The Mathematics of Freedom
There are very few passages that I know, from the moment I first read them, will remain with me forever. One is Natan Sharansky’s description of playing chess against himself in his mind during the long years he spent imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag. His captors could confine his body, but they could not control his mind. In that inner world, he remained free.
Yesterday, I finished reading Avinatan Or’s remarkable new book, From Beneath the Earth, about the 738 days he spent as a Hamas hostage in Gaza. Avinatan is an extraordinary young man, one of those rare people who seem almost too good to be true.
A brilliant electrical engineer working at Nvidia, he went to the Nova music festival with his girlfriend, Noa Argamani. On October 7, 2023, they were kidnapped and violently separated. The images of Noa being taken into Gaza while desperately reaching out toward Avinatan became one of the defining images of that terrible day.
Unlike most of the hostages, Avinatan was held alone throughout his captivity. For 738 days, he lived underground in Gaza, isolated, starved and beaten. Avinatan is nearly two metres tall, yet for much of his captivity he was chained inside a cage barely larger than a mattress and only around 1.8 metres high. He could not even stand upright. Day after day, he was forced to bend his body inside a space too small to contain him.
But he refused to surrender his faith, his dignity or his ability to choose who he would be. Facing an impossible reality, Avinatan decided to take responsibility for his own fate. With extraordinary patience and determination, he secretly planned an escape. Under the eyes of surveillance cameras, he dug more than ten metres with his bare hands, creating his own passage toward freedom.
Eventually, he reached the surface. For a few precious moments, he breathed fresh air and saw the stars for the first time in years. Then his plan was discovered. He was beaten for days and chained even more severely. Everything he had worked toward had collapsed. But Avinatan did not collapse with it. Even after his carefully constructed plan failed, he refused to give up.
Later, while chained inside that small cage, he asked his captors for one thing: a book. Not a novel. Not an adventure story. A mathematics book.
Without paper or any way to write, Avinatan solved advanced, master’s-level mathematical problems in his head. His body was beneath the earth, locked in a Hamas tunnel. But his mind remained his own. Like Natan Sharansky playing chess in a Soviet prison cell, Avinatan Or represents something far greater than physical endurance. He embodies Jewish resilience: the refusal to allow an oppressor to define the limits of our humanity.
Sharansky and the other refuseniks helped shake the world. Their courage exposed the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet regime and contributed to its eventual collapse. Our generation faces a different totalitarian ideology: radical Islamism. Our task is to expose it with the same moral clarity, not as a struggle against Islam or against Muslims, but as a struggle against an extremist ideology that sanctifies death, glorifies terror and attempts to strip its victims of their humanity.
We have a responsibility to tell the story of October 7, 2023. We have a responsibility to share the stories of the Israeli hostages, not only the horror they endured, but also the strength, faith and courage with which they confronted it.
