17/18 October 2025, 26 Tishrei 5786

They are back – and what a full heart of relief, hope and trepidation has accompanied us this week! A moment of redemption.

Our prayers on Shabbat for peace will be rewritten, our kavannah – our spiritual intention when we pray for the hostages coming home – will be transformed.

Kohelet was wrong, wrote Israel’s poet laureate Yehuda Amichai z’l. I love this. During the week of Sukkot we read Ecclesiastes (Kohelet) chapter 3:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

Yet truthfully we, and so many others, have experienced all these things at once: celebration, relief, fear, sadness at who hasn’t returned alive. We have witnessed the devastation that is Gaza for the families that have survived these 2 years and the grief they hold. Our friend, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, said the same. Hope has accompanied us all. Rabbi Michael Marmur taught that hope – tikveh in Hebrew – has the root KAV, meaning cord. That cord binds and pulls forward and connects us back (just like the Torah scroll we unrolled on Simchat Torah). So this verse from Bereshit, the beginning of our story calls out to us:

וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים | אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ …

And God made human beings in the divine image. Creating it in the image of God…

This being human is complicated, large and heavy, full of fear, sadness and joy – but what a blessing it is.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rebecca