The cards I hold

In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
– Abraham Joshua Heschel

I started collecting these cards in late October 2023, when my wife and I traveled from Jerusalem to Los Angeles. The war showed no signs of coming to a quick end, and we were able to spend two weeks with our daughters. I attended a weekday morning service at a Persian synagogue where they handed me a laminated card printed with the names of four Israeli hostages. “Pray for them,” I was instructed. It was my first card.

Back in Jerusalem, cards were distributed at synagogue events, at Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, even weddings. “Pray for the hostages,” we were exhorted. I did. I still do. Some cards simply have names printed on them, some with prayers. Some are on high quality stock and some are large format, printed on both sides and with photos of smiling faces – fathers with their toddlers, older men comfortable later in life. I continue to carry them with me. It is not enough.

I don’t wear a yellow ribbon pin or BRING THEM HOME dog tags. I don’t criticize people who do, but making public statements doesn’t make me feel more engaged or effective than my fearful daily visit with God and the small group of hostages whose names have been placed into my hands, as though their lives were placed in my care. As though I, with my words, might accomplish what this entire nation failed to do.

It has been a long war. As much as I have added cards to my stack, I have sadly removed some. Two cards in particular. I remember the shock when they were placed in my hand and I read the names. One card, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, I retired last August, the day before standing in silence with the hundreds who lined Pierre Koenig Boulevard in southern Jerusalem as his body passed on the way to burial.

Now I have put away another card, printed with the name Ariel ben Shiri: Ariel Bibas, the red-headed 4-year-old who has at last been buried together with his mother and his baby brother.

(courtesy)

When news came of the release of the boys’ bodies, we called friends, friends called us – a scenario that played out throughout the Jewish community in Israel and around the world. Like Hersh before them, the Bibas family – 4-year-old Ariel, his 9-month-old brother Kfir and their mother Shiri – had become totemic. Like Hersh, they symbolized all the hostages. The nation clung to them in hope and prayer, some of us by reading their names quietly during prayer services. Others, by constantly checking news services, by commiserating together,  by weeping each day for these innocents whom we had not known, and who had in an instant become intimate and beloved family members to us all.

The way the Bibas family were treated by their captors – both in life and in the manner of their death – is likewise the totem of the evil and hatred we face. Five hundred days separate the fearful images of Shiri holding her children as they are dragged into Gaza and the final revelation of the manner of their death. Between the hope that they might survive this ordeal and the moment when their battered bodies were at last given burial in their homeland. Five hundred days during which our world has been upended time and again.

If we need more cards, more reasons to pray in desperation and fear, we need look no further than our own grim reality.

Hamas is a genocidal organization committed to the annihilation of both the nation and the people of Israel. But the magnitude of the carnage on October 7^th is attributable to our own inability to protect ourselves. It is easy to take shots at the military, particularly when they are taking responsibility publicly. This week’s news details myriad failures by the Israel Defense Forces in the lead-up to October 7, and on the day itself.

But how much of that responsibility do we share? Let us add to the cards we pray over each day.

Take a card for those who promoted a belief that Hamas can be bought off, or even become rational, and that somehow we can live together. Take a card for the conviction that the Palestinians are weak, primitive, uneducated and pathetic, and that we can out-think them, out-negotiate them, and out-fight them on the battlefield. For believing that every terrorist has his price and for – unbelievably – repeatedly returning to office a prime minister who openly funnels hundreds of millions of dollars to an entity dedicated to our eradication, and his cronies who champion this policy.

Take another card for that same prime minister who, 500 days into this war, refuses to appoint a committee of inquiry, and another card for a weak and disorganized opposition, too focused on the image of their own moral integrity to get down and dirty in the business of politics for the good of the nation.

We do not demand enough of our leaders. Another card, please. We do not demand enough of ourselves. More cards…

Should the government appoint a commission of inquiry? The fact that it has not done so heralds a government no longer beholden to the will or the interests of its people. Whatever one’s political orientation, this disaster happened on this government’s watch. Our failure to hold them accountable says that our priorities have more to do with finding people to blame than with creating a new reality.

We – collectively – are responsible for our nation and for our people. I don’t know how to fix everything that is broken in our society. But the first step towards repairing the internal damage is accepting responsibility for what is wrong. This is what it means to be a citizen in a functioning democracy: everyone bears some measure of responsibility. We must be willing to engage in unpleasant conversations. Rather than calling them names and brushing them off as pathetic – the same mistake we made with Hamas – we need to find ways to speak with people who refuse to hear us. Exhausting and demoralizing as it is, we need to become politically engaged in ways that influence the power structure rather than merely marching and chanting our disapproval. As we think of new ways to insult each other, can we also remember that we are all limbs of one body? That an injury to one of us injures us all?

Some people say that the generation of Israelis now fighting in Gaza will emerge as a political force that will sweep out tribalism and corruption and establish a government that will work for the good of the nation and its people – its people, not its factions. After more than 500 days, with 59 hostages still held in Gaza and with hundreds of Israelis dead, surely this is not too much to ask. It is worth praying for.

Until then, I continue to pray over these names printed on slips of paper, frayed at the edges from being handled each morning. Three times each day, in the Amidah prayer, we recite the blessing of God “Who releases prisoners.” It is time we stop relying on God alone. If there is any purpose to our lives – as individuals and as the Jewish people – it cannot be to despise each other and sit in judgment on one another. Our people need new leadership. Our people need us. If we are not equal to the task, then I must ask you to write my name on a card and pray for me too. And while you’re at it, pray for yourselves.