Behold, a People

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ITwas human misery, laid out with military precision. Last Friday, my wife and I found ourselves at 6:30 a.m. looking through the door of a sports hall in Beit Shemesh that had been converted into a makeshift campground. Row after row of one-man tents housed family members of the Hamas hostages. They were in the middle of a days-long march from the Gaza border to downtown Yerushalayim, to raise awareness of their cause.

Slowly, the marchers stumbled from their sleeping bags with that puffy-faced, unrested look peculiar to those who’ve slept in a tent. As they degummed their eyes, they were greeted by a welcome sight: coffee, breakfast, and a warm hello from a dozen or so volunteers in day-glo shirts. Unlike many of the other stops on their journey, these were religious volunteers — mostly Anglos — brought together by Ezrat Achim, a Beit Shemesh organization that is a one-stop shop for many medical and social services.

The brief encounter was a stark reminder of the pain that these people are still going through. There was a university student whose fiancée’s parents are somewhere inside Hamas’s tunnels, fate unknown; a woman whose 23-year-old daughter was captured from the Nova festival; an elderly, Baghdad-born woman who was simply journeying to identify with the cause.

Five months into the war, most Israelis have moved on to a grim new normal. But like Yaakov Avinu, who couldn’t find comfort because Yosef was still in the land of the living, the hostage families are suspended in a twilight zone: They can neither mourn properly nor hope properly because their loved ones have simply been swallowed