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Vicky Ludmer

They are back home

Romi, Doron and Emili.

“So there is hope for your future, says the Lord; and the children shall return to their own land.” Jeremiah 31:16

The mixture of sensations is inevitable: the bittersweet taste in the soul simultaneous with the complete happiness of Doron, Romy and Emily’s return home. The coexistence of relief and fear. Helplessness and hope. Pain and anger.  The feeling that every scenario is Lose – Lose.

For 15 months some of us have been struggling with a permanent mixture of feelings that seem contradictory and difficult to exist at the same time, feelings we can sometimes express, but that most of the time we keep in silence.

The persistent feeling that we are tired of hearing our own voice demanding justice, rationality, empathy while that voice seems mute in front of the rest of the world.

There are individual silences, community silences, national silences.

And on the other side there are aberrant and shameful silences.

In a polarized world like the one we are living in so many areas, here too there are the Ones and the Others.

The Ones have been viciously attacked over and over again since October 7 every day. The sovereign and democratic state of Israel was invaded by unscrupulous, bloodthirsty and cruel terrorists with a single goal: to destroy an entire people. And they did not do it in silence, but by loudly announcing it to all who were attentive to listen. They entered and murdered, raped, burned and kidnapped women, children, elders and men who were peacefully sleeping in their beds, or dancing celebrating the dawn of a new day.

Since that day the horror has multiplied ad infinitum in almost all the cities of the Western and Civilized World. And that is where the Others appear.

Those Others who should never have existed in the illusory belief that the last massive slaughter that occurred during World War II would had been enough. However, the streets of London, Paris, New York, Madrid, Barcelona, Toronto, and so many others have taken the side of the terrorists, and their heads of state have chosen the complicit silence that enabled this suffering to continue over time. Or worse, they have been active participants in the unscrupulous pressure on Israel to feed the beasts.

That silence is what enabled a shameful agreement. That silence is what keeps allowing the masters of terror to direct the scene. An agreement that forced the attacked State to accept an exchange in dribs and drabs, of some of its kidnapped children, 3 per week, up to 33 hostages (not the 94 that are still captive), for hundreds and thousands of convicted terrorists who return like victorious heroes promising to come back for more.

Of course, those same Others who denied the reality of October 7 would never believe any of this to be true. And that is one of the things that continues to allow the chain of terror to keep going. Not a single day had gone by since this hypocritical ceasefire was forced upon Israel and the representatives of the terrorists are already calling on their troops to continue with “the resistance”, understanding “resistance” as massive and indiscriminate attack on Jewish targets.

Now, many of these leaders claim to have contributed to this “peace agreement”. Well, no, you did not. You only facilitated the triumph of terror. Today the world is a more dangerous place, and it will continue to be so in the coming weeks.

On our side, we will continue choosing Life over Death in the same solitude as we have been doing so since the beginning of this nightmare, and to which we are accustomed and we will continue to pay the cost of that choice, with the same bittersweet taste that I spoke of at the beginning.

The objective is clear and there is no doubt.

Everyone must return home. Now.

About the Author
Vicky Ludmer is a lawyer, life coach, NLP practitioner and Jewish educator. She lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a member of Fundacion Pardes, a local masorti congregation and external advisor to Hanoar HaTzioni.
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