Yesterday I got on the wrong train. No, that’s not right at all. I got on the right train, only then it went to the airport, so it was the wrong train after all. As the inimitable Kathryn Shultz has written with wonder: the thing about being wrong is it feels just like being right. I actually cried a little as I stepped off in Elizabeth, out of sheer frustration and perhaps exhaustion and stress too, knowing what the delay meant for the rest of my morning. I called a taxi. I hid from the cold inside the Colombian café across from the station, where no one spoke English and surely had far greater worries than I do right now. I bought pastries filled with guava. From the back seat of the taxi, I called the person I was meeting to tell him I wouldn’t make it after all. Hearing my distress, he asked if I’d taken a deep breath yet. I laughed. No, I hadn’t. Ironic. Hadn’t I just last week spent five days meditating in total silence with Buddhist monks, where all we did was focus on the breath?
I was going to write something moving and beautiful about the return this week of Ran Gvili, z”l, the last person to come home from captivity by Hamas. I was going to write about the hair-raising coincidence that his body was brought back the same week that we read in the Torah, in parshat b’shallach, that 400 years after Joseph died, Moses remembered to take his bones out of Egypt and back to Israel with them for burial there. The rabbis wondered: how did Moses know where Joseph’s coffin was? They imagined the Egyptians had hidden the coffin as part of the strategy to prevent the Israelites from leaving. That Moses knew he couldn’t leave Joseph behind, and so he found Serach bat Asher, the mythically old lady who knew everything, and she told him to go to the edge of the Nile and call for the bones, for it was time to come home; and sure enough when he did, Joseph’s coffin rose to the surface from the depths of the Nile. Moses shouldered it, and so (Exodus 13) “Moses took with him the bones of Joseph, who had extracted an oath from the children of Israel saying: God will be sure to take notice of you, then you shall carry up my bones from here with you.” The IDF soldiers sang Hatikvah when they found Ran Gvili z”l’s body.
But on the train, I read a beautiful piece by my colleague Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt, published here in the Times of Israel and pasted below, and so I decided to share that with you instead. Tomorrow at services – after our bar mitzvah boy leads us in the Song of the Sea that our ancestors sang as they crossed into miraculous, hope-filled redemption — we will say a collective mourner’s kaddish, joining the entire Jewish people in mourning not only Ran Gvili z”l, this week of his burial in Israel, but also the death of thousands: from those murdered on October 7, 2023 through all those killed in this brutal war, right up through the death this week of Sgt. Major Asael Babad z”l, 38-year-old father of 5, who was critically wounded in Gaza last October and died from his injuries this Thursday.
It turns out that we are often on the wrong train without knowing it, that it’s maybe the wrong train every time, and also the exact right one, too. Ran Gvili’s mother gave a beautiful eulogy, in which she said that she realized her mission is to prove we are one strong people, here to stay, and that we are all on the same side.
I gave the pastries to the taxi driver, who — like the bakery staff — didn’t speak English. The wrong train is the right train, we are all on it together, heading places of our own choosing and also sometimes where we never intended to go, where we never wanted to be. I took a breath, and another. The rest of my day was wonderful.
The Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes To You: The Return of Ran Gvili
By Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt
The ordeal of the last hostage seized by Hamas and taken to Gaza more than 843 days ago came to an end this week with the return of the body of Ran Gvili and with his arrival at his final resting place today. It has not gone unnoticed that it coincides with this week’s Torah portion which tells us that “Moses took with him the bones of Joseph, (from Egypt) who had exacted an oath from the children of Israel, saying, “God will be sure to take notice of you: then you shall carry up my bones from here with you.”
The reception in Israel was one of mixed emotions—pleased that he was finally brought home to receive a proper burial, intertwined with sorrow and grief that it was his body, and not the living man that was returned, coupled with a sigh of relief that for the first time since 2014, there are no Israelis being held in Gaza by Hamas.
The roads carrying the 23-year old’s body to the cemetery where he was to be buried were lined with thousands of people who never met him. The nation paused to witness the funeral which was packed with hundreds of ordinary Israelis and the nation’s leaders.
Every Israeli knows his name. Everyone knows his story. Everyone felt a profound sense of relief that he was finally home.
As his mother said, “Our pride is much, much stronger than our pain.”
Moments like this are difficult for outsiders to fully grasp.
This is what it is like when a nation is a family—an extended family where, despite deep divisions and constant contention, and despite what many outsiders may not understand, there remains a shared sense of fate and destiny that ultimately overrides internal differences.
I think of the Simon and Garfunkel line, “Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” It captures the feeling in Israel. All eyes have been focused on the return of this hero, who, despite being injured, rushed to defend his fellow countrymen as soon as he learned they were under attack. He was as has been noted, “the first one in and the last one out.”
His courage and the outpouring from across the country reveal a kind of national intimacy that is rare in most other nations. It is a source of its strength and resilience, a distinguishing characteristic that makes Israel unique and which its enemies and detractors will never understand.