Day 599: Looking Back at Black
From 100 to 599
I’ll never forget being at Kikar Chatufim, Hostage Square in Tel Aviv, on day 100.
Everything about that day was beyond belief and comprehension. So many family members of so many chatufim. So much anguish and sadness etched into their faces. So many survivors from so many kibbutzim, and the feeling that their hearts had been ripped to shreds.
That was day 100. 100 was a truly impossible number to grasp, a number that compounded everything else that was so horrifically incomprehensible.
Let Freedom Ring
On that day, a large liberty-like bell was set up at the square while small copper bells were distributed to everyone that was there. At the same anguish-drenched moment, all those bells tolled—like crippled shofars—as we desperately urged our prayers heavenward.
That was day 100. A number impossible to grasp.
599
Today is day 599.
Tomorrow will be 600.
Do any of us have the slightest idea what to do with that? How could we?
There is very little we Jews haven’t gone through, but this is different. In all our history, past and recent, our people have never been traumatized in this way. Just when we thought we’d suffered every suffering on God’s earth, and that such sufferings were behind us: This. This! Oh God not thiiiiiis.
In This Moment
In this moment—
As we sit, read, eat, walk, work, nap, pray, and cook—
There are Jews being held in torture chambers that we thought only existed in the past, or in some disgustingly graphic movie set in the Middle Ages. In this very real moment, Jews are being tortured. Not held as captives, not mistreated, not imprisoned; they are being brutally and viciously tortured—physically, sexually, and mentally—in the ghastliest ways imaginable. Those who have come home have shared bits of the horror, though far from everything.
In this day 599 moment: What do we do with ourselves? With this question that has no answer.
600
Blank.
Black.
Empty.
Howling horror.
600.
6,000,000
600.
6 …
In honor of the soldiers fighting to bring our brothers and sisters home.
Fighting to protect us all.
May God watch over them and grant them complete success.
