From Captivity to Conscience: A Jewish Call to Vigilance

Friday November 21, 2025 – א׳ כִּסְלֵו תשפ״ו

There are moments in Jewish life when history collapses into the present — when the stories we carry in our hearts suddenly stand before us in flesh and blood. This week, I experienced one of those moments.

Since October 7th, the hostages held in Hamas captivity became, for many of us, part of the very fabric of our spiritual lives. Their names entered our prayers. Their faces looked down at us from posters in our synagogues and community centers. Their stories traveled with us into our Shabbat tables and family conversations. Even our children absorbed their presence — sometimes in ways we could never have anticipated. I once overheard two pre-teens at a convention in Israel ask each other, almost casually, “Who’s your favorite hostage?” Not out of callousness, but from the unfiltered honesty with which children struggle to make sense of the world we hand to them.

The hostages were everywhere — in our hearts, in our rituals, in the ways we tried to hold hope when hope felt impossible.

And then, this week, I had the honor — and the burden — of meeting some of them face-to-face.

A delegation organized by the Conference of Presidents brought several freed hostages and their families to New York on their way to Washington, to the White House, at the invitation of President Trump. I walked into the room expecting to greet symbols, embodiments of our collective yearning. Instead, I met human beings, each carrying a universe of pain, resilience, memory, and quiet courage.

Matan Angerest and Bar Kupershtein — gentle, soft-spoken, shaped by experiences we can only imagine.

Iair Horn — using humor to cut through the heaviness of the room, as if laughter itself were an act of spiritual defiance.

Segev Khalfon — describing the simple joy of drinking a clean glass of water, marveling at a freedom most of us forget to notice.

And Omri and Lishay Miran, alongside Omri’s father, Dani, his long white beard like a banner of survival. Omri told me how he refused to look back as he was dragged away — not wanting his daughter’s final image of him to be the look of terror. He even spoke of conversations he had with his captors about faith, describing them not as believers but as adherents to a deranged cult. He spoke of food, of torment, of endurance. And then, with a sigh that felt older than his years, he said, “Each one and their own personal hell.”

In those encounters, the abstraction shattered. The posters on our walls dissolved into flesh and voice and story — far more painful, far more complex than the symbols we held.

And when these survivors thanked us — thanked us for marching, praying, speaking out, advocating, lighting candles, and refusing to forget them — a deep humility washed over me. Pride, yes — but also a kind of moral embarrassment. I celebrated milestones while they endured nightmares. I prayed for them while they trembled in captivity. Even with our solidarity, we could not carry their burden. We could not bring them home sooner.

Yet in that room, there was no scolding, no resentment. We spoke about unity. About Am Yisrael. About the sacred responsibility we bear for each other. And as we stood together singing Hatikva, the word חופשי — “free” — rang differently. Freedom was no longer abstract; it was standing right in front of us.

A Moment of Holiness — and a Moment of Warning

Holy moments never exist in isolation. They speak into the world we inhabit — and that world is shifting in troubling ways.

As these hostages made their way toward Washington, something else was happening in our country: a rising tide of rhetoric and rage that threatens the safety and dignity of Jews not only in Israel, but right here in America.

Over the last months, we have heard echoes — unmistakable echoes — of the old “America First” ideology, a slogan with a long and dangerous history of isolationism, xenophobia, and antisemitism. Once again, we hear versions of it being revived, repackaged, and mainstreamed. This rhetoric paints global Jewish concerns — and especially Zionism — as something foreign, suspect, or disloyal to America. It is a framework that says, implicitly or explicitly, that Jews and Jewish identity are somehow incompatible with true American belonging.

We cannot ignore what has happened on the streets of our cities. Just days ago, outside a Manhattan synagogue, protesters chanted “Death to the IDF,” and “take another settler out,” turning a Jewish house of worship into a place of threat and intimidation. This wasn’t a debate about Israeli policy. This wasn’t criticism. This was eliminationist language directed at a Jewish communal space — a red line so bright and so dangerous that it should alarm anyone who cares about the future of pluralism and safety in our nation.

This moment lays bare a reality many hoped they would never see: antisemitic anti-Zionism is coming now not only from the far left, but from loud, well-funded, increasingly influential corners of the American right.

We have watched as President Trump repeatedly elevated voices like Nick Fuentes — a man whose ideology drips with fascism and Holocaust admiration. We have watched Tucker Carlson drift from conservative support for Israel into conspiratorial attacks on Christians who support Zionism, calling their beliefs a “brain virus.” We have watched Nick Fuentes himself argue that Zionism proves Jewish dual loyalty and that Jews are inherently unassimilable — the oldest poison in the antisemitic bloodstream.

This is not a disagreement over policy.
This is not a debate over geopolitics.

This is antisemitic anti-Zionism.[1]
It denies Jewish peoplehood. It delegitimizes Jewish belonging.
It frames Jewish sovereignty as a threat to America — and to the world.

And it must be named clearly.

The Moral Challenge Before Us

We stand now between two realities: The profound holiness of encountering freed hostages.
And the profound danger of rhetoric that seeks to undermine the freedom of Jews everywhere.

We must celebrate miracles — and confront threats.
We must hold hope — and refuse naïveté.
We must strengthen unity — even as the world fractures around us.

For what is Zionism if not the simple, profound belief that Jews have the right to live as a free people in our land?
And what does it mean that this belief is now being attacked from the very places many once assumed were safe?

The freed hostages taught me that freedom is fragile.
Freedom must be guarded.
Freedom must be held in community.
Freedom must be defended with clarity and courage.

“להיות עם חופשי בארצנו” — to be a free people in our land — was never meant to be a passive aspiration. It is a right and a responsibility. It obligates us to protect one another, to name danger when it emerges, and to refuse the normalization of rhetoric that seeks to strip us of dignity or belonging — whether in Gaza tunnels, on American streets, or in the halls of political power.

In this moment — with survivors of unspeakable darkness walking toward the White House, and new forms of darkness rising in our own public square — we are called to moral clarity.

To honor the hostages, both those returned and those still in captivity, we must recommit ourselves to the safety and dignity of Jewish life everywhere.
We must confront Hamas — and also confront the American voices who now echo the same conspiracies Hamas relies upon.
We must hold tightly to unity, even when the world tempts us toward division.

And most of all, we must remember:

To be a free people is not a privilege.
It is a right and a responsibility.
One we must carry with vigilance, solidarity, and an unwavering hope that light — even fragile light — can still overcome the deepest darkness.

Shabbat Shalom and Hodesh Tov!

[1] I will go into greater detail on the issue of when anti-Zionism crosses the line into antisemitism, and I did address the issue in a previous column here.