email #56 -- reflections on the return of ran gvili's body, and the end of the gaza war

[Leon Kraiem]

Hi friends,

The war in Gaza, we can conclusively say, is over, as of last week.

Not in the sense that the war was decisive -- it wasn't. What's left in the Strip is ambiguous and foreboding; it is, by all appearances, more likely than not that Israelis of my children's generation will also eventually be sent to fight in Gaza, and that the younger of those who fought there this round will have to go back in -- maybe sooner rather than later.

But my employer was among the last hold-outs in keeping an "Israel at War" banner atop our homepage, to the vocal consternation of friends of mine; well, we've now taken it down, after our specific condition for doing so was met: the return to Israel of 'every last hostage,' living and dead. The army on Monday recovered the remains of Ran Gvili, a police officer who ran directly into battle on October 7 and whose body was then stolen to Gaza. He was the last 'hostage,' living or dead, still there.

Gvili's funeral was held on Wednesday. The brother of another slain hostage announced he wouldn't attend, because Netanyahu was slated to give a eulogy, and it would be "an election event, even if they try to present it as apolitical." I read that and it struck me as unfair to the prime minister. It wasn't.

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I wrote throughout the war (note, the simple past tense -- no 'have been writing' or even 'have written' anymore) that I thought the rhetoric about slain hostages was mistaken; that activists, out of the best of intentions, were eliding the distinction between people and bodies, and with it the difference in moral calculus between putting people at risk for the sake of returning one as compared to return the other. I agree with everything I wrote.

And: a thing about reading from the Torah out loud, communally, three times a week, is that there's a limit to how free any given Jew can be when claiming that something is or is not Jewish. Right as I started composing this paragraph (I was watching the funeral live-stream at the time), Itamar Ben Gvir got up to give a eulogy. There is probably no Jew whose Judaism I think is more blasphemous than his. But it happens to be the case that he invoked precisely what I was about to write about.

The third verse of last week's Torah portion (I am aware that this sounds like a bar mitzvah speech, but what are you going to do?), which starts just as Israel are leaving Egypt, goes as follows: And Moses took with him the bones of Joseph, 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.' To say, then, that returning a Jew's body for a fitting burial in the homeland is, say, ‘important,’ would be an understatement of literally Biblical proportions.

And one need not look back to Joseph. Twenty years ago, when Israel pulled out of Gaza and forcibly evacuated the settlers there, the IDF dug up all 48 people buried in the settlement's cemetery. From Wikipedia: "All of the bodies were removed by special teams of soldiers supervised by the Military Rabbinate and reburied in locations of their families' choosing. In accordance with Jewish law, all soil touching the remains was also transferred."

Gvili's body was hidden away in a Palestinian graveyard, and soldiers had to exhume and DNA-test some 250 other bodies on Monday before they identified his. "The IDF said it would be returning all of the other exhumed bodies to their graves and cleaning up the cemetery, out of respect for the dead," per ToI. When they finally found Gvili, his body was "intact, in his uniform and everything...just as he set out [to fight]," according to the police chief.

The Chief Rabbi, in his eulogy, noted that the blessing which hails God as "the Good who does good" was originally formulated after the bodies of some Jewish fighters killed by Rome in the Bar Kochba rebellion were miraculously preserved, allowing the living to give their fellows a proper burial. 

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The preservation of Gvili's body was not a miracle, per se -- but was its return?

In October, I tried to write about the trickiness of that word with respect to hostages getting freed. In my email, I said the January hostage deal “wasn't a 'miracle,' in the 'scientific' sense.” I used quotation marks without a source text, as if to tell the reader. “If you were more well-read, you’d know what I’m talking about,” but that’s always a tell-tale sign the author doesn’t.

I think what I meant, though, was something like: the freeing of those hostages might have been a miracle, but it wasn’t a mystery, the distinction being that a mystery is when something happens, and you don’t know why; but a miracle isn't. If a miracle is a miracle, then we know exactly why it happened: God intended it to, and He wanted you to know.

For something to be a miracle in the “scientific” sense, it has to be impossible according to the laws of nature – and in that sense, the return of the hostages wasn’t a miracle, and importantly so. As I wrote at the time, it was the result of specific actions in the physical world, which “were courageous and difficult and performed by people, and decisions matter, and attributing their achievements to God doesn't just gift Him stolen valor, it also dodges His draft, because it's our job to get this done.”

But while a “scientific” miracle is necessarily impossible according to nature, its impossibility is never the point, just a sort of divine signature – it’s how God shows off His independence from the laws of nature -- it's as though the lead actor in an engrossing, historically-accurate production of Richard III took out his iPhone onstage and asked the audience to get in his selfie.

Each of the three hostage deals broke the fourth wall in that way – they said: “That cynical, ‘what can you do?’ world that you pretend to believe in, that you humans try to manifest into being, by refusing to feel things and declining to do things, isn’t the real world after all – and you won’t get away with pretending it is forever.” When a living hostage returns home, you get a certain snapping-back-to-reality, that says: "Things really do matter, and you can't pretend they don't, but you can decide what role in the story you're going to play."

While the return of Gvili’s body was not the same as a living, breathing captive emerging ghost-white from a tunnel, it did have some -- more than a sixtieth, let's say -- of that miraculous, ‘did you think I didn’t mean it?’ quality, which makes it impossible not to feel the difference between the country before his return, and the country after it, or the basic reasonableness of calling that difference the definitional end of the war. 

–

When I was a kid, my dad used to throw philosophical questions at me every once in a while, and we’d gut-check my intuitions and then deconstruct them together (other fathers teach their kids to play catch.) One of the questions I remember revving up for a confident, categorical answer to, and then being utterly, intractably stumped by, was: “If you make somebody a promise, and then they die, do you still have to keep your word?”

I remember my mind going immediately to my grandfather in that moment – probably because at that age, he was just my avatar of a dead person. I also remember, very shortly thereafter, my dad taking out my grandfather’s weathered old prayerbook, and reading the second paragraph of the Shema out of it with me before I went to bed.

While I wasn’t familiar with most of the siddur as a kid – nor did I know what almost any of the words meant until well into adulthood – I’m better acquainted these days with at least the core of the daily liturgy. And what my dad and I were reading that night is just a hop, skip, and a jump (five pages, in my liturgical daily-driver) from the 2nd-person description of God, in the middle of the “revives the dead” paragraph, as the one who sets captives free, and keeps His faith with those who sleep in the dust.

As I said before: reading from the Torah out loud, three times a week, puts bounds on what you can claim to the public about ‘the Jewish take’ on something. Praying from the siddur silently, in private, three times a day, has something of a claim on what you can say in your own heart, too.

–

And with that, the war is over. 

(Well, this one is, at least. I cancelled my 10-day Vipassana course so as not to be off the grid on an unfamiliar kibbutz if and when the missiles start flying from Iran. But maybe they should, and maybe they won't, and either way, let's take it one day at a time.)

I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are,

I look forward to keeping you posted,

Leon