Two years ago, on the joyous eve of Simchat Torah, the Hebrew calendar’s exuberant celebration marking the culmination of the annual Torah reading cycle, Hamas shattered the world for Jews everywhere. It was Oct. 7, 2023, a Saturday morning, when families in southern Israel should have been dancing with sacred scrolls under open skies and singing praises to the God who delivered His people from bondage. Instead, the air filled with the screams of the dying and the gunfire of terrorists who poured across the border like a plague from hell.

In a meticulously planned atrocity, the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust, Hamas terrorists and their allies slaughtered 1,200 souls and abducted 251 more into the bowels of Gaza. They rampaged through kibbutzim such as Be’eri and Kfar Aza, gunning down grandmothers in their kitchens, hunting festivalgoers at the Nova music site where 364 young lives were extinguished in a frenzy of hate, and dragging people into vans bound for tunnels of torment. The victims weren’t soldiers or settlers in disputed lands. They were Jews at prayer, at play, at peace — targeted for the singular sin of existing as Jews.