Celebration Amidst Sadness

It was Hoshana Rabbah. The shul was filled with the song of prayer, the rustling of lulavim, and the gentle feeling of devotion. As I stood there davening, my heart heavy with the weight of recent months, I suddenly felt a vibration in my pocket. Normally, I would never glance at my phone during prayer, but something compelled me. When I looked down, the words on the screen took my breath away “The first seven hostages are on their way home to Israel.”

Tears welled up in my eyes before I could even process the words. My lips trembled. For a moment, I couldn’t speak. The people standing nearby noticed my trembling shoulders and the tears streaming down my face. One man gently asked, “What’s wrong?”

I could barely whisper, “The hostages are returning home. We are witnessing a miracle.”

The words hung in the air and I felt something shift within me – a release, a sudden flood of emotion that I didn’t even know I had been holding back.

In the day that followed, the miracle continued. All twenty remaining hostages, men who had been held for over two years in conditions too cruel to imagine, were finally freed. The nation erupted in joy. You could feel it everywhere; in the streets, in the cafés, in the shuls. People smiled again. Strangers hugged each other. There was celebration. For the first time in years, it felt as though a heavy weight had been lifted off our collective chest. We could finally breathe.

But as the days went by and the initial euphoria began to settle, another feeling began to rise within me – a quiet, haunting sadness.

I started thinking about the hundreds of soldiers who gave their lives to make this miracle possible. I thought about the thousands more who were maimed, who now must live the rest of their lives with injuries, both visible and invisible. I thought about the families; mothers, fathers, siblings, and children, whose loved ones would never return home. For them, there was no jubilation. Their joy would always be incomplete, their holidays forever marked by sorrow.

That day when President Donald Trump visited Israel to mark the historic release of the hostages, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Knesset with words of pride and gratitude. During his speech, he turned his attention to a young man sitting in the visitors’ section – Ari Spits – a soldier who had lost both legs and one arm in the fighting. Netanyahu spoke of Ari as the very embodiment of the courage and resilience of the Israeli army. He compared him to our leaders Joshua and David.

Everyone in the hall rose to their feet, giving Ari a long, thunderous applause. The clapping went on and on, a collective expression of admiration, grief, and gratitude. It was one of the most emotional moments I have ever witnessed. Tears filled my eyes again. It was beautiful. It was powerful.

And yet, as the applause faded, another thought pierced through the emotion: After all this is over, Ari will still have to go home. He will have to live each day with the pain, the loss, the struggle to adapt to a new life. His family will have to rebuild alongside him, finding strength where most of us would crumble.

The applause will fade. The speeches will end. But the suffering – the quiet, daily reality of those who paid the heaviest price – will remain.

We don’t always realize how deep the wounds go, how wide they spread. Israel may be a small nation, but the ripple of grief touches every corner. Every person knows someone who was lost, injured, or forever changed. In truth, we are all wounded. We are all, in some way, suffering from a collective trauma, a kind of national PTSD that lingers in our hearts and our homes.

Sometimes, when I see the families of the freed hostages, their faces glowing with relief, I feel conflicting emotions. On one hand, I rejoice with them. How could I not? Their pain has turned to joy. Their tears have become laughter.

But part of me can’t help but remember how, for some of them, it seemed during the months of demonstrations as though nothing else mattered; as if all that counted was the return of their loved one with seemingly no thought of the tremendous sacrifice our nation was enduring and the gigantic effort and sacrifice that our people were making.

I know deep in my heart this isn’t truly how they felt. I know that they too, must have wrestled with the guilt, the gratitude, the overwhelming complexity, to know that they aren’t the only ones grieving, but our entire nation was grieving as well. Yet sometimes, in the charged atmosphere of public demonstrations, this nuance gets lost. The optics, to me, were painful.

We are living through a chapter of history that will be remembered not only for its miracles but also for its unimaginable cost.

May we find the strength to rebuild, to comfort one another, and to remember that every person is a world unto themselves. They are all precious!

And may the day come soon, when our tears of sorrow, truly turn to celebration.