Dear Friends,
This has been a heavy week. Three years have passed since October 7, and the horror of that day has not faded. We still carry the memory of the innocent lives taken, the families shattered, those dragged into captivity, and the incredible pain that left so many people forever changed in a single horrific day. These are not memories that return only once a year. They have remained with us, and they continue to shape us.
Less than two weeks after October 7, I traveled to Israel on behalf of our Naples community, bringing supplies and support. We visited soldiers, hospitals, families and people whose lives had changed in a handful of hours. I will never forget those days, or the faces of the people we met. The grief was raw. The shock was everywhere. And yet, even then, in the middle of so much pain, I saw something else. I remember sitting with Omer Shem Tov’s mother, Shelley. Again and again, she spoke about continuing to believe, continuing to pray, continuing to hope. There was such a light to her, even then. And as time went on, we heard story after story from hostages themselves about holding onto faith, finding strength in one another and searching for even the smallest glimmers of hope.
Those stories of light have stayed with me. Not because they lessen what happened. Nothing could. They stay with me because they remind us that even after the darkest moments, we still face a choice about what comes next. We carry the pain. We carry the memory. But we still have a say in who we become and what we do from here.
Perhaps that is why this week’s Torah portion feels so timely. We open the Torah again with one word: Bereishit. In the beginning. The Torah does not begin with a world already filled with beauty and order. It begins with tohu va’vohu, a world unformed, with darkness over the face of the deep. And then come Hashem’s first words of Creation: Yehi ohr. Let there be light.
Perhaps in those words is one of the first missions the Torah gives to us as well. When we encounter darkness, our task is to add light. We do not deny what is broken or pretend the darkness is something else, but neither do we surrender to it. A few verses later we read, Vayehi erev vayehi voker, yom echad. There was evening and there was morning, one day. The night is part of the day, but it is not the whole day. Morning still comes.
Maybe that is part of what the Torah is telling us when we finish it and immediately begin again. We remember everything that came before. We mourn. We learn. We carry it with us. And then we begin again. We choose who we want to be, what kind of homes we will build, what kind of people we will become, and what kind of world we want to leave for our children and grandchildren.
I think about Sasha Troufanov and Sapir Cohen. So many of you remember when they stood right here in Naples and shared their story with our Chabad Naples family. We listened to them, cried with them, laughed with them and felt deeply connected to everything they had endured. And now, after all they went through, this year they stood beneath the chuppah and were married. Today, they are building a Jewish home together. Their story inspires us to keep building and to keep bringing more light.
And perhaps it is fitting that as we begin the Torah again, we are also preparing to begin a new chapter at Chabad Naples. On November 8, we will gather for our grand opening. We are deeply grateful for everything we have built together, but we are never satisfied to stop there. We want to keep growing, keep building and keep bringing more light into the lives of more people. Please take a moment to RSVP at [email protected], and I hope you will join us as we celebrate this next chapter together.
That is the work before us. To remember, to carry the pain with us, and still refuse to let darkness define what comes next. To keep building, keep caring, keep doing another mitzvah, helping another person and bringing more goodness into the world. We cannot choose everything that happens to us, but we can choose what we build next.
Yehi ohr. Let there be light. The Torah begins again. And so do we.
Wishing you and your family a beautiful and meaningful Shabbos, filled with light, peace and blessing.
With love and blessings,
Rabbi Fishel & Ettie Zaklos