The Last Hostage

January 30, 2026 – י״ב שְׁבָט תשפ”ו

For 843 days, 12 hours, and 5 minutes, Hostage Square, just outside of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, served as the emotional and moral epicenter of Israel’s efforts to bring home those taken captive on October 7. The square became a kind of national sanctuary-in-motion: a long, empty Shabbat dinner table stretching in silent accusation; an elaborate model of a Hamas-designed Gazan tunnel evoking the claustrophobic reality of captivity; a central stage for rallies and speeches; booths selling “Bring Them Home” merchandise; and, at its heart, the weekly Havdalah ceremonies organized by the Reform Movement, drawing thousands in person and countless more via livestream from around the world. Week after week, Israelis gathered there not only to protest or pray, but to insist—publicly and collectively—that time itself mattered, that every passing second was a moral failure until the hostages returned.

On Wednesday, during a dramatic and emotional ceremony marking the return of the last Israeli captive, the body of fallen police officer Master Sergeant Ran Gvili z”l, the digital jumbotron towering over the square was frozen at 843 days, 12 hours, 5 minutes, and 59 seconds. The effort to bring Ran Gvili’s body home cannot be ignored. Hundreds of the security apparatus were involved, which included a crack team of forensic dentists who dug through dental records of hundreds of corpses until the right match was finally found, and we, as a people and nation, could rest assured that the Gvili’s could bring their son to a proper burial.  There was no cathartic cheer, no sense of victory. What filled the square instead was something heavier and quieter—a collective exhale, the release that comes not with joy, but with the end of unbearable waiting.

For Israelis, this moment inevitably summoned an older, unresolved national wound. The name Ron Arad is etched into the country’s collective consciousness. Shot down over Lebanon in 1986, Arad became the embodiment of agonizing uncertainty. For years, there were signs of life—letters, photographs, fragments of intelligence—each reigniting hope, each followed by renewed silence. His fate was never resolved, leaving the nation suspended between prayer and dread. His face on posters and billboards came to symbolize Israel’s deepest promise to itself: that it does not abandon its missing, even when answers may never come. Arad represented the terror not only of loss, but of never knowing.

That is precisely why the end of the hostage chapter in Gaza—however incomplete, however painful—marks such a profound rupture in Israeli public life. For more than two years, yellow ribbon pins on lapels, backpacks, fences, and baby strollers, and dog tags hanging from rearview mirrors and around necks, were not mere symbols. They were declarations of moral incompleteness. They said: we are not whole, we are not finished, we cannot move on. The hostages organized and unified (a swath of) Israeli society and world Jewry around a single, piercing demand that transcended politics, ideology, and identity.

Now, slowly, sometimes awkwardly, and ceremoniously, those ribbons are being unpinned. Dog tags are being removed and set aside. The pain has not faded, and the story is not yet resolved, but the posture of waiting has ended. This is one of the most destabilizing transitions a society can experience: the movement from mobilized grief to unstructured grief, from a singular moral focus to a landscape of unresolved mourning and difficult questions. Hostage advocacy unified so many of us in a rare and fragile consensus. Its absence will likely create a vacuum—and vacuums are never neutral.

What fills that space next will shape Israel’s moral and civic future. Without hostages in Gaza, Israeli society will no longer be oriented around one humanitarian demand directed inward. Inevitably, the gaze will widen—toward the aftermath of the war, toward Gaza itself, toward Palestinians living amid devastation, displacement, and despair, and towards the West Bank where settler violence remains unbridled. For many Israelis and many Jews around the world, this shift will feel deeply uncomfortable, even threatening. It will raise painful questions that cannot be postponed forever: What responsibility do we bear now that the immediate emergency is over? How do we hold our own trauma without allowing it to eclipse the humanity of others? Can empathy expand without feeling like betrayal?

These questions are not theoretical. They will shape public discourse, policy choices, and the moral vocabulary of Israeli society in the months and years ahead. They will test whether Israel can move from a posture of survival to one of moral agency.

Parashat Beshalach offers an uncannily precise lens for this moment. The Israelites have just crossed the Sea of Reeds. The enemy has drowned, and the threat essentially dissipated. Miriam sings, and the people taste freedom for the first time. Almost immediately, they panic. They complain of thirst, of hunger, of uncertainty. The Torah conveys to us that liberation was the dream, but it is also completely disorienting. The clarity of oppression is replaced by the ambiguity of freedom. Redemption is not the end of the story; it is the beginning of a far more demanding chapter.

The Israelites needed to learn to live as free people, not defined by the Pharaoh. They needed to regroup and reimagine their identity as a people once the sea had closed over the Egyptians. So too, modern Israel now faces a moment after the sea has closed. The countdown clock has stopped. The singular cry—bring them home—no longer structures every moral decision. The question remains:  What kind of people do we become when the external urgency recedes?

Do we cling to fear as identity, hardening ourselves against anything that might complicate our grief? Or do we allow compassion to widen, even when doing so feels emotionally risky? Beshalach teaches that the absence of an immediate enemy does not relieve us of moral obligation. It intensifies it. Freedom demands responsibility. Silence after the song demands choice.

Removing ribbons and dog tags should not be seen as erasure, but rather as a transition. It is the painful movement from rallying to rebuilding, from a single moral demand to moral complexity. Hostage Square may grow quieter, and the clock may no longer tick, but the covenantal work of justice, dignity, empathy, and shared humanity has only begun.

The sea has closed behind us. Now comes the harder journey forward.

Shabbat Shalom and Tu BiShvat Sameach!