Can Song Ever Replace Silence?
Following the massacre of October 7, 2023, I made a vow that, unless life circumstances dictated otherwise, I would never again leave Israel over the holiday of Simchat Torah. This was the day on the Jewish calendar that barbarians unleashed unprecedented savagery on our beleaguered citizenry. This vow was a result of my visiting with family in Maryland on that fateful morning. Despite my most valiant efforts, it would take more than a week and thousands of evaporated shekels to finally return home.
Desperate to return to Israel, I slept on airport floors all over Europe and North Africa, trying to inch my way closer and closer to Ben Gurion. Consequently, I was never able to wrap my head around the days that followed the slaughter. Indeed, I felt ashamed that I had, somehow, been exempt from the abject state of paralysis that Israel experienced while they raced to inter 1,200 butchered men, women and babies. I would only learn, later, about the silence that came after the screams of 251 kidnapped innocents faded, leaving behind a flesh-strewn and blood-soaked vista.
Two years later, instead of setting the holiday table, ironing festive clothing and baking a last batch of round challahs, we were glued to television sets and computer screens, watching the last living twenty hostages emerge from the bowels of Hamas-Hell, a spectacle that was so miraculous that it bordered on the unbelievable. But we had to believe it because we had prayed for it. For years, a poster hung in my office stating, simply, “Expect a Miracle” but over time it became merely ‘wall art.’ As the clock ticked closer and closer to the time for lighting candles and shutting down all electronic equipment, we still remained glued to the snippets of joyous, tear-soaked reunions. The cameras cut to the riotous crowds thronging about Kikar HaChatufim – Hostage Square – outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, some of whom were detaching their yellow hostage-pins and removing the ubiquitous ‘Bring Them Home’ dog tags. Joy appeared unbridled and complete.
But I could not stop thinking about the parents of the soldiers who paid with limbs, visible and invisible injuries and death. Imas and Abbas who surreptitiously watch their outwardly brave children, trying not to cloy but remaining ever vigilant for signs of depression and suicidal ideation. It is all too much. So while the country was dancing in the streets, crying tears of relief and uttering the phrase, “The war has ended,” I sensed a pervasive loneliness for the families of our IDF heroes. We are a compassionate people and, certainly, we know exactly where to place our thanks; for some, however, glee remains elusive.
I cannot take off my pin just yet. Despite a reprieve and a chance to celebrate, Hamas does what Hamas does. In the last 24 hours, in lieu of honoring their “promise” of disarmament, 60 people were publicly executed. These people had dared to voice the correct opinion that Gaza’s carnage lies directly at the feet of Hamas.
We are still in the early chapters of the Torah readings, the technicolor stories of Genesis that denote the birth-pangs of becoming a people. As the weather turns colder, I’m warmed by memories of Simchat Torah 2025 where, dancing with other women, we draped blue and white Israeli flags over our shoulders and sang with abandon. Together our voices lifted in prayerful song, yearning for the day when we will beat our swords into plowshares and have all of our sons and daughters safely home, within the bosom of our land.
New York native Andrea Simantov has lived in Jerusalem since 1995. She writes for several publications, appears regularly on Israel National Radio and owns an image consulting firm for women.