An Israeli soldier walks near pictures that are part of an installation at the site of the Nova festival, where people were killed and kidnapped during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, in Reim, southern Israel, Jan. 14, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Tyrone Siu

I don’t want it to be Oct. 7 today. I’d like the calendar to go straight from the 6th to the 8th, the way some buildings go from the 12th floor to the 14th, and for all of us to agree not to mention it.

I know how that sounds coming from a news editor. Remembering this day is my job. Today, I will publish the anniversary coverage like everyone else, and I will do it properly. But I would give a great deal to sleep through it.

Instead, I watched the videos again. Nobody asked me to. Some I have seen so often that I know the exact second to look away. Others I had never seen before, and that is its own small horror: Three years later, there is still footage left. The killers wore cameras. The victims held phones. The cars had dashcams and the houses had security systems. It was the most documented massacre in Jewish history, and you can watch for three years and not reach the end of it.

What I felt, watching, was horror and nothing. Both at once. My stomach dropped and some other part of me sat there, flat, taking notes.

I used to think numbness was the opposite of grief. It isn’t. It is what grief leaves behind when it has passed through the same place too many times. It is scar tissue. And I am ashamed of it anyway, because the rest of the world went numb in about a week, and I swore I never would.

I have wanted to skip Tisha B’Av too. Every year, in the heat, hungry, sitting on the floor. And every year I remember that this is exactly the point. Jews are the people who did not skip. We took the worst day we had and gave it a date, a text, a posture, a melody. Not because we love suffering. Because a day you skip does not go away. It leaks into all the others.

But Tisha B’Av has had 2,000 years to become liturgy. Oct. 7 has had three. We have no Eicha for it yet. We have footage. The videos are the only scroll we’ve got, raw and unedited, and that is why watching them feels like both a duty and a wound. We are reading a lamentation nobody has written yet.

And unlike Tisha B’Av, this one comes twice. It happened on Simchat Torah, so a few days ago we danced, or tried to, or stood at the edge of the circle holding a child’s hand and counting. Now the other date arrives to collect whatever the first one missed. The massacre took the happiest day on the Jewish calendar and handed us a second day of mourning as change.

So no, I don’t get to skip it. About 1,200 people were murdered that morning and 251 were dragged into Gaza. Their families never got an Oct. 8. For them it has been the same Saturday for three years. I can manage it once.

Here is what I have decided about the numbness. It does not mean I have stopped caring. It means I am still here, still watching, three years in, long after watching stopped being bearable. The people who feel nothing are the ones who never looked. The people who feel too much to function looked once. The rest of us, the horrified and numb, are the ones who kept looking. Somebody has to.

I don’t want it to be Oct. 7 ever again. None of us do.