To the Victims of Faith

Photo credit: Este Abramowitz. “Hostage Q&A.”

After this last round of survivors, it’s hard to listen to any critics of the deal. At this point in time, one should be ashamed not to try to do everything in their power to support these terrifying physical “remains” of humans and hope that the rest will all come out soon.

At the outset, before the deal was approved, I agreed with its opponents’ logic. But now, once it’s happening and there is nothing that we can do about it, the criticism—based on future and potential occurrences that only happen under Gd—needs to stop.

I look at it from the language of Halacha. For centuries, Rabbanim have paskened on Shailos within the framework of “lechatchilah”, at first resort, and “b’dieved”—or after the fact, at final resort. Lechatchilah, such a deal should never have gone through: Everybody agrees that the prisoner to hostage ratio which Israel agreed upon is overwhelmingly disproportionate and that the country needed to see the war until its very end.

But b’dieved—after the fact, at last resort—once the deal is on and more hostages are beginning to return (and in dismal conditions), it is upon us to accept the reality and open our arms in a full embrace to those individuals who still remain in suffering. After this last release of holy men in the form of skeletal frames, who dares to offer a dissenting voice to the plan?

In Jewish law, the priority of hatzalas nefashos, rescuing souls, triumphs over any other mitzvah, even Biblical ones: We desecrate Shabbos to rush someone to the hospital; a severely ill person fasts on Yom Kippur; and sometimes even, in extenuating circumstances, hilchos niddah are put on hold if a woman needs her husband’s help.

That is, in order to save lives that are currently in danger, we press pause on the natural order of our lives and our firm religious ways. If Torah allows for this, then logic follows that our hearts must too.

Arguments opposing saving Jewish lives within the depths of Gaza involve the dishonoring of lives lost from war and terrorism in releasing new prisoners and raise concerns for the endangering of lives in the future by the same token. However, pikuach nefesh—the urgency of saving a soul—especially when it comes to the exceptional mitzvah of pidyon shvuyim (redeeming captives) is in the now. We barely have control over the present, but what we certainly do not have control over is what happened in the past and what will happen in the future.

Again, we do everything we can to honor and value the dead as well as protect our nation in the future. But once we did what we could to mitigate concerns for both groups of people, and there are present lives in danger, we work with the now.

Forty years ago, major Rabbinic figures like the Lubavitcher Rebbe were vehemently opposing any such negotiations as they encourage more hostage-taking. Even centuries back, in the thirteenth century, when the Maharam Mi’Rothenberg, the leading Torah authority of Germany and Western Europe at large, was imprisoned by the government for being Jewish, he refused the large ransom his community collected, fearing this would only encourage the wicked to continue abusing their power, capturing more Jewish lives for an even higher price. Undoubtedly, these are all valuable pieces to our history.

A few weeks ago, after having read Dovid Lichtenstein’s halachic discussion of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange and the opinions that strongly opposed it, in his fantastic book Headlines, I submitted a basic halachic question to a person of great value. This Rav, Rabbi Yehudah Mandel, a man of great Bitachon (literally, “feeling security in Gd”) responded that he doesn’t necessarily hold a popular opinion yet he supports Rav Yosef Yosef’s psak that you do everything you can to save a Jewish life. Rabbi Yehuda Mandel then added that the Palestinian prisoners don’t “impress” him. We hope and daven for the best and have a little faith that, once we did everything we could to get an ideal situation (hishtadlus or effort), HaShem will take care of them and He will protect us.

In other words, from the perspective of a faithful Jew, nothing ever happened in our world, happens or will happen without His Will. So to those obnoxious voices who still criticize that more Jews are about to come out of Earth’s hell and that this should never happen at the expense of future and past sacrifices, I say:

Have a little faith in Gd. Stop putting your faith in others and in the will of evil to succeed. Gd wills it, it happens. Period. And if you don’t believe that, then you’re a victim of your own faith.

Then I’d finish off, to the dissenting intellectual, with a little pointer: Start taking your daily dose of Vitamin E, for Emunah, and pray that your families will continue to remain safe, and that the ones who do come home standing have a quick recovery and can continue to sanctify HaShem’s name.