Why I went and why I stay

“Do you ever think about leaving?” my thirty-one-year-old daughter asked me last Shabbat, after returning from working on staff at Ramah in the Rockies all summer. “The kids there have such an easy, secure life. Don’t you ever think about living where you don’t have to worry so much about your children getting killed? Or being traumatized by their friends being killed?”

She asked this likely within hours of when Hersh, Carmel, Eden, Ori, Almog, and Alexander were murdered.

My daughter was thinking about my son, her twenty-one-year-old brother, who has already lost two friends during this war. Both were soldiers in Gaza. And his best friend since childhood was seriously wounded but, thankfully, survived; the soldier sitting next to him did not. And before the war, another friend, also a soldier, ended his own life. These have been very hard years for my poor son. But at least he is still alive. He could very well have been at the Nova festival.

I was at Hersh’s funeral. I deliberated about whether to go. I live two hours from Jerusalem, and I did not want to be a voyeur in someone else’s pain. I never met Hersh, and while I did meet and stand with his parents at demonstrations, we are not friends. I feel close to them after hearing them speak and reading about them (as so many of us do), but as a memoirist, I know what it is like for others to feel they know you intimately, when you know much less about them, if anything at all.

My family in the US did meet Hersh. They know him and his family from Passovers at Ramah Darom. And my spouse, Jacob, knows Jon from before October 7^th, through work connections. We moved from Jerusalem to Kibbutz Hannaton in the Galilee before he and Rachel moved to Jerusalem from Berkley.

My personal connection is with Hersh’s grandmother, Leah, who lives in the US. In 2020, when Jacob was diagnosed with Pemphigus Vulgaris, a rare autoimmune skin disease that is fatal if not treated, Jon told Jacob his late father had had the same disease. I got Leah’s email address from my mother, and we began corresponding.

Jacob was misdiagnosed for months before he was hospitalized. Finally, baffled, the doctors told him to check himself into Rambam hospital, where they have a good skin clinic, and where he was finally diagnosed correctly. But the disease had already progressed considerably.

Jacob spent a month at Rambam (during the COVID pandemic, which made it even harder). Leah offered the kind of emotional and practical support only the spouse of someone with the same disease as your spouse can offer. When the steroids they were giving Jacob were not working, she urged me to pressure the doctors to give him an infusion of Rituxin, the more expensive (but thankfully covered by our socialized medicine health care provider) but also more effective (and with fewer side effects) method to treat the disease.

And it worked. Jacob receives Rituxin infusions now every year, and thanks to that, and to Leah, he is in remission.

I tell you this because it is what I recalled when trying to decide if I should go to the funeral. It reminded me that we are all connected, that we all must take care of, support, and advocate for one another. Especially when those with authority who are meant to be taking care of us are prioritizing other interests over our best interests — whether it be money, power, bureaucracy, politics…

So, I went to Hersh’s funeral, along with Jacob, although I did not approach Leah, still did not want to infringe upon her much more personal pain and need to be surrounded by family and people who knew and loved her grandson. But while listening to one heartbreakingly beautiful eulogy after another, I sent Leah and her family healing and supportive energy, even if not through physical touch or eye contact. As she had done for me.

And then I went to the protest in front of Bibi Netanyahu’s Jerusalem home — to try and help bring the other hostages home. That is what Rachel said Hersh would have been doing and would have wanted us to do. That was the central message of all the speakers at the demonstration — hostages’ family members who desperately urged us all to arise and take responsibility where our leaders are refusing to do so, because they do not have the hostages or our best interests at heart.

There were six mock coffins at the demonstration, representing the six murdered hostages. Behind the coffins, there was a large banner with a photo of Hersh, from the video Hamas had sent on Passover. It read, “What if it had been your son?”

The banner reads, “What if it had been your son?” Photo Credit: Haviva Ner-David

And yes, it could have been my son. Just as my daughter had said a few days before. It was by sheer luck that it was not my son, or any other of my seven children. Not only because they like to dance in nature, but also because we could easily have chosen to live on a kibbutz in the Gaza Envelope instead of one in the Galilee.

When we moved to Israel, we knew there was a chance our children could be killed in battle. Or even in a terror attack. We were living in Jerusalem during the second intifada. Every day I lived with the fear one of our kids (or I or Jacob) would be blown up on a bus or in a café.

But never had I imagined Rachel and Jon’s reality – my child, severely wounded, being abducted from a dance party, tortured for eleven months in captivity, and then executed, while the Prime Minister – whose brother gave his life to save hostages in the Antebbe rescue operation– dragged his feet and caved into the extremist zealots (ready to sacrifice others’ lives, not their own) he himself had appointed, knowing full well what that meant. All to save his own political power.

So, what do I tell my daughter? And my son? And all my children who have paid the price of our choice to move here?

I tell her I do think of leaving. Almost every day.

But then I choose to stay, at least for now. Because I also know the feeling of standing in protest with 500,000 people at Begin Bridge the night after the news came out of Hersh’s and the other five hostages’ deaths. It was that feeling that brought me to Israel in the first place.

I grew up on the story of Entebbe. And while today I know I was not told the whole story of this flawed country, one thing that still stands is that feeling of being part of something bigger than myself, of living in a country of people who care about the country itself and about each other – even if our current government has abandoned us. Even if our current “leaders” are leading us into an abyss — an abyss of self-interest, cowardliness, narrow vision, and war, that cannot be sustained in the long run.

If we all leave, who will fight for the rest of the hostages? Who will fight for the future of this country? How can we leave it in the hands of Netanyahu and his ministers?

Up on the stage at Sunday night’s Tel Aviv protest, stood leader Einav Zangauker (mother of the hostage Matan), with Shachar Moor (“Zahiro”), nephew of Avram Munder, by her side. Up until a few weeks ago, we had all thought Munder was still alive, but it seems he was executed, too, along with the five other hostages whose bodies were found by the IDF along with his. Yet he still stood by Einav’s side on Sunday evening.

Shachar did not know Einav before October 7^th. She is a Likkudnik from Ofakim, and he, a radical lefty from Tel Aviv. They have been leaders of the struggle for the hostages, fighting side-by-side, like family. And he is still fighting for the hostages, even as the struggle to bring his Uncle Avram back alive has been lost.

Israel is a tiny country, which can feel suffocating at times, especially after spending your summer in the Rocky Mountains. But the flip side of suffocating is the warm embrace the Goldberg-Polin family and all the hostage families have received from so many people here.

Not from the government, who has literally beaten them down, but from the people. We may have a government that abandons its citizens, but we are a country who embraces one another, especially in hard times.

As I write this at 1am, there are people still out blocking the Ayalon Highway. Because they care about the hostages. Some have never met even one hostage, but they have stopped or altered their lives to fight for their return. That is not something you have everywhere, and that is worth staying and fighting for. After all, we are all connected, as Leah and her family, and so many other families of hostages have taught me.

That is what I will tell my daughter.