Ayeka - Hineni (Commemorating October 7)

Photo from Israel National Memorial on third anniversary of October 7

Remarks to JCHS Parent Guardian Assoc for October 7, 2026, on the third annivsary lightly expanded

On the afternoon of this third anniversary, I watched the memorial in Tel Aviv — not the government’s ceremony, but the one organized by survivors and bereaved families themselves. Fifty thousand people filled Park Yarkon. 

The program was filled with story after story. An Arab Bedouin Israeli man remembering his brother, a bus driver, who drove back into the fire on Route 232 for the kids fleeing the Nova festival. His brother’s words, before he went: “I know it’s dangerous, but these people have to be brought back.” A widow remembering her husband, another driver, who got up that morning and drove south toward the danger. His words: “If I am needed, I am going.” 

And Eli Sharabi, who came home from sixteen months as a hostage in Gaza to learn that his wife and daughters had been murdered in their safe room at Be’eri, closing the program with a promise to the dead: “I have not forgotten you. Israel has not forgotten you.”

Despair and determination. 

Suffering and resilience. 

The same anniversary, told dozens of different ways.

And then a song. Shuli Rand’s Ayeka. Rand — a Breslov Hasid actor/songwriter, released Ayeka in 2008 as one man’s argument with God. The National Library of Israel places it in the lineage of Israel’s wartime songs, alongside Lu Yehi and Yerushalayim Shel Zahav. Within months of its release, when war came to the south, Israelis reached for it. After October 7 they reached for it again. 

The song's title is the first question God ever asks a human being. Adam has eaten from the tree and is hiding among the trees of the Garden, and God calls out (Genesis 3:9): "Ayeka? (Where are you?)" Rand turns the question around and aims it back at heaven. Here is an excerpt of the song translated in English: 

Master of the universe

If I were to franly admit it

At times I have no strength

To remain in Your world

Whence from Your presence would I hide?

What would I plead for, what excuse would I make, what words would I use?

Voices from the past whisper that I should halt. 

But I keep groping in the dark

Imploring and entreating, where are You?

A person hanging on by a thread. Some days, no strength to stay in the world. Crying out to God: where are You?

Now a different voice. Shoam Moshe Ben-Harush was twenty years old, a staff sergeant in the Nahal commando unit, from the Golan community of Hispin. He did what Israeli soldiers are encouraged to do before a dangerous mission: write a letter, to be opened only if they do not come back. Three months before October 7, as his unit prepared for a mission of that type, Shoam — opened a WhatsApp group with a single member, himself, and wrote a letter.

On October 7 Shoam fought at the Kerem Shalom outpost. When the attack came, he and two friends were the first to recover, charge, and return fire. He was mortally wounded. For three weeks his family never left his bedside. His brother Ori found the letter on his phone and could not bring himself to read it; he still believed Shoam would wake up. Shoam died on October 26, 2023. His family donated his organs, and five people are alive today because of him. They read his letter aloud, together, for the first time on Yom HaZikaron (Israel's Memorial Day), six months after his death. It is now collected in If You’re Reading This, an anthology of last letters from Israel’s fallen post October 7.

Here is what Shoam wrote:

The world is twisted, the world is dysfunctional, the world is scary, the wold is full of things you don't know. The world is strange, the wold is wrong, the world is messed up. 

But even wtih all its flaws the world is beautiful, the world is open for us to discover, the world is open to suggestions -- and that's exactly what's beautiful abou the world, that it's not beautiful. 

I don't wan to live in any other world. I want to live in this world, in this twisted, dysfunctional world. 

Thank you for puttin gme through trials and tribulations, thank you for giving me strength. Thank you for giving me love, for giving me parents, for giving me friends, for giving me a home, for giving me life. 

Rand asks God: Where are You? Shoam answers the world: I want to live here. Both are telling a truth. Both are invoking a prayer.

There is something perhaps mystical too in the numbers of this anniversary. The seventh of October, year three: 10, 7, 3.

One week before the anniversary, flydubai flight 1073 took off from Dubai for Tel Aviv with more than 170 people aboard — almost all Israelis, about thirty of them children. Two hours into the flight, over Saudi Arabia, the copilot stabbed the captain and tried to put the plane into the ground. Investigators say his intent was to crash it into Ben Gurion Airport with everyone aboard. It fell 14,000 feet in thirty seconds.

The captain, bleeding on the cockpit floor, reached up and unlocked the door. And Israelis came through it. A plumber from the front rows named Yaniv Hayoun was first. Behind him came Tzvika Manes, Assaf Regavim, and others. For twenty or thirty minutes they fought the copilot in that tiny space, pulled him off the controls, and tied him up with headphone cords. One passenger leveled the plane himself, with what he knew from watching an air-crash show on television. Then off-duty pilots who happened to be aboard took the controls and landed at Tabuk, where Saudi doctors treated the wounded. Everyone came home.

They did not wait for permission. They did not wait for rescue. On the eve of this anniversary, that is the Israeli, the Jewish, answer to the reflexive Ayeka. Where are you? Hineni. Here. Coming through the door.

Ayeka is a question each of us gets asked. Not just once. But every day. And our tradition has one answer to it. It is Avraham’s word when God calls his name before the Akedah (Genesis 22:1). It is Moshe’s word at the burning bush (Exodus 3:4). It is a bus driver’s word on Route 232: if I am needed, I am going. It is the word we say when someone we love calls our name in the dark.

"Hineni (I am here)."

Here to remember, and to record. 

Here to grieve what was taken. 

And here — stubbornly, together — to live in this world, and to thrive in it.

Where are you?

Hineni.