When I was in elementary school, on the 100th day of school, everyone would bring in 100 of something - grains of rice, paper clips, Lego, socks, toy dinosaurs. We would all line up our 100 items on the floors of the classrooms and down the halls of the school.
The idea was to see how different 100 looked depending on what we were counting.
Last weekend, we marked 100 days since October 7.
In some ways, those 100 days were like grains of rice, taking up hardly any space. It is as though the more than three months that have elapsed are non-existent; like those 100 days fit into the space between yesterday and today. It is as though every morning in October 8th, when we woke up telling ourselves that the events of the day before must have been a nightmare, only to recall that they were not.
In other ways, that space from day one to day 100 is cavernous. After 100 days, there are still an estimated 132 hostages in Gaza. 110 hostages were released and 18 have been confirmed dead by the IDF. The 100 days of uncertainty as we await their return have been an eternity. How is it possible that after 100 days there is still no timeline for when the remaining hostages will be returned to their families and their countries?
It has been 100 days since the world witnessed an atrocity committed against Jews in Israel. In that space, the world has born witness to the evidence of rape being used as a war tactic. The world has seen evidence of the barbarism not only of Hamas terrorists, but also of people in Gaza who looted, pillaged, took and sold hostages. The world has watched as Hamas rejected deals to end the war in exchange for the return of the hostages, repeatedly.
For 100 days, the Jewish people have been met with an unprecedented rise in Antisemitism. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have taken to the streets to call for intifada. For 100 days, the Jewish people have been the subject of victim-blaming or accused of lying about what took place.
There is a documentary frequently used as part of Holocaust education, called Paper Clips. In the film, to help students at a high school conceptualize the magnitude of the Holocaust, they collected 6 million paper clips. Paper clips are small, really small. One would think that even a number as hard to conceptualize as six million, would take up relatively little space. That was not the case.
100, as a number, is far easier to conceptualize. We can understand far more easily how 100 looks and feels different depending on our vantage point. It is hard to reckon with the fact that Israel is over 100 days into a war it did not start or want. It is hard to understand that for 100 days people around the world have justified the hostages, all of whom are someone’s child, as some form of justified resistance.
It is not the quantity that is difficult to understand in this equation. It is instead what the milestone of 100 means in this context.