All eyes are on Agam.
Agam Berger.
The surveillance soldier who has so far been left behind, while her surveillance soldier cohorts have thankfully just returned home after a nearly 500 day harrowing ordeal.
As the three stars twinkled in the sky signaling the conclusion of Shabbat last week, our eyes welled with tears as we watched the emotionally wrenching hostage reunion videos. It was tormenting for the surveillance soldiers who were released from captivity to separate from and leave Agam behind. One released hostage offered to remain behind with her.
The first time I learned something more personal about Agam was last year in November, 2023, during the first hostage release.
A different girl named Agam, who had been released from captivity, spoke about how, despite the terror stricken dread and panic, Agam Berger found a way to calmly busy herself with braiding the other hostage girls’ hair. Agam risked her life to keep Shabbat, refusing the demands of the terrorists to cook on Shabbat. I was stunned. And deeply inspired.
Agam was just 19 years old.
She had just completed her initial IDF training when she was placed in Kibbutz Nachal Oz, so close to the Gaza border. When she expressed concern to her mother Meirav, her mother replied, encouragingly: “The place where you are at is exactly where you are meant to be.” Two days later was the Oct. 7 massacre where almost 20 of the surveillance soldiers were murdered.
Initially, on Oct. 7, Agam had called her family, conveying that she’s OK, protected in a street shelter. But in the second, in her final phone home before she was taken hostage, Agam said: “Ima (mom), they are shooting at us. There are terrorists. Everyone is crying. But I’m not scared.”
When the war broke out, that Thursday turned into baking-for-the-war effort day — cakes (in my case most often banana chocolate chip cakes) and Sabbath challahs for the soldiers. But also, challah-baking with intention, as a mitzvah, as a gateway to prayer, as I, together with thousands of other women, wove loaves of hope for Shabbat. As the separate strands came together into the beautiful weave of a braid, tightly close, of one unit, somehow, invisibly, against all odds, ever so briefly, hope came together too.
As I braided these loaves, I poured my emotion into weaving these Sabbath breads. Sometimes, I even took two separate three strand challah loaves, pinching them together at the top and bottom, and then creating a sweetheart indent at the top, and pressing the length of the braids outward, so the braided loaves themselves were transformed into braided challah hearts. It was my way of saying, for you, our brave, soldiers, with love.
Candlelighting is the timeless symbol of ushering in the Sabbath. As is the symbol of two braided woven yeast dough breads, laid side by side.
When you sit down to a Friday night meal with two intertwined challahs on the table, you know it’s not just another meal, but that it’s the special Friday night Sabbath meal.
Last year, after I heard the hostage Agam, who had been released, talk about Agam Berger, who was just a kid, really; to understand her ability to access a force, a power, a profound poise and resilience within herself to choose to busy herself with something so generous and kind to her fellow hostages, something so simple and seemingly small, yet something so life-affirming, so feminine and personal, that can feel normal, and of course distracting — as if that’s what’s on the girls’ minds, having their hair braided, while in reality they were living in moment to moment terror.
I internalized it as “Agam’s braids of hope.”
In my own way, as I wove my own Sabbath challas, I layered Agam’s braids of hope into my challah strands. My challahs, safely baked at home in freedom, became a link for me to Agam’s heroic braids of hope, and to Agam’s symbol of her heroic Sabbath observance.
This Thursday, I will continue to bake Agam’s braided loaves of hope that Agam managed to weave together in the paralyzing and obliterating black terror of captivity in honor of the Sabbath.
Right now our eyes, the entire country’s eyes and hearts are looking, waiting, toward this Thursday. Toward Agam returning home. The last of the surveillance soldiers. And, of course, waiting for all the hostages that are scheduled to be released together with her, among them fathers of young kids who have longed for their dads.
If only I could greet them with freshly baked piping hot challah loaves, woven with hope and prayer for their return.
Woven with Agam’s strands of hope.
© IJN 2025
