The hostages are home.
A circle, a very painful circle, has, finally been closed.
Simchat Torah, the holiday that fell on Oct. 7, 2023, is all about circles. Circles of dancing around the Torah.
Hakafot, they are called.
It’s about circles of completion, as celebration of another cycle of reading the Torah is completed.
But on that day, another altogether different and horrifying kind of circle opened like the gates of hell. The longest hakafa.
That day was branded on each of us, as the cars with parents driving their young soldiers drove by and began to increase in number, as the news trickled until the depth of the attack by hordes of savages dawned on us.
After two excruciating and traumatic years, I, together with millions of Jews around the world, pulled all-nighters to stay up and watch 20 of our fellow Jews whom we had come to feel we knew, finally be released from captivity.
To see this unexpected wrenching kind of hakafa, this circle that was unleashed on Simchat Torah, come to an end.
Each morning in the morning prayer service we say: “Blessed are you G-d . . . Who frees the captive.” This time, I felt like screaming these words.
Then, as night fell, yet again celebrating Simchat Torah, (in Israel), the Jewish people were reciting the Shehechiyanu. “Blessed are you G-d . . . Who has kept us alive, sustained us and brought us to this moment!”
On the one hand, the unbridled joy. On the other, the subdued and muted grief of knowing there were hostages who were never to return, and still others to return for burial.
We had just read in Kohelet, the book of Ecclesiastes, a few days earlier, on Sukkot. “A time to weep and a time to laugh . . .”
Not always are these emotions so clean and so compartmentalized. Sometimes in life, the two — joy and sadness — bleed into one another.
The return of the hostages was such a day.
Mixed emotions, pulsing through the elation and euphoria, for so much that had been lost and for the torment these hostages had been through.
The reunion scenes were surreal. Throughout the day, my emotions were at the surface as I kept welling up, even when I wasn’t specifically witnessing one of the gut-wrenching reunions with the dam totally broken, heart ricocheting, tears streaming down my cheeks.
Reunion. That word has new meaning now. We witnessed the depth of what that word means. We could now imagine the reunion of Jacob and Joseph.
The scenes we saw truly felt biblical.
Family members receiving and clinging to their loved ones after living with the emotion that they might never see their sons, brothers, grandsons, partners, fathers or loved ones again.
It felt like people coming back from the dead.
In the end, it was two years to the day. To. The. Day!
How mystical did the timing feel.
Hoshana Rabba, the eve of Simchat Torah, was the day the hostages returned. It is the day we beat the willows to the ground. The day we time and again cry out from the depths in prayer: “Ana Hashem hoshe’a na! — Please G-d, save us!” And other cries for help also in this brief beseeching type of language in this particular liturgy of the day.
The name of the day itself, “Hoshana” is “Save us.” It’s the theme of the day.
And those willows, in Hebrew are called “aravot,” from the Hebrew root word for “areivut” — interconnectedness.
An interwoven tapestry of the interconnectedness of the Jewish people — that is an essence of the day of Hoshana Rabbah, That was the tangible historic experience we felt.
All of us, as a whole, all of us different types of Jews, wept with joy as we felt the profound relief of our brothers and sisters in captivity whom we all grew to feel so close and connected to, finally return.
Hundreds of thousands gathered at the daybreak of dawn at the Western Wall, culminating in their collective Hoshana Rabbah cry,: “Ana Hashem hoshe’a na,” as the fragile hostage return was underway.
Hundreds of thousands gathered at Hostage Square to share in the moment of the hostages’ return, for which many had been indefatigable in their civilian fight for the release of the hostages. The singing of “Habaita,” homecoming, of “ma’aminim” — we are believers of “od yoter tov,” things will get better and better, filled the air.
Shofars were blown at the border crossing, as people lined the roads where the returning hostages would pass.
The soldiers. The holy IDF soldiers, without whom none of this would have been possible.
And many, whose lives were-heartbreakingly sacrificed, to reach this moment.
Not everyone was having reunions. Nor will they ever have them. That’s the grief they must live with forever.
These past two years opened something new. There was a timelessness quality to this nightmare. The timelessness of the persecution of the Jewish people that I had thought was left behind in the horror of the Holocaust.
These past two years we touched Jewish history.
Auschwitz. Auto-da-fé. Blood libels.
It all came back. We were living through another chapter of a link in that chain of Jewish history.
Seriously, I need to pinch myself and wonder, what century are we living in?
The hostages! Starving them, but if one converts to Islam, one will receive food. This went on for months, as Rom Braslavski was tormented and starved. Yet not for a second did he waver.
Alon Ohel, whose village had his piano waiting for him to play his beloved “Claire de Lune,” that we heard so many times throughout these past two years (including on the yellow piano in Hostage Square when I was there).
