Something fundamental is breaking in Israel, and it began long before October 7. That day shattered lives, families, and the nation’s sense of safety, but the deeper fracture had already been growing for years: a progressive inability to live together and see one another not as sides, but as people.
We no longer speak across differences. We reduce people to positions. We defend our truth, but we no longer carry each other. The results aren’t abstract; they are real, visible, and dangerous.
This isn’t the first time Jewish society has faced such internal division. The split of the biblical kingdoms, the Hasmonean civil war, the bitter factionalism before the Second Temple’s destruction – our history is marked by moments when we turned inward against ourselves. And now we risk repeating that pattern.
Lag Ba’omer marks the day the students of Rabbi Akiva stopped dying. Twenty-four thousand perished during the omer period. The Talmud tells us they died because they failed to show one another kavod – dignity, honor, space.
These were scholars, students of sacred texts, disciples of the very man who taught that “ve’ahavta l’re’acha kamocha” (love your neighbor as yourself) is the great principle of Torah. And still, they failed. Not because they lacked conviction, but because they stopped seeing the other. They held Torah. But they held it so tightly, there was no room left for the person beside them.
That collapse didn’t begin with hatred. It began with blindness. The kind of blindness that tells you your cause is sacred and, therefore, unquestionable, that your truth is sufficient, and that your responsibility ends at the edge of your certainty.
Once that blindness sets in, almost anything becomes justifiable. You call it Torah. You call it ideology. You call it justice. But if it cannot make space for the other, it fails the very thing it was meant to protect.
The pattern we are repeating
Today, we are walking the same path. We speak in absolutes. We draw lines. We stand behind our tribes. Kavod has become conditional; the other, negotiable.
Rabbi Akiva watched his students die, not all at once, but one by one. Every voice. Every possibility. And when the rooms were empty, when the world he built could no longer hold, he didn’t defend it. He didn’t rebuild it.He began again, with five students.
And this time, he placed something else at the center.
He had always taught “ve’ahavta l’re’acha kamocha.” But after the collapse, he no longer taught it as a value; he taught it as a foundation, the measure by which every law, action, and principle would have to pass or fail.This was because he had seen what happens when the mission outruns the person, when principle forgets presence, and when devotion forgets to look up.
Beyond repair to reimagining
This is the existential question Israel now faces – a question that transcends politics.The question is not how to manage disagreement, but how to build a country that can carry disagreement without tearing itself apart. Not how to be right, but how to live beside those we believe are wrong. Not how to win, but how to make space.
This is not a time to repair what has broken. It is a time to reimagine what could be built.
I’ve met the ones doing that work in new grassroots movements across the country. Not the ones shouting, but the ones listening. Not the ones defending the old world, but the ones reimagining what comes next.They are not rebuilding what was; they are imagining what could be.
And if we are serious about surviving, not only physically, but morally, we must do what Rabbi Akiva did.We must name them, support them, and walk beside them.
A shared future
What might this reimagined society look like? One where disagreement doesn’t mean division, where multiple truths can coexist without canceling each other, and where the space between positions becomes not a battleground but a meeting place.
This doesn’t require abandoning conviction.
Rabbi Akiva’s five students held diverse, often conflicting views. What made their learning community succeed wasn’t agreement, but the recognition that the person across from you matters more than the position they hold.Because this is a Rabbi Akiva moment, what we place at the center now will shape what survives.
The choice before us is clear: continue down the path of mutual blindness, or begin the harder work of seeing each other again, not despite our differences, but with them fully in view.
This is Israel’s most urgent task, more pressing than any security threat or diplomatic challenge.In the space between collapse and creation lies our chance to reimagine.
The writer made aliyah from the UK.