Today marks the 613^th day of my older son Ze’ev’s reserve-duty service as an army kashrut mashgiach since the October 7^th War broke out. I know that number sounds like I made it up, but I didn’t. Just saying. Some people have been in uniform for 997 days. Others have been in uniform for hundreds. One of those is my son-in-law.

A few months ago, my daughter Tzippora and her husband Shaked were making plans for summer vacation. Shaked, who learned in yeshiva and passed a year of semicha tests, is a popular Tanach teacher in a secular school in Kiryat Gat. As an idealistic baal teshuva from the Iranian community of Ashkelon, becoming a role model to kids from a background similar to his own was always his dream, and now he is living that dream. He is already a homeroom teacher in charge of the Tanach department in his large high school, and the school is starting to push him to take an interest in being a school principal, but he wants to keep teaching.

 Over the past three years, he has been juggling teaching with hundreds of days of intense army service, mostly in Gaza. At age 34, he is no longer in the very front lines like he was 10 years ago as an elite Givati infantry reservist participating in four Gaza post-Disengagement wars, but he is still very much involved in active combat service.

As a Kiryat Arba resident, every Shabbos morning I try to walk down to Me’arat HaMachpela for vatikin/Daf Yomi followed by Sfat Emet study in the Beit Schneerson neighborhood of Hebron. February 28, Shabbos, was different. My childhood friend was visiting me, a 70-year-old widower, with his fiancée, and neither were vatikin people. Normally, I would take such guests to Friday night davening in the Me’ara. That davening has a magical feel, and Shabbos guests always enjoy it, whether they go with the lively Carlebach minyan or choose a more sedate minyan. But this being Ramadan, the Me’ara is closed to Jews for five Fridays. (On those five Friday mornings my Daf Yomi minyan davens in the Avraham Avinu neighborhood.) So instead, we davened at 8:00 a.m. in the Me’ara.

This past weekend, we celebrated a very exciting Shabbat Chevron with many thousands of visitors, reading parashat Chayei Sarah with its story of Avraham Avinu’s purchasing burial graves and fields from Ephron the Hittite. This constituted Avraham’s first recorded real estate purchase in the Land of Israel; hence, it merited 22 verses, very rare in the Torah for a land purchase.

We had six guests, all of them yeshiva students. Four of the six were from the baal teshuva yeshiva Machon Meir, which has been sending us Chayei Sarah guests for many years, since the days when I was translating the parashat hashavua sheet of Machon Meir. Every guest is a treasure and a world unto himself, but this year the award for most interesting guest might go to Yisrael, age 61, a successful Hong Kong businessman who decided in midlife to convert to Judaism and study Torah.

With Corona and the war, it has been five years since we residents of Kiryat Arba-Chevron enjoyed a full Shabbat Chevron such as we enjoyed during all the years since 1994. This year, we felt magic and electricity for weeks before the actual Shabbat. Visitors from the outside started to arrive on Wednesday. We had arranged to have our six guests weeks in advance. We then spent two weeks having to say no to people calling and asking for a place to stay.

With the unprecedented heat wave Israel has been experiencing – the plague of wild dogs in my town, supposedly escapees from Gaza, as well as a single, loud donkey parked behind my house by some teenage boys – it has been difficult to sleep for weeks. Add to that the defeatist political protests against the war and constant political bickering, with every political disagreement within the coalition and army being trumpeted in the most unflattering way possible, I almost did not write this article. Finally, Canada, Great Britain, France, and Australia announced they were recognizing a “Palestinian” state, and the whole world started to look black. Wanting to write only positive things, I felt as though I had nothing to say.

But then I sat under our air conditioner for five minutes, and the world looked brighter. Refreshed, I will share with you two positive developments, reactions to that perfidious state recognition.

In these crazy times, when the news does a complete 180 degree turn every day, when there is much more that we do not know than what we do know, I would like to take a look back and a look forward.

For many years, Israel faced a nuclear threat from Iran, and that fact had great political meaning. Two American rabbis I am close to each expressed these fears to me, separately, 30 years ago, during the Oslo period, in almost the same words. Both viewed holding on to all of Judea and Samaria (my view) as endangering Israel. Both rebuked me, more or less gently. One said, “If we provoke Iran by holding on to Judea and Samaria, and they drop an atomic bomb on us, maybe Kiryat Arba where you live will survive, but I have my doubts about the millions of Jews in the Tel Aviv area.”

The two men who thus addressed me were not hedonistic, bar-hopping atheists. They were both learned men, committed to teaching as much Torah as possible to as many young people as possible, and that was what they spent their lives doing, one in America and one in Israel. They were both very good at what they did, and both still are. I almost never respond quickly to oral arguments, and I just listened when they spoke, especially as I revere both.

Let me begin by saying that we in Kiryat Arba have been praying for the hostages for 15 months, and we are glad that they are being released, whatever mixed feelings we have about the terms.

Hostage deals with extravagant price tags are not something new. The first big hostage deal was in 1985, when Shimon Peres was prime minister. It was called the Jibril Deal, and I remember protesting against it at a Tel Aviv demonstration. It freed 1,150 terrorists in exchange for three Israeli hostages held by the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Israel had never seen the likes of that.

Later, in 2011, there was the Shalit deal, which freed arch-terrorist Yihye Sinwar, mastermind of the October 7^th attack, and 1,026 other terrorists in exchange for one soldier.

In November of 2023, after a month of heavy fighting following the October 7^th attack, Israel achieved a hostage deal in which 108 hostages were released in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners. At some point, negotiations broke down and the Gaza war resumed.

Last month, a year later, presumably following pressure from Donald Trump for a deal, an agreement was reached in which 33 of the remaining 82 Israeli hostages were to be released by February 16 in exchange for the release of about 1,900 terrorists, a thousand of them serving life sentences. Another 49 living hostages remain after that, and their release will involve further negotiations.