Hapax: Redeeming the Captives or Not

Today’s internet and social networks allow anyone to express an opinion. My own work — writing articles and giving lectures on Talmud, Jewishness, and the Yiddish world — comes from my life as an Israeli archpriest, presently serving in Europe. I have received the blessing to teach Semitic studies within the Eastern Orthodox Church, and I do not act on my own authority.

Some matters may seem “personal,” yet they belong to the life of the faithful, to all who form the Body of Christ. Israel — its destiny, and the many ideologies about Jewishness — does not belong to any one person or institution. I write as a witness to what I have learned and discovered over years of deep involvement in the Semitic dimensions of revelation.

Tisha b’Av draws us into what lies buried in darkness — the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the exile of the people, the wounds of expulsion, persecution, and massacre that recur through Jewish history. The day is called a mo‘ed/מועד, an “appointed time,” not because it celebrates joy, but because it demands that we sit with loss until we hear its deepest echoes.

From there, the tradition leads us slowly toward the light. The seven weeks that follow — the shiv‘a d’neḥemta/שבע דנחמתא, the seven weeks of  consolation, the haftarot/complementary prophetic readings – lift us, step by step, toward Rosh Hashanah. Then the gates of repentance (teshuvah/תשובה) are always open: the gates of responsive return, renewal of the soul, the chance to stand again in covenant.

This arc from lamentation to renewal is not symbolic alone. It is woven into our history from the very beginning. The Exodus began with liberation from bondage. It culminated not in military conquest, but in the giving of Torah at Sinai, where law and discernment were bound to memory and gratitude. From then on, our survival was never simply the survival of bodies. It was the survival of a way of being: freeing the captive, guarding the stranger, protecting the weak, even in war.

The Talmud and halachic literature hold fast to this continuity. The mitzvah of pidyon shvuyim – redeeming captives – is not an optional virtue. The Shulḥan Arukh rules:

“פדיון שבויים מצוה רבה היא, מפני שהשבוי רעב וצמא וערום, ועומד בסכנת נפשות; והמעלים עיניו מהם, עובר על לא תאמץ את לבבך (דברים טו,ז), ולא תקפוץ את ידך (שם), ובטל מצות פתוח תפתח את ידך (שם, ח), ומצות וחי אחיך עמך (ויקרא כה,לו), ומצות ואהבת לרעך כמוך (שם יט,יח), ומצות הצילם לקוחים למות (משלי כד,יא); ואין לך מצוה גדולה כפדיון שבויים.”
“Redeeming captives is a great mitzvah because captives are hungry, thirsty, naked, and in danger of their lives; one who averts his eyes from them transgresses ‘Do not harden your heart’ (Deut. 15:7) and ‘Do not shut your hand’ (ibid.), neglects the mitzvah ‘You shall surely open your hand’ (Deut. 15:8), the mitzvah ‘Your brother shall live with you’ (Lev. 25:36), the mitzvah ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ (Lev. 19:18), and the mitzvah ‘Rescue those taken to death’ (Prov. 24:11). And there is no mitzvah greater than redeeming captives.” (Shulḥan Arukh, Yoreh De‘ah 252:1)

The Talmud in Bava Batra (8b) declares:

“אין לך מצוה גדולה כפדיון שבויים.” – “There is no mitzvah greater than redeeming captives.”

And Rav Aḥa bar Abba adds:

“שביה קשה מן הרעב ומן המוות.” – “Captivity is worse than famine and worse than death.”

Maimonides echoes this in Mishneh Torah (Hilkhot Matanot Aniyim 8:10), adding that one who delays is “like a shedder of blood.”

This is not marginal law. It lives in the prayers of every morning: matir asurim/מתיר אסורים – “Blessed are You… who frees the bound” (Berakhot 60b). To utter it while turning away from captives is to hollow out the blessing itself.

In every age, this imperative has been tested. Medieval communities risked ruin to ransom those seized by pirates or hostile rulers. During pogroms, Jews hid the hunted at the cost of their own lives. Even in mortal danger, the instinct — and the halachic demand — was to redeem the captive first.

Which is why the question before us is so grave. Have we ever, in all our catastrophe-marked history, faced a moment in which the lives of Jewish captives were not treated as the supreme, overriding priority?

History offers parallels, but not equivalents. Under Nazi rule, the Judenräte were forced to carry out orders under lethal threat. Adam Czerniaków in Warsaw chose suicide rather than sign away the children. Chaim Rumkowski in Łódź chose obedience to the occupiers, consolidating his own power as his community diminished. These choices haunt us because they show how even in extremity, moral responsibility can be embraced or abandoned.

And yet, the present rupture is harsher still: then, Jewish leaders acted as captives themselves, under the boot of a genocidal occupier; now, a sovereign Jewish state, free to choose, appears to set aside the supreme commandment that our tradition has never suspended, in any generation.

I am aware of the complexity of the political and military considerations involved in any negotiation for hostages. Yet the halachic imperative stands above such calculations, as it has in every generation, because life in captivity is itself a form of slow death.

Such a break is not only political; it is theological. Pesach teaches that liberation is the foundation of covenant. Sinai teaches that covenant demands discernment. The mitzvot teach that life in captivity must not be weighed against abstractions of strategy or reputation. To set aside that law is to step outside the very pattern by which Jewishness has known itself.

And here, in the same land, another voice has spoken – from a tradition long marked by its own wounds toward the Jewish people. The local Oriental and Eastern Orthodox Churches have never formally set aside the ancient charge of deicide; no Orthodox Church has revised its theological stance since Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate removed or rather cached that accusation from Catholic doctrine. The Council’s decision is partial since it is a part of the classical Christian creed as expressed by the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. The word and the notion hardly can be removed without full consent of all the concerned denominations. There is no consent on this, since Jesus of Nazareth is confessed as “divine”. This unhealed teaching still casts a shadow, contributing to a certain blurring in Christian responses to Jewish suffering.

Yet in October 2023, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, offered himself in exchange for a child hostage. Whatever the doctrinal tensions between our faiths, this was an act entirely in harmony with the Torah’s command and the Halachah’s highest priorities as well as the Christian duty to ransom the captives – pidyon shvuyim/פדיון שבויים. It was also in continuity with the witness of Moses – “Erase me from Your book if You do not forgive them” (Exodus 32:32).

In the Christian Scriptures, the words of Jesus himself carry this same moral arc: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). Saints across centuries have lived this call: Saint Vincent de Paul, known for his tireless service to the poor, organized missions to ransom Christian captives in North Africa; and Saint Gregory Palamas, himself ransomed from captivity, preached to fellow prisoners and amazed even his captors with his steadfastness.

The historian Georges Bensoussan has said that, at present, genocide corresponds to deicide — the attempt to erase the people bound to God’s covenant. If that is so, then every refusal to confront genocide, every blurring of the duty to save life, participates in that logic. In this light, Pizzaballa’s gesture stands as a rare reversal: a willingness to bear the cost oneself to restore another’s life.

The duty to redeem the captives is not only Jewish Law. It is a shared human ethic across faiths and nations. Its abandonment is therefore not only a rupture within our covenant, but a failure visible to the world – a wound to the very idea of moral responsibility.

If others can recognize and live our own most urgent mitzvah, how much more must we, to whom it was first given, refuse to abandon it.

As Tisha b’Av recedes and the shofar of Rosh Hashanah draws near, the gates of judgment will not ask for our strategies, our polls, or our political calculations. They will ask only this: when your brothers and sisters were held captive, what did you do to bring them home?

“Nachmu, nachmu immi/נחמו, מחמו עמי – comfort, comfort with Me (not only My People) is the vocalized alternative of a commandment, a duty, a plight, just a signal of true humanity and creed that has to be shown now. Now, not to break centuries of decency.