Impromptu Honor Guard

Here’s how it works:

We receive the message via WhatsApp:

Good evening
We are preparing for a flag vigil tonight in honor of receiving a hostage.
According to estimates, the convoy is expected to pass around 10:00 PM at the Tel Gama junction
Thank you to everyone who plans to come. The solidarity, mutual support and the determined and consistent participation in these vigils greatly strengthen the families.
Follow the announcements as there may be changes.
Until the last hostage.

We stop what we are doing.

We go to the closet and don the T-shirt – the one we keep for days like this, soft now from too many washes, its white and red letters faded, but its message never. We pick up the flag, fold it once, twice, and tuck it under our arm. We drive a handful of kilometers; the journey taken too often.

At the junction, we find each other: neighbors who speak the same language of October 7th, friends who survived that massacre and still wake to the taste of longing for that which we have lost forever, yet who are determined to fix and build again. We hug the ones we almost lost. We stand in pairs and small circles and exchange the quiet, quick updates that keep us human. Sometimes we wait hours; other times it’s over in minutes. Eventually, the silence ripples over us like a weightless veil, and someone says, low and laden, “Here they come.”

We go because we must. We go because a van – white, ordinary, marked with a single number on its side – will pass through the crossing carrying someone who wasn’t as lucky as any of us there. We do not know the name, but it is one of 6. It could be the soldier who fell 11 years ago defending our ancestral homeland, then held like a bargaining chip. It could be my former student who grew up, fell in love, started a family, and became an artisanal cheese maker. It could be the Thai worker who came for work and ended up a name in someone else’s nightmare. Or it could be any of the other three. For 763 days, their families have waited, fighting for their return with hope; bargaining with pain.

We stand at the roadside, flags hanging limp in the chill of that waiting for the lights of the convoy to approach. We measure each heartbeat against the van’s approach. We go to help bear their memories and pay our respect. Like a relay race, we help carry the baton along so they do not go on this final journey into Israel alone. We go because it is the least – and sometimes the only – thing we can do to honor the person inside: to give their families back a little dignity, to let them begin, at long last, to bury that which was cruelly and brutally stolen.

If tonight’s van delivers one of our own, and not another anonymous body, there will still be five left. We all await Hadar Goldin, Meny Godard, Ran Gvili, Dror Or, Sudthisak Rinthala, or Lior Rudaeff. Their families, no doubt, will sleep nary a wink tonight, waiting for a confirming call. We count them, not as numbers, but as missing chairs at tables, unfinished conversations, voices absent from the milking and the morning coffee.

It is now Saturday morning. I began writing this late last night when I returned from the vigil, where I saw and hugged many friends from Kibbutz Nir Yitzack, including Ella whose husband we helped lay to rest in their cemetary less than two weeks ago. Now, bleary eyed after staying up late, I have learned that the hostage we accompanied last night was, in fact,  Lior Rudaeff z”l , from Kibbutz Nir Yitzack.  He was the last hostage victim brutally slaughtered and stolen from Nir Yitzack. He was the father of one of my students when they were in high school. Among other things, he was an ambulance driver and volunteer medic, who went out to help the first responders on Oct 7th, was murdered there, and kidnapped. It has also been revealed that he was the second in command on Nir Yitzack’s first responders’ team – a fact which had been kept quiet until now in fear that if the terrorists had been aware of that, the price for his return would be higher; had he been captured alaive, his torutres might have been even more brutal. May his memory be for a blessing.

There are still the remains of 5 hostages being held as bargaining chips in the hellish bowels of Gaza. The Hamas know where they all are, and if they WANT to, could return them today. We must #bringthemallhomeNOW.

I look forward to the day when all the T-shirts can be burned and the last yellow flag repurposed into something soft for a pillow. I expect we will forever question how to keep living with this ledger of loss. For now we stand, we wait, and we remember.  And we hope to get the calls to the junction for the 5 who remain behind, very soon. Only after they are all home and their families can breathe again, can we pick up the pieces which have been put on hold for the past 764 days, to refocus our efforts and energies on continuing to make this desert bloom.