The Hostages

“One who saves one life, saves an entire world.”

by Ehud Neor

There is an elephant standing silently behind the dais used by those spewing hatred of Zionists. It is a clown-elephant making faces at the crowd, unseen by the speaker, but known by the speaker to be there, because it is always there, the product of an ancient memory, possessing an bottomless memory of its own. The crowd of Jew-haters pretend to be listening to the speaker—their gaze is upon the speaker—but there, off to the side, flapping its ears, is the source of the know-it-all smirk on their faces, those flapping ears in lieu of a flashing neon sign advertising: the Jew, the Jew, the Jew.

What is the secret knowledge possessed by this ancient members-only club, a giddy self-knowledge that finds it expression in an ecstatic blood-lust against the Jews? It is not difficult to understand, and it is not simple to understand; it is not to be understood. Point at it while crying out “Injustice!” and it mutates before your very eyes, again with a smirk, leaving you pointing at the ether, now crying “It was there just a minute ago!” as the screams of slaughtered Jews reach you from the house next door.

Antisemitism, anti-Zionism, simple Jew hatred are not rational concepts. They are not irrational either. They do not belong to the realm even of conscious thought. It is a menacing, silent clown-elephant flapping its ears at you: the Jew, the Jew, the Jew.

Now the Jew-haters are facing a different Jew. A Jew, unafraid, who instead of focusing on what is said at the dais and with great toil refuting what is said point by point, eloquently, winningly, but never to any avail, a Jew who instead of looking with horror at the flapping, mocking elephant ears, steps and turns back, surprisingly to the haters, to see generations of kin, almost as if making a final weapons-check before the crucial attack, realizing that the backing of Jewish forebears is the only backing needed for what is coming, a Jew at the head of a long line of trudging Jews, Jews who have been trudging faithfully, hopefully, Jews who have been trudging since that first trudge out of Egypt.

Empowered by that vision, the new Jew turns forward with a straightened gaze at the source of the purulent hatred and sees that the elephant ears have cocked and ceased flapping and the speaker at the dais has gone silent, hurriedly gathering the pages of the tired, age-old speech that are already being scattered in the wind. The elephant slowly turns and walks away.

The new Jew makes note of the unexpected victory, asking: “How is it possible that such evil is in retreat? They live-streamed their rape and pillage of us, calling home to proudly tell their parents ‘Dad! I’ve killed ten Jews!’ and received in answer ‘Allah be praised, I am proud of you my son,’ and when we turned to the world we heard: ‘Prove it! It never happened! Fake videos!’”

This gut punch, or secondary rape, is not new to the Jews. Sometimes—most times— the after-pogrom is worse than the pogrom itself. The angel of death lingering over a pastiche of the worse behavior that humanity has to offer, behavior that continues until the perpetrators relent out of boredom.

And yet…this time is different. The clown-elephant has turned a corner and is out of sight. The keynote speaker for evil is not to be found. Their departure was precipitated by a new voice in the streets. Once very rare, because it carried danger, and as such had its beginnings in a small still voice awakened by the inner moral candle of good people, it is now growing into a mighty roar:

I stand with the Jews.

The fabulous, even miraculous, thing about this proclamation is that it is fixed forever. There is no limit to its reach. The heart that is open to it will hear it and respond. It represents a moral clarity that has been absent, that has been hidden for too long by a wall of flapping clown-elephant ears.

What precisely is meant by standing with the Jews? For all the sound and the fury of this miraculous war, their remains a deep wound. Great evil knows the weak spot of the good. The greater the evil, the more painful the hurt. Standing with the Jews at this time, means standing with the the emaciated, scourged Jews in the dark and dank tunnels of Gaza, serving as human shields for the poster child of evil. No less than that.

What reward is had for making this stand? One might think that the good deed is in and of itself all the reward that is required. It is. That is a basic truth. But it seems that in addition to the reward of a good deed being the good deed accomplished itself, there is a widening of horizons and deepening of understanding of what it is for which we take a stand.

How so? The answer is to be found in the quandary of the Jew haters due to the decimation of their front-line representatives in the face of righteous Zionist fury. Things are going badly for the haters of Zion, and this is just the beginning. There comes a time in free societies, when falsehood folds in upon itself like a collapsing star, the lies fueling this dark sun depleted by a new light of simple good people proclaiming the good word:

We stand with the Jews.

That evil gaseous giant that is Jew hatred is slurped back into the void where it belongs. In its place, a new light, illuminating the farthest reaches of the tunnels under Gaza, gently alighting upon those beautiful Jewish souls, dead and alive, our brothers and sisters—truly our brothers and sisters and our souls clinging to their souls…

We see. We see with a clarity what was always there before our eyes but was hidden by layers of subterfuge. The value of a life. The holiness of life itself. The cadence of the march of the trudging Jews through history: L’chaim!

It is not the Jew bearing witness to the value of life that stamps an impression on the modern consciousness. That witnessing has not been acknowledged by the Gentile world for over three thousand years. On the contrary, this statement of the obvious—that life is holy—has been twisted and cruelly turned against the Jews over millennia.

What has been revealed, now that the tide of darkness has begun to recede, is the impression left on the modern consciousness by the anti-Jew. We see and understand now that it had been concealed only by the flimsiest of disguises, another gut-punch insult to the Jewish survivors of the ages, and to the survivors of the Oct. 7 pogrom. Hidden by the flapping ears of the clown-elephant was the impression of a death cult. This was a death cult that instinctively knew that its mortal enemy was the nation that worships life, and the nation that worships life has belatedly realized that there is no compromise with the death cult. There is only life or death, light or darkness, good or evil.

The proof of this is provided by the death-cult practitioners themselves, just as they provided the proof of the pogrom through live streaming of the atrocities. This proof is to be found in the exchange rate fixed by the death-cult market of human trafficking, more popularly known as a prisoner exchange. In particular, the prisoner exchange known as the Shalit deal. This deal provided the terrorist manpower that was the driving force behind the Oct 7 pogrom. What was the human trafficking exchange rate for that deal?

1=1027

One single Jewish soldier who had been on guard on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza, in exchange for one thousand and twenty-seven terrorist prisoners, who were collectively responsible for the death of hundreds of Israeli citizens until their capture, and after their release, for the death of hundreds more tortured and raped in the Oct 7 pogrom. In addition, Israel well knew the price for releasing such prisoners. Previous prisoner swaps had seen the released terrorist return to their evil ways, continuing to murder Jews at each and every opportunity.

On the measuring scales of their own design, the Arab Jew-haters demonstrate for anyone wishing to see, who is for life, and who is for death. This is the reason that the Jewish nation cannot enter into negotiations with those who hold our captives. This day-after-the-pogrom torture, that lasts sometimes for years, is effective. The collective Jewish soul is torn asunder, into a million pieces. It is a festering sore that does not heal as long as there are Jews in captivity.

This is a great pain for the Jews. First and foremost, we acknowledge this. We are hurt by the fact that we cannot save the captives. We are tortured, every minute of every day, always with the accompaniment of the eternal Jew music, not “there but for the grace of God, go I,” rather, “there I sit, there my children sit, there my grandchildren sit,” because it could be.

So we are left, believing Jews and non-believing Jews alike, with a new kind of prayer, one that projects the essence of our own souls into those terrible tunnels of hate and death, searching out and finally finding the kindred souls of our captives, to give solace, to embrace, and when the fire comes, to whisper in their ears the Jewish message of love, of light, of life.

First published on A Pisgah Site