On the eve of Shemini Atzeret, you couldn’t make it up
On the eve of Shemini Atzeret, the festival that celebrates the ultimate oneness between God and His people, Israel stands on the verge of another kind of homecoming. After two years of heartbreak and division, the news that hostages may finally be returning feels almost scripted by Heaven itself. You couldn’t make it up. The festival of unity, unfolding just as our brothers and sisters are set to come home, reminds us that Jewish history doesn’t run on coincidence. It runs on covenant.
Shemini Atzeret is the quietest of all our festivals. No shofar, no sukkah, no lulav. Just one request from God: “Stay with Me one more day.” It is the day of pure relationship, of oneness, of closeness beyond words. The Talmud says that after the intensity of the festivals, God cannot bear to part from His people. So He asks us to linger, to be together a little longer.
Two years ago, on this very day, Shemini Atzeret, 7 October, the Jewish people experienced the most horrific attack on Jews in modern history. The day that should have symbolized unity became a day of unimaginable rupture. At that time, the Jewish people were bitterly divided, one against another. Even our enemies themselves proclaimed that they saw our division as our weakness, and it gave them the confidence to attack.
And yet, here we are, two years later, on the eve of the same festival, watching as those torn from us are set to return. The circle is closing. What was broken begins to mend. Too many have died. Too few are returning alive. And yet, there is something almost prophetic in the timing, something that whispers that even after the longest night, the dawn still comes.
Over these two years, I have spoken with Jews across the world, in Israel, in London, in New York, in Johannesburg, and despite the pain, despite the distance, there is a quiet truth emerging: we are more one than we have been in a generation. Beneath the noise and the fear, there is love. Beneath the difference, there is family.
When I was recently in Johannesburg, I was struck by something small yet deeply moving. In the parking lot of a kosher supermarket, there was a single empty space with a sign that read: “No parking in this spot until the hostages return.” That image stayed with me. It inspired us to place an empty chair in our JLE Centre in London, a chair draped with a yellow ribbon and the names of those still held captive. I have since learned that similar gestures exist in Jewish communities around the world.
So perhaps it is not coincidence that as we enter Shemini Atzeret, the festival of oneness, our brothers and sisters may at last come home. The hostages’ return is not only a political event. It is a spiritual one. It reminds us that the Jewish story, even in its darkest hour, is never without hope.
We are the smallest of nations, but the largest of families. And when we act like a family, when we feel each other’s pain, pray for each other’s safety, and celebrate each other’s joy, we are unstoppable.
Kohelet tells us that “for everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” Twenty-eight times he lists the changing rhythms of life: a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time for war and a time for peace. These are not just poetic reflections. They are the story of the Jewish people. Across our history, we have lived through every one of those times, exile and return, despair and hope, tears and song.
The sages taught that the world will exist for six thousand years, six millennia of human struggle and striving, before entering its seventh, the age of peace. If that is true, then we are now living in the final two hundred years of that vast story. The closing pages of history. And perhaps, just perhaps, this moment, when the Jewish people are yearning not for victory but for unity, not for power but for peace, is part of that final turning.
May it be said of our generation that from division came unity, and from darkness, light.