Matan Angrest, who had been back from captivity for just 48 hours, and then like a lion, eulogized his fallen commander at his funeral — words from his heart every Jew should hear.
Maxim Herkin, so modest, so sweet, apologizing to his mother and brother, for his ordeal.
Bar Kupershtein, whose reunion with his wheelchair-bound father, who rose to hug his son, and the accompanying raw primal sounds of release at his return, can’t leave a human being’s eye dry.
Evyatar David, looking as borderline alive as a muselman, who not that long ago we watched in both paralyzing dread and rage, who was made to dig his own grave, now miraculously, against all odds, alive, and home in the embrace of his family.
Every time I thought I couldn’t cry anymore, I would see another return. And another.
And Avinatan Or — reunited with Noa Argamani, whom, with the rest of the world, we saw in desperate terror as she was torn from him and on the back of the terrorists’ motorcycle. A picture that became emblematic of Oct. 7.
What were the odds they would return? Who would have thought they would survive and ever be reunited?
Yet, we have all lived through witnessing this miracle.
Each and every one of the hostages’ reunions, and the emotion of the day itself, was, in a word: ineffable.
The tears, the prayer, the anxieties, the trauma, the exhaustion, the longing, the hoping, the terror, the tenuousness, of these past two years, collapsed in relief, releasing itself like a pent-up valve, exploded.
In a sense it felt like it was two years of Oct. 7 this — like time stopped for two years — and now we reached Oct. 8. A chance to begin again and heal.
For two years, in the shul I davened, every Shabbat prayer service concluded with Psalms and the singing of “Acheinu.” Every chuppah I had been present at, included and centered around prayers for the soldiers, for the hostages return.
The day when there will be no more of “hutar l’pirsum,” cleared for publication of a fallen soldier’s name or not, has, we pray, has arrived.
Israel set two seemingly out-of-reach goals for this war: To dismantle Hamas. To return the hostages.
We sometimes wondered, is it really possible? How will it come to pass? The bereaved families, the families serving in the war, the fraught feeling that enveloped the nation — sometimes it felt like there might not be a light at the end of this terrible tunnel.
In the end, this particular redemption came in the blink of an eye, a blink of an eye at the end of a struggle so tense and intense with practically the entire world against Israel and on the wrong side of history, aligning with darkness and evil.
In the end, the cost for an innocent Jew stolen from his home, to be free in this world, cost a terrifying price that we chose to pay because we don’t leave our brothers and sisters behind, yet we still tremble with fear at the consequences such costs can exact.
The end came beyond what any orchestrator could possibly ever dream up — how full circle it all was, to the day.
“Like dreamers” — “hayinu ke-cholmim,” the Psalmist writes.
That’s what it felt like.
It’s certainly not the vision of Isaiah’s peace yet. For the wounded and fallen soldiers’ families—and even for the all returning soldiers, for the hostages and their families, and for all of Israeli society, each to their level of trauma, the hard work of healing just begins.
We have met a generation of giants that walks amongst us Jews. They are my hope for better times to come.
These past two years have pulsated with pain, we found ourselves caught in cruelties we never could have imagined.
For those who were directly affected, it was like carrying boulders on the shoulders that practically pressed on the breath.
For all of us collectively as a people, it felt like we were carrying added stones on our soul.
The fallen burnished colored leaves of autumn cascaded to the ground. The cold of winter rain came pouring. The frozen cold thawed into budding color filled spring. And the beating sun of summer sunshine. Four seasons, in double.
They came and went, but no matter, we would go to sleep and then wake up, and it felt like it was the same season, no change. The season of Oct. 7. Simchat Torah, 2023.
This week, that changed. It feels like the world can continue again in its natural organic seasons.
As I am visiting here in Denver for the holidays, I can only imagine what Simchat Torah in Israel was like this year.
A Simchat Torah for the ages. Perhaps like never before in Jewish history.
All that pent up emotion released and transformed into the dancing circles around the Torah.
The hakafot as they ought to be.
That derailed terrible longest haunting hakafa, for now, mostly over.
The nightmare of uncertainty, thankfully, mostly over.
We still await the heartrending return of those hostages who were murdered in captivity, and soldiers whose bodies were taken, to be returned to their families for proper burial.
They’ll never live to have the reunion we were so inspired to have seen. These families will—hopefully after long lives — ultimately go to their own graves with the wound of this barbaric terrorist tragedy and unanswered questions they will have to learn to live with and carry for the rest of their lives.
We continue to pray for their return for a proper Jewish burial in their homeland.
Even with this still painfully unfinished aspect of the war that is technically over, the meaning of those three simple yet eternal words, “Am Yisrael Chai,” live and breathe like never before.
© IJN 2025
