Where Have All the Big Brothers Gone?

I had just landed back in Israel from a business trip to Copenhagen. For a few days, I’d been away from the heaviness that hovers over this country, breathing in a different rhythm, almost forgetting the constant ache of our current reality.

It was dark at 4:00 am when my taxi from the airport wound its way up the steep road to my village. The driver slowed at the crest of the hill. “Isn’t this where the hostage’s family lives?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered quietly. “Guy Gilboa-Dalal.”

An hour later, I slipped into bed, comforted by the knowledge that my sons were fast asleep at their father’s house just a few minutes away. Safe. Alive. We were the lucky ones.

Just a few floors down lives the Gilboa-Dalal family, whose world has been turned upside down. Their daughter, Gaya, grew up alongside my oldest son. She would come over often, sometimes with friends, sometimes with a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies. Just a young girl doing young girl things. She was especially close to her big brother Guy, who would pile her and my son into his car late at night and take them to friends or out for burgers. My son liked Guy and enjoyed having him around, a kind of big brother figure he never had.

Some days after October 7, my son told me that Guy, 22 years old at the time, was still missing from the Nova Festival and that he may have been taken hostage into Gaza. And then, when the photos surfaced of Guy in the hands of a terrorist, it was confirmed. Our entire village cried out in grief.

That same week, our small community mourned the murder of 22-year-old Idan Haramati, who was also at the Nova Festival. Idan was the big brother of a 13-year-old girl in my younger son’s class. The shiva was flooded with middle school kids. Gaya was there too. So many little brothers and sisters to comfort.

A little more than a month later, we all bowed our heads again when 21-year-old Captain Eden Provisor, a platoon commander and the big brother of a 13-year-old boy in my younger son’s class, fell serving in Gaza.

My kids’ middle school entrance is lined with photos of Guy, Idan and Eden. Big brothers missing, one after the next. Every day, our children walk past those faces. Every day, they carry that weight: a grief that is both personal and collective. And then later, on TikTok, they are bombarded with voices from around the world dismissing their pain, telling them it isn’t real, that they aren’t real, that they aren’t even human. I wonder how this will shape them — their sense of self and their place as Jews and Israelis in the world.

I see Guy’s parents every few days, doing ordinary things: taking out the garbage together, carrying groceries upstairs, chatting as they go. Always in their “Bring Guy Home” T-shirts, like a uniform. Once, in the elevator, his father gave me a gentle, tired smile, looked down at my dog and asked what breed he was. I wished him “Shabbat shalom” as I left, then immediately worried it was the wrong thing to say. How could Shabbat be peaceful when your son has been held hostage for more than 700 days? And yet, there is something profoundly heroic in their ordinariness — the way they keep living, keep laughing at small things, and keep fighting relentlessly for their son’s return.

This September, as the new school year opened, my oldest son left on his Holocaust education trip to Poland. I asked him to take a photo of himself at the gates of Auschwitz as some kind of proof that our family survived that place for four generations now. But the real proof will not be in a photograph. It will be in the way he and his friends learn to carry this impossible inheritance forward: growing up in the absence of the big brothers.