with unbearable pain, and our minds are clouded with sadness over the loss of the lives so brutally taken from us since October 7, 2023, and the hostages and their bodies that are still captive in Gaza. And, despite all this, we — the Jewish nation, headed by the state of Israel — have demonstrated to the world that we will not give up and that we have not forgotten how to fight back. Our unwavering goal remains to protect our Jewish homeland, our Jewish freedom, and the voice of Jewish communities in the Diaspora.

We Jews stand here today to announce to the world that we are here to stay, whether in Israel or here in this messy antisemitic world, called the Diaspora.

I think this notion for us Jews today transcends religion. There are those among us who are religious, and those who are not. There are those who believe in G-d, and there are those who don’t. Some people are angry with him and argue with him about the injustice and cruelty that has befallen the Jewish nation and enveloped this world with unbearable sadness. But maybe by coming together, and showing up for Israel, maybe G-d has looked down upon us and and inscribed us in the “good” book, because we are saying “yes” to a nation that chooses life over death — not only for its own people, but for everyone who chooses the glorious lightness of freedom over the despairing abyss of tyranny.

Anya Gillinson is an immigration lawyer and author of the new memoir Dreaming in Russian. She lives in New York City. More at www.anyagillinson.com.