From the Borehamwood Vigil Friday 21st February 2025
This week, Eva and I feel blessed to have our sons back from Israel with us for a short while to celebrate a simcha together. And so, for the very first time in seventy weeks, on erev Shabbat, I’ll turn off my mobile phone. As I do so, I’ll be conscious of the fact that there are many families who still need to keep theirs on, waiting, just in case there’s news about their loved ones.
Many of us thought that we’d already cried enough during the last more than 500 days.
But nothing could prepare us for receiving the bodies of hostages, those for whom we’ve prayed and hoped and waited to emerge from the valley of the shadow of death.
Innocent people who’ve been held for so long kept captive and abused as pawns in a sick, cruel and twisted game and murdered by vile and brutal terrorists.
We cannot possibly fathom it because anyone with even an ounce of humanity cannot imagine such inhumanity.
The pain that we feel for Kfir, taken at just 8 months old, Ariel aged 4, and 84-year-old Oded is indescribable.
All of them murdered, not because they’re Israeli, murdered, for no other reason, than they’re Jewish.
Pure souls, holy souls, precious souls.
May G-d avenge their blood.
And now, as if it’s some kind of sick joke, we hear that Kfir and Ariel’s mother Shiri wasn’t returned together with them.
We can’t even begin to imagine the physical, emotional and psychological trauma that their family must be going through, the suffering caused by such wickedness is unfathomable.
Sometimes there are no words to bring comfort, sometimes there’s only silence.
We stand here together in silence, our hearts broken, our eyes filled with tears, our hopes shattered.
But we stand here together.
And that togetherness is itself a source of comfort.
It’s a togetherness that can never and must never be broken.
It’s a togetherness that no terrorist can understand or destroy.
It’s a togetherness that grows in strength and only gets stronger, and gives us comfort.
Knowing that G-d is with us in our pain.
Knowing that we’re with each other in our pain.
Knowing that we’re with Israel and Jews around the world in pain, but together.
We read in psalm 145: “G-d watches over all who love Him, and all the wicked He will destroy.”
Rabbi Pesach Krohn once taught that if you come in to Shul at the wrong moment, you might hear this verse completing wrong, either “G-d watches over all who love Him, and all the wicked” or “all who love Him, and all the wicked He will destroy.”
We often don’t see the full picture and can’t make the correct conclusions and so we have to remember that this isn’t the end of our story, there will be better times ahead, evil will be destroyed and good will prevail.
At this dreadful moment, we mourn together with the Bibas and Lifshitz families and together with all those families who’ve lost loved ones and, as is traditional, we say the words of the prophet Isaiah, speaking in G-d’s Name: “As a mother comforts her son, so will I comfort you and in Jerusalem you shall find comfort…Your days of mourning shall be ended…Death will be destroyed forever, and G-d will wipe away the tears from all faces and will remove the reproach of His people from the whole earth, for G-d has spoken it.”
May their families be comforted amongst their fellow mourners of Zion and Jerusalem
המקום ינחם אתכם בתוך שאר אבלי ציון וירושלים