Bring Them Home Now: Heartbreak and Hope Even Here in NC

Tonight, the final new moon of the Jewish year will appear in the sky marking the new Hebrew month of Elul and the Jewish community will begin counting down the days to the Jewish New Year. Each morning of this month, we hear the blast of a ram’s horn (the shofar) serving as a wakeup call to the ways we need to change. 

This past Jewish year (5784 by Jewish accounting) has been the worst year since the Holocaust.  Our people experienced a pogrom on October 7th in which Hamas terrorists attacked 24 communities, two cities and the Nova music festival — murdering 1200 individuals, torturing and sexually assaulting hundreds of others, and abducting 250 individuals to Gaza. As Jews, we thought pogroms, violent riots against Jews that mostly occurred in Europe, had ended by the mid-1940s. We were wrong.  

Sunday morning, we awoke to news that 330 days later, six of those hostages were found murdered in a Hamas tunnel.  Most of us could visualize one mother in particular, Rachel Goldberg, mourning the death of her American-Israeli son, Hersch, 23. He was wounded and abducted from the Nova music festival.  

Rachel had become the voice of the hostage families, speaking so tirelessly and with such clarity that she was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of the year. Just two weeks ago, she and her husband spoke at the Democratic National Convention calling for an end to the war, “There is a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict in the Middle East. In a competition of pain, there are no winners.”  Yesterday we watched Rachel and Jon bury their son.

This week’s intense pain stands in contrast to the hope many of us felt with last week’s rescue by the Israeli Defense Forces of Farhan Alkadi, found alone in a Hamas Tunnel after 326 days of captivity.  Alkadi, 52, the father of 11 children, is an Arab Israeli Muslim Bedouin – one of eight members of his community taken hostage. His brother said his return was even better than the arrival of a new baby.  His 90-year-old mother, upon being reunited with her son said, “Now I can die.”  

One mother’s unparalleled anguish and another’s unparalleled joy are just two stories of countless mothers’ anguished experiences in the Israel-Hamas War that has brought unspeakable death and destruction to Israelis and Palestinians. There are families on both sides of the border that cannot return home. Grieving and displaced mothers try to bring normalcy to an upside-down world.

Coincidentally, I was born on this new moon. While my Gregorian birthday is celebrated with calls and social media greetings, my Hebrew birthday will be marked by private reflection, coinciding with the onset of the Jewish world’s reckoning.  I am a rabbi, professor and activist.  I am a woman of words, but this last year left me, on many days, silent. Too often I was overwhelmed and paralyzed by the grief I witnessed from mothers, colleagues, students, and religious leaders of all faiths.

What is my birthday wish?

I fervently hope that we follow the lead of an Israeli organization called Women Wage Peace. Its tag line is “Peace is not a utopia, it is the necessary foundation of the lives of two peoples in this place, in security and freedom.” Its co-founder, Vivian Silver, was a member of Birkat Shalom, the sister congregation of Charlotte’s Temple Beth El. For decades Silver fought for Gazans’ human rights and for peace. I visited our sister Kibbutz just days after Silver’s November funeral. She was murdered in the October 7 massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri.

I propose that we commit to waging peace by not demonizing others but by finding others from different communities with whom we can cry, with whom we can hope, and with whom we can work to end the suffering and pursue tangible actions that advance peace. 

Becoming women who wage peace means committing to causing no harm with our language and with our actions. It means combating antisemitism and Islamophobia and driving toward a two-state solution where we can celebrate all mothers who seek peace – for their children and for all children. 

After news of the six hostages’ murders, 500,000 Israeli protestors took to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s failure and Hamas’ failure to bring about a deal. My Israeli rabbinic colleagues were among those calling for reckoning and protesting for peace. One wrote: “I believe this could be a watershed moment.”

My birthday prayer is that it is.