Oct. 7 produced such a strong reaction in Jews around the world partly for this reason. People who had drifted from Jewish life found their way back, walking into a synagogue for the first time in years, picking up a book of Jewish history they’d never gotten to, pulling out a Star of David necklace that had sat in a drawer since childhood, or simply saying “I’m Jewish” out loud in rooms where they used to let it pass unmentioned. Call them Oct. 8 Jews: people whose sense of belonging was less created than reactivated. The expression varied. The impulse behind it did not: a rediscovery that being Jewish means belonging to an am, a people, not just holding an identity.

Right when so many tried to isolate Jews from one another and flatten our identity into a political liability, we moved closer together and found in it a source of meaning instead. The greatest Jewish achievement is not Israel, remarkable as it is. It is the Jewish people itself. Israel is one expression of Jewish continuity. The people are the source it continues from. It is no accident that the same years that saw so many institutions abandon us also pushed us together. Instead of drifting out to sea, we swam toward home.

The scale of what we inherited is easy to miss because we grew up inside it. Israel sits at the center of Jewish life today, but Jewish flourishing didn’t stop at its borders. The generation that rebuilt sovereignty in our ancestral home also built an entire Jewish infrastructure across the diaspora after losing a third of our people in the Shoah: schools, charities, universities, advocacy groups, centers of learning, all our own, on a scale nobody before them could have managed. We are the first Jews in almost 2,000 years to hold sovereignty and a thriving global diaspora at the same time.

Tell a Jew from 1346, or 1497, or 1648, or 1938 what this era actually holds, and don’t leave anything out: Hebrew spoken by millions, a Jewish army defending a Jewish state, Jewish communities flourishing across much of the world, and, yes, an attempted genocide like Oct. 7. He would recognize the tragedy instantly. What would surprise him is everything standing next to it: an army, a state, the power to respond.

Since making aliyah, I’ve felt something I can only describe as strength: not because Israel is totally safe (Oct. 7 made sure none of us will ever believe that again) but because for the first time in my life I live somewhere Jewishness is not a minority identity but the given condition of the place. Hebrew is the language on the street, the calendar runs on the Jewish year, and the whole rhythm of public life follows it. For the first time I understand, physically rather than intellectually, what it means to belong to a civilization instead of merely inheriting one.

That feeling is the same one many Jews had after Oct. 7. History did not end that day. But we now meet it from a different position than our ancestors did. We have the agency they could only long for and the sovereignty they could only pray for. We can shape what happens next instead of simply absorbing what’s done to us. That power comes with responsibilities and mistakes our ancestors were spared. The mistakes are themselves proof of how much has changed. You cannot mismanage power you do not have.

The Jewish story is usually told through catastrophe, and there are good reasons for that; catastrophe has shown up far too often to ignore. But as the historian Salo Baron argued against what he called the “lachrymose” reading of Jewish history, catastrophe was never the whole story. We were exiled, persecuted, expelled, and nearly annihilated, and still remained capable of renewal.

For almost 2,000 years, Jews closed the Pesach Seder with the words “Next year in Jerusalem,” knowing they would very likely never see it happen. Parents taught it to children. Children taught it to grandchildren, across a chain of generations who died still waiting. Eventually the prayer became a fact. Jews now walk the streets of Jerusalem speaking Hebrew as a native tongue. Across the diaspora, Jewish communities keep building, teaching, and renewing. Children light Shabbat candles with their parents. Students still study texts written thousands of years before their grandparents were born.

None of this erases the challenges still ahead, and Oct. 7 made sure we could never forget that. But when I think about the generations who carried this story through exile and catastrophe and expulsion, one conclusion is unavoidable: We are living inside the world they spent centuries dreaming about, on the far side of institutions that could not survive their own decay and let us go.

When I walk through Tel Aviv, hear Hebrew all around me, and watch Jewish life carry on with such ordinary confidence, I think about the Jews who carried this dream across centuries of exile.

They never lived to see and experience this world.

We do.