Agam Berger and Meirav Berger, our teachers, we humbly thank you
“From the depths I called out to you O L-rd”
— Psalms 130:1
October 7. Devastating surprise. Soldiers, fallen. Hostages, taken and tortured. Civilians, displaced on one side of the Gaza border and turned into human shields on the other. War, destruction, beheadings — impossible to complete the list without risk to one’s sanity.
Yet, amidst the depths, a counterintuitive, unexpected, sharp ray of holiness. Amidst wrenching funerals and the agonies over uncertain fates, an unforeseen story emerges, all the more dramatic for being utterly unexpected.
The story of Agam Berger.
All of 20 years old.
Kidnapped. Imprisoned.
Agam Berger.
As opposed to suffering: faith.
As opposed to denial of freedom: Shabbat.
As opposed to threats by people all too indifferent to the harsh realities they create by carrying out their threats: resistance.
As opposed to the pervasive uncertainty of captivity: soothing the nerves of fellow captives.
As over against despair: inner revolution.
Agam Berger, abducted as a person with no evident, or at least no significant, faith, returns from 482 days of punishing captivity on Jan. 30, 2025, holding up her handwritten sign: “I have chosen the path of faith.”
Agam Berger, abducted into conditions of harm unknown in her specific case but well known generally, conditions of denial of movement, of light, of food, conditions of torture —returns from captivity with a passionate love for Shabbat observance.
Agam Berger, abducted by murderers, rapists, beheaders and slaughterers, defies their commands to go down into tunnels, and to kindle a fire and cook on Shabbat, and to accept a Koran —and not only defies but makes requests — she requests a siddur. And gets one. And prays. And fasts on Tisha b’Av and Yom Kippur. And refuses to eat leaven on Passover.
Agam Berger, abducted with murder and mayhem all around, braids the hair of fellow captives, calming their nerves, preserving their dignity and, one presumes, doing it in such a way as not to attract the attention of her captors.
Agam Berger — as opposed to the unceasing hammers of bad news we have received since Oct. 7, 2023 —provides a radically different story. A story which should not be consigned to the rarest annals of heroism, as if there were nothing for the rest of us to learn from her. No one should need to face the horrors she did in order to derive the lessons she derived. Lessons that transcend their origin. They are universal.
Agam Berger should be our teacher, not enshrined on a distant pedestal beyond our reach. Quite the contrary. If she could find the way to embrace faith, Shabbat, compassion, resistance to evil and inner revolution —then all the more so, we can.
Agam — and her mother, amazing in her own right. Meirav Berger, whose daughter’s spiritual revolution was unknown to her, embraced a spiritual revolution of her own, which was unknown to her daughter. Meirav Berger, too, developed a passionate embrace of Shabbat observance. As a hostage mother, we certainly would have understood had she fallen to despair. But she did the opposite.
For the appropriate metaphor we turn to Einstein’s puzzling physics concept of “action at a distance.” Two particles fly off in different directions under a single impact. Later, there is a second direct impact on only one of the two particles, but that impact on only one particle affects the other particle too, no matter how distant the two particles are from each other. “Action at a distance.”
Now we have in the Berger family “spiritual action at a distance.” Mother and daughter, linked by the single impact of Meirav’s birth of Agam, later impact their lives by embracing Shabbat. But the two are so distant from each other. It doesn’t matter. The impact of Shabbat on the one Berger affects the other — “spiritual action at a distance.”
Not metaphorically, Ahad Haam put it this way long ago: More than the Jews have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.
Agam, Meirav — our teachers in so many elevated realms of holiness, from the ritual to the ethical — we humbly thank you.
© IJN 2025
