He's alive ... and so are we.
A three minute video has shaken this country to its core, and in our community, brought great hope, joy, relief, rage, heartbreak and a determination to do something.
Here’s the WhatsApp that went out to our community this morning, after we’d all gotten home from a morning service held at the Hostage Families Tent (more on which below), just outside the PM’s “home” (where he doesn’t live … but that’s also another story).
The translation follows the screenshot:
INSTRUCTIONS:
To get the stench off your body, you need to shower for at least 30 minutes using Mint-scented Head and Shoulders, or you can lather your body in tomato sauce or ketchup.
As for clothes, white clothes should be soaked several times and then laundered with bleach and then washed once again with regular detergent.
Colored clothes should be soaked either in vinegar or in soda water, and then washed using regular detergent.
And shoes … soak the shoes for a long period in water, and then soak them again in vinegar or soda water for several more hours.
….
Then there’s more about soles of shoes, hats, etc. But you get the idea.
What led us here? A day in the life of a broken-hearted community that got a ray of light from Hamas.
We’ll start with yesterday afternoon.
Late in the afternoon, yesterday, my wife asked me, “Did you see about Hersh?”
We have grandchildren staying with us for the first part of Pesach, and I’d been busy trying (not very successfully) to make sure that our house didn’t look like it had taken a direct hit from Iran. So I’d not checked my phone in a while.
“No, what?” I had a horrible sinking feeling.
“He’s alive. There’s a video.”
At that point, most Israeli media was not showing the video, because it was clearly an attempt by Hamas to screw with our minds. But it was easy to find. Ha’aretz didn’t post it but linked to a Tweet that had it, and soon enough, it was all over Israeli social media.
Later, Hersh’s family explicitly gave their consent to have the video shown, so with that permission in mind, on the off, off chance you haven’t seen it, here it is. Yes, it’s a horribly cruel move by Hamas, but all of Israel is watching it, so you might as well know what everyone here is responding to.
Interestingly, the English translation isn’t all that precise—kind of strange that Hamas can dictate a Hebrew text for him to “perform,” but can’t get the English right. But whatever …
Shortly after I read that the video had come out (I hadn’t yet seen the video), we sat down with our kids and grandchildren for dinner. Despite our “no phones at dinner rule,” I stole a peak at my WhatsApp feed. There was a slew of messages from our minyan:
EVERYONE MOVE NOW! EVERYONE TO AZA STREET. Today, April 24, a video of Hersh was released, with the first sign of life. And it’s up to us to make sure that it’s not the last. We’re calling on everyone who can, to come at 6:30 pm to Aza Street and to demand from the Prime Minister: A HOSTAGE DEAL NOW!
But by then it was way after 6:30, more like 7:30, and people were posting, “Is it still relevant to go?” YES, or VERY were the answers. I grabbed my keys, kissed the grandchildren and ran out the door.
It wasn’t a huge crowd, but it was a desperate, angry crowd. A couple hundred people, at most, newly reminded that someone many of them know and love, was alive in Hamas hell, desperate for us to get him (and many others, hopefully) out.
By the time I got there, someone had lit a fire in the middle of the street. And people were blocking an intersection. Not a huge intersection, but an intersection. It was clear: this was not going to be a “color inside the lines” protest.
There were a lot of cops, but so far, they were more watching than anything.
I stood next to someone I know from our minyan, watching the partly relieved, partly horrified crowd. He turned to me and said, “What a complete mind F***.”
And that it was. Precisely what Hamas intended.
At a certain point, though, the crowd started to move towards Paris Square, where there was a much more significant intersection to block. The cops got serious, and within minutes, there were dozens of army border patrol women and men running through the crowd, not trying hard at all not to bump into people. They wanted us to know that they were there.
When the crowd got to the main intersection in the area, the cops up’ed their game. I took the following video. You can see the bus in parts of it, going nowhere. What you can’t see is the long line of cars behind it, with nowhere to go (until the cops forced people out of the intersection).
(I sent my wife a copy the video from right there. When I got home she told me that the women officers looked scared. I hadn’t seen it at the time, but in retrospect, it does, indeed, look that way. I can understand them. Not how they’d thought they’d be spending the evening. All of us were in the same square, caught in the same horror show, but “assigned” different roles.)
I’ll come back to the US campus protests below, but at this point I will note that even as the cops used a bit of force to get people off their streets and out of the intersection, I didn’t hear a single person say a single nasty thing to a single cop. They were doing their job, we understood.
They were doing their jobs, but we were also doing ours. Tragically, we’re in this together. But as tense as it was, and as close as it got to being not quite non-violent, there was no hate in the air. Not at anyone present, at least.
This was in front of the Kings Hotel (founded in 1956, mere eight years after there actually was a king here …)
The rest of the evening doesn’t matter much. The crowd split into groups, going in different directions. The cops, at at certain point, had had enough. They made a few arrests, and got much more physical.
Yes, I assume some readers are now saying to themselves, “Well, that’s what you get. People have no right to block intersections.” And that’s true, as far as it goes. But if it were your kid in there for 201 ways, what would YOU do? What would YOU want others to do? Write letters to the editor?
There’s no easy call here.
As the crowd dispersed, people kept in touch via WhatsApp.
8:21 — “where should we go now?”
8:22 — “King George”
8:36 — “Bezalel Street, near Sacher Park”
Then, a change in tone:
8:49 — “They’re using water canons and skunk water at the corner of Ben Zvi and Bezalel.”
Which brings us to the laundry instructions.
Later in the evening, even before many of us got home, there was another call to show up. This time for the morning, at a service to be held at the Hostage Families’ Tent, just outside the Prime Minister’s house that Bibi doesn’t live in.
Shacharit service for Chol Ha-Mo’ed Pesach—TOMORROW. Thursday, 17th of Nissan, April 25. 8:00 am At the Hostage Tent on Balfour. Bring a siddur.
🎗️ 🎗️ 🎗️
“Be at rest, once again, O my soul, for the LORD has been good to you. You have delivered me from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. I shall walk before the LORD in the lands of the living.”1
With prayers for the return of Hersh along with all the other hostages. ❤️
We showed. In fact, the overlap between those protesting the night before and those who showed up in the morning was stunning. Not 1:1, but a lot of overlap.
Walking to the location, though, I was suddenly struck the the horrific stink. For a second, I thought that maybe I’d stepped in something nasty, but then I realized. The cops had sprayed the Hostage Family Tent area with skunk water, too. As far as I know, there was no protest there when they did it (though I could be wrong), in which case it was completely gratuitous.
But there is was, disgusting and nauseating. And hence the instructions for laundry, likely more for what had been done the night before ….
This morning, the scene could not have been more starkly different. (You can see the Hostage Families Tent off to the far right.)
Again, a few hundred people. This time taking care not to block the street, this time directing their attention not at the government, but to heaven.
The follow was during Hallel. The verse being sung at the moment, quite appropriate to the moment, was Psalms 118:5:
In distress I called on the LORD;
the Lord answered me and brought me relief.
We were there for an hour and a bit (that’s how long it takes on Pesach), and went home.
Not all of us, of course. 133 people got nowhere near home.
I sent the above video to a friend who’s a rabbi in the States (what he was doing up at that hour I do not know.)
Actually, it did, in fact, feel holy.
Both last night and today, as horrible as these past two years have been here, I felt blessed beyond words to live here, to be part of this struggle. I pray that it ends quickly, but until it does, it feels like an opportunity to be part of something sacred. With people of the kind one finds nowhere else on the planet.
So one final, brief word about the protests on American campuses….
There is a ton to say, and much has been said. I no longer live there, so I’ll leave it to others to comment. Except for this:
Did you see anything like this video on any of those campuses? I don’t mean prayer, specifically, and certainly not Jewish prayer. I mean, did you see anything about anyone actually believing in anything? For the most part, you didn’t. Did you see anything that felt like it was about love? For the most part you didn’t.
Last night and this morning here were about love. About showing love and support to the hostage families in general and Hersh’s family in particular. But also love for this country. There was no hatred of Israel. No hatred of the establishment just because it was the establishment. No hatred of the police or the Border Patrol. And no hatred of Arabs or Gazans, even. If I could go through that video with you one person by one person, you’d be astonished at the number of people there who are peace activists.
Or were. But will be once again.
Last night’s protest and this morning’s prayer emerged from an abundance of belief, and love. Not from hate. The vast majority of those protesting people on American campuses don’t believe in anything at all. They’re certain that Israel is at fault, even though they know nothing about the conflict.
I should note that increasingly, many Israelis I know are less and less certain that what Israel has been doing in Gaza is morally justifiable. I’m not taking a position at the moment, but we will shortly be posting an interview with an Israeli deeply committed to this country who believes that Israel’s moral compass has gone very much awry. Everyone who gets the podcast will be able to hear him and then decide what they think.
They’re gay and lesbian, many of them, but they see no irony in protesting in support of an organization that would kill them on sight in Gaza. They hate the universities for believing in the law. They hate the universities for not allowing them to shut up and intimidate people with whom they disagree.
But forget what they hate. Forget what they oppose. What do they believe in? What do they think is worth not a tent and a scream, but the totality of their lives? What are they committed to that is larger than themselves?
For most of them, not a single thing.
That, at the end of the day, is what is different between the protests here and the protests there.
And that is why, at the end of the day, if you had to bet on one of these two societies surviving as a place in which one can live a noble life committed to something that matters, the bet is not even close.
Psalms 116:7-9.