Friday, September 6, 2024
Last weekend, the IDF recovered the bodies of 6 hostages from a tunnel in Gaza, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose parents have spent the last 11 months aggressively advocating for his safe return.
Mainstream media headlines noted that the six had died, but that’s not accurate. They were murdered—executed at close range when their captors realized the IDF was close to recovering them from a tunnel under a child’s bedroom.
These were young people who had been attending a music festival. They were advocates for peace who were brutalized and terrorized for nearly a year without the International Red Cross, the UN, or much of the world paying attention to their plight.
We got to know Hersh because of the efforts of his parents, but there are still 101 hostages being held in Gaza, not all of whom are still alive.
Bringing them home is not a simple task. Negotiating with terrorists is a losing proposition. Recovering these people and corpses may involve releasing thousands of convicted murderers and terrorists, who have sworn to repeat the massacre again as soon as they can. There is no right answer that does not include pain and sorrow.
In Judaism, we believe saving a life is like saving a whole universe, because of what will come from that single saved life. That means we lost six whole universes last week, and more than 1200 since the October 7th attack.
Right now, we feel the loss as a hole in our universe, but life goes on. Jewish babies are traditionally named for family members who have died. In just the last few days, babies have been named in memory of Hersh Goldberg-Palin and Carmel Gat. While neither of these children are directly related to Hersh or Carmel, all of Israel and Jews worldwide consider them to be family and we remember them accordingly.
From the depths of our pain, we focus on repairing the universe for those still to come. It’s all we can do.
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linda@popky.com
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