Last week, the Israeli hostage nightmare finally came to an end—thank Gd. Ran Gvili, the last hostage remaining in Gaza, was returned to Israel for a dignified burial. For the first time since 2014, no Israelis are currently held hostage in Gaza.
It is a moment of profound relief—and also a deeply bittersweet one. Freedom arrived alongside mourning. Joy cannot be separated from grief. There is no clean emotional landing, only the complicated truth that lives were saved, lives were lost, lives were forever altered, and wounds remain that will never fully close.
Already, painful disagreements have surfaced in Israel about the role of mass protests led by hostage families—protests that filled Israeli streets and spread around the world. Run For Their Lives, a global initiative with a local presence here in Plantation, took a different form—not a protest aimed at influencing policy, but a public expression of solidarity, intentionally visible and communal, meant to affirm the dignity of the hostages and their families. Against that backdrop, recent comments by Gal Hirsch, Israel’s Coordinator for Hostages and Missing Persons, suggesting that protests helped Hamas have understandably angered many.
No Family Should Ever Be Blamed
It must be said clearly: hostage families must never be blamed for being vocal. They were given no framework, often felt overlooked by those in power, and were left to navigate an unbearable crisis on their own. They did what any loving family would do when a life is at stake—and no one has the right to judge them for it.
A Hard Truth We Must Face
Soon after the nightmare of October 7, I began to hear—slowly and painfully—another fear alongside the obvious ones: that intense, sustained, and highly visible public attention around the hostages might put them at greater risk. I first heard this from someone whose own family members, including children, were taken hostage, and I wrestled with it deeply—because I believe that raising names, faces, and stories matters. And yet I was confronted with the possibility that even deeply compassionate, highly public attention might also prolong suffering.
What this chapter exposed is not only the cruelty of Hamas, but a longstanding Israeli vulnerability. For years, analysts have warned that Israel lacks a binding hostage policy. Following the Second Lebanon War, the Winograd Commission examined Israel’s national security and military performance and underscored the need for clearer strategic planning. In that broader moment of reckoning, Defense Minister Ehud Barak convened a committee chaired by former Supreme Court president Meir Shamgar to propose guidelines for hostage negotiations; its recommendations were never formally adopted. Those recommendations included limits on prisoner releases, secrecy in negotiations, and insulating leaders from unbearable emotional pressure.
A January 2023 State Comptroller’s report—issued months before October 7—criticized years of foot-dragging and even a failure to clearly define responsibility for hostage policy.
None of this diminishes the Jewish imperative of pidyon shvuyim—the sacred obligation to redeem captives. But it does help explain how that very moral commitment—so deeply Jewish and so deeply human—was turned into a weapon against us.
So What Is Our Responsibility?
I am not an Israeli citizen. I am an American rabbi, writing to an American congregation. And yet so many of us were deeply involved in the effort to bring the hostages home, each in our own way—marching, praying, advocating, meeting families, carrying their fear and hope with us every day.
Our responsibility is not to tell Israel what to do, but to help ensure that the lessons paid for at such a terrible cost are honored, studied, and not lost to time. That means continuing to talk about this openly and supporting serious policy conversations now—so that if, Gd forbid, another crisis ever comes, clarity is not forged in the fog of emergency.
If hostage-taking has become a weapon of war, then Israel must develop a policy that protects both lives and values—not instead of compassion, but in order to safeguard it.
As a Diaspora community, our task is not silence, nor shouting—but steadfast moral seriousness: to keep caring, to keep supporting, and to insist—lovingly and firmly—that this lesson not be forgotten.
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