The Blogs: All of Israel is responsible for one another כל ישראל ערבים זה לזה

The returning hostages talk about their time in the tunnels and about the other hostages who were with them. We have heard incredible stories of their interactions with each other and even with their barbaric terrorist guards.

Omer Wenkert told about how each one of his fellow hostages had a job to do, cleaning, dividing food, talking to the guards, etc. and it became routine, no questions or comments, they just did it.

Or Levy told the parents of Hersh Goldberg and Aner Shapiro first about Aner’s amazing bravery in the migunit and how he taught them, under fire, what to do if he missed picking up a grenade and throwing it out or if he was injured or killed. He stressed to them ‘keep your eyes on the ground.’

And Hersh who said every day — ‘When there is a why, you can always find the how,’ which was central to the book by Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. And it turns out Rachel had heard this story earlier, in a meeting with Or.

Rachel: “At some point, there were seven of them held together, and Hersh repeated this phrase to each of them. And each of them tried to figure out, what is my ‘why’? Or what is my ‘what.’ And for Or, it was his son. For each of them, it was something different. When Hersh was taken from that tunnel, for the rest of the time they were together, Eliya, Or, Alon, and Eli, they repeated this every day for the next 440 days. They would say it every day until the day he (Or) was released. So, it was an amazing thing to hear.”

Eli Sharabi shared so much of how, with his fellow hostages, they relied on each other, telling stories, keeping each other sane and alive.

Aviva Segal talked about how Liri Elbag brought Keith out of a deep depression when she wasn’t able to, and Amit Sosana told of how Liri saved her life when she was being tortured by the terrorist guards.

Every single one of the returned hostages have shared their incredible life enhancing, lifesaving experiences. From the first hostage releases in November 2023, when the barbarians were holding children as hostages, we heard of other hostages who sought to protect them, the children who were not their own children, and they gave of their own tiny scraps of food to the children.

When we hear of other cases of captivity around the world and in history, there are so many situations that are ‘dog eat dog’, survival of the fittest, take care of number 1. Of course, there are exceptions where others also have shown this shared responsibility and caring, but it is not universal.

The hostages and returned hostages are people who went through the worst day of their lives on October 7 and then continued in that hell for all the time they were in captivity. And they knew, without anyone saying anything to them what Mutual Responsibility ( ערבות הדדית) is. They lived it, they embodied it, they survived together because of it.

Hearing all of these stories and I’m sure there will be so many more, one has to wonder where it all came from. It is our culture, our education, our living as a shared society that has engrained this in us.

In our normal lives, we can see it daily as well. If a person falls on the street, immediately others nearby will come over to help them up, or call an ambulance and stay with them until it comes. It can be as simple as opening a bag of Bissli and offering it to those around you, to strangers. To us in Israel, it seems like the natural and normal thing to do but it is not so in much of the world. I remember being a trip with my family in the US and I took a nasty fall. There were many people around me who saw me fall. Not a single one came over to help me or even see if I was alright. They went about their business as though I didn’t exist. This has never been the case in Israel.

My daughter recently told me about a famous actress she is working with. This actress, ‘Y’ was sitting at a coffee shop drinking her coffee and noticed a young man who seemed a bit lost, not in direction but in his lack of calmness. She went over to him, a total stranger and asked a simple question, “Do you want to talk?” He responded with thanks and said he was fine. Despite this, Y gave the young man her cellphone number and told him to call if he wanted to talk. Y is sufficiently famous that everyone around her knows who she is. Later that evening, the young man did call. He had been back from fighting in Gaza and just can’t find his place. Y noticed something amiss and offered him her help with all the seriousness in the world. She saw someone in need and offered of herself. Y regularly gives trauma care to hostage families and Nova survivors and their families. Besides the fact that Y is truly an amazing woman along with being a great actor, she breaths ערבות הדדית every second of every day. She is Israel.

These actions, this caring, this being there for each other, doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It is something that is instilled in us from an early age or for me as an immigrant, part of my acclimation into our culture. We are not only taught this in school, in youth organizations, in the army, we are witnesses to it, we are recipients of it, we are givers to it all the time. It is natural and we are not surprised by it but we do appreciate it and I don’t believe that we take it for granted. Our returned hostages have shown us the ideals of this real value and it shows that, even in the most horrid situations, we are there for each other.

Hundreds of thousands express this every day and every Saturday night when we leave our comfortable homes and go to the demonstrations, because we feel that the hostages are our own and we bear the responsibility for them, for their families and to make sure that we get them home. When people see the tape with the number of days the hostages have been in captivity on my shirt daily, and the shirts that I buy from the hostages family forum that I wear every day together with the hostage dog tag, and yellow hostage pin and yellow wrist bands on my hand, I sometimes get asked if I have someone there in Gaza. My answer is the same as so many people, “they are all mine.” And nobody finds this a strange answer. They may not express it the same as I do, but most people feel the same way. We are responsible for each other.

So, I ask myself constantly, if this is one of our greatest values as a people, as a nation, how is it that this value, this feeling, this righteous responsibility is so missing from the place that it should be felt, expressed and acted on more than any other place in the country, the government? Isn’t that why we elect them, to serve the people, to care for the people, to be responsible for the people in the best of times and mostly in the worst of times?

Ezer Weitzman, when he was president visited with the family of every fallen soldier and every person who was killed in a terror attack. Of course, the numbers were nowhere near the numbers we face today, but he did it, not only because he felt it was his duty as president, as Citizen number 1, but because he was able to sympathize and empathize, to feel the pain of others. He was a bereaved father and understood the horrendous pain of losing the people we hold so dearly and he acted accordingly and gave comfort to so many.

A country can be measured by so many things but one very important, yet overlooked one is the compassion of the elected leaders for those who elected them. Unfortunately, I have not been able to see any compassion by the majority of those who make up our government. I see purposeful blindness and deafness to the hostages’ continuous suffering, to the plight and trauma of the hostage families, to the families of those who survived or were killed on the worst day of our history. I see apathy and worse, evil contempt among some of them. And I see that they care so much about their own self-interests that they fail in every way to care for the most important things that are around them and us daily since October 7. They are too busy dividing up money for their political strength and personal future, passing laws to give them immunity from crimes they commit as elected servants, to protect themselves and their failed and corrupt coalition, and above everything else, to do all they can do to prevent a State Commission of Inquiry to investigate how October 7 happened, who was responsible and what must be done to make sure it never happens again.

Where are their feelings of responsibility for the other, and I don’t mean the other in the government but the other being the entire population, the people and state they are elected to serve. We, the nation, the people feel and act with this joint responsibility daily, hourly; it is an integral part of our lives and we have seen it more than ever following October 7.

Our government is elected and paid to act on this responsibility at the highest levels and they have failed miserably at the most important job they are there to do and at the most critical times.

Leadership is not about talking. Leadership is about doing, action, working to make all of our lives better and the best way to do that is to understand and act on that value, that principal that which must be the guiding light of everything they do; that we are responsible for each other. Only when we have leaders who can live that value will we have leaders who are worthy of us because we are certainly worthy of that kind of leadership.