The Hostages Came Home. Our Illusions Cannot

During Sukkot, we read from Ecclesiastes. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.” A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. This year, those ancient words carried a heavier weight. As the holiday came to a close and the hostages began returning home, Israelis and Jews worldwide have found ourselves straddling those times all at once. Joy and grief. Relief and rage. Hope and hurt.

The scenes yesterday deeply, undeniably human. Parents embraced children they thought they might never see again. Strangers stood together in the streets, crying for people they did not know. After 738 days in captivity, these returns offer us a sacred kind of healing. We thank G-d for that. We thank the soldiers, the negotiators, and the families who never stopped believing.

And yet, this moment of redemption does not mean we can move on.

For decades, the phrase Never Forget has shaped our collective consciousness, reminding us that our memory serves a purpose. Never Forget means refusing to be lulled into complacency. It means carrying the trauma of the Holocaust not as a wound that festers, but as a lesson that protects. Now, that phrase must grow. We must make room for October 7. We must carry that day with us in the same way. We can Never Forget what happened when so many of us were dancing with Torah scrolls and opening our sukkot to guests. We must remember what it felt like to wake up to horror in our homeland.

October 7 was more than a national security breach. It was a rupture in our collective sense of safety. The images are burned into us now — burned into families, burned into the national psyche. We lost lives, yes. But we also lost a kind of trust in our institutions. In the world. In the idea that something like that could never happen again.

We rejoice that the hostages have been returned. But we can’t confuse a single act of mercy with a full accounting of justice. The price we paid was steep. Nearly two thousand Palestinian prisoners were released, some of whom were convicted of heinous crimes. This was not a moral equation. It was a necessity born of unbearable pain and suffering, and it must not become a precedent. If this chapter is remembered only as a diplomatic success or an emotional turning point, we will have learned nothing.

What we need now is not just policy reform or defense upgrades, though both are essential. What we need is a permanent shift in how we live with our memory. Just as we teach children about Auschwitz and Treblinka, we must teach them about Kfar Aza and Be’eri. Just as we read testimonies of survivors, we must preserve the stories of those who hid in safe rooms and watched their loved ones taken. Just as we mark Holocaust Remembrance Day with national silence and prayer, we must find ways to ritualize the memory of October 7 so that it never blurs into the background noise of history.

Sukkot reminds us of life’s fragility. Ecclesiastes reminds us that everything passes. But we are not called to surrender to that truth. We are called to respond to it. The sukkah is flimsy, yet we dwell in it with intention. The body is mortal, yet we cherish it with care. National security, too, is fragile. And if we forget that, we risk losing everything.

The return of the hostages is a moment of grace, but it can also be a moment of resolve. We cannot afford to go back to how things were. We cannot afford a selective memory.

Never Forget can no longer refer only to the atrocities of our past. It must include the trauma of the last two years. It must hold October 7 as firmly as it holds Yom HaShoah. This is how we honor the dead. And this, I believe, is how we protect the living.