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.

As I was walking down to Hebron this morning, my elderly friend Zechariah Nahari reminded me that yesterday was the end of shiva for Shalom Nagar, an 86-year-old Kiryat Arba resident. Zechariah, as a fellow Yemenite and family friend, was at the ceremonial meal held (by non-Ashkenazim) on the seventh day.

Shalom, a”h, had two claims to fame as far as I am concerned. First, he was the policeman who, in 1962, at age 26, hanged Adolph Eichmann, Hitler’s architect of the Holocaust. Chosen by lottery from among 22 policemen, and the only one of the 22 who did not want to do it, he pushed the button that caused the trapdoor to fall away, leading to Eichmann’s death. When you google pictures of Eichmann in his glass cage at his trial, the policeman on the left with the mustache is Shalom Nagar. This was the only case of capital punishment in Israel’s history as a modern state.

Second, he was the uncle of Rabbi Uzzi Nagar, who has been teaching us Daf Yomi for 14 years in Me’arat HaMachpeila.

Shalom, the uncle, born in Yemen in 1936, arrived in Israel as an orphan at age 12, served in the paratroopers, and then joined the prison service. For many years, he was irreligious, but as he advanced in the prison services and became head of Ramla Prison, he returned to his faith. Throughout his 25 years of retirement, he studied in one of Kiryat Arba’s many kollels. If you google Shalom Nagar, you will see a man in his eighties with a beard and peyos.

When Rabbi Uzi Nagar, the nephew, completed high school, he went straight into the air force for three years, and then he obtained a BA in engineering from the Technion, Israel’s MIT. As a student in the Technion, he met his wife Michal, and together they decided to devote their lives to Torah. Rav Nagar studied in an Ashkenazi Kollel in Jerusalem for seven years and then became a Torah educator. When I began Daf Yomi, Rav Nagar had already been teaching Daf Yomi for five years, so he is now approaching the end of his third teaching cycle.

It was May, 1967. The mood in Israel was tense. Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt was riling up the masses, talking about driving Israel into the sea. There was a fear that the surrounding Arab countries were about to attack Israel from all sides with the intent of destroying it, and there was a sense of imminent tragedy. High school students were put to work digging trenches around Israeli towns to impede foreign attack. City parks were consecrated as burial grounds. The common black humor of the time was, “Will the last person to leave Ben Gurion Airport please turn out the lights?”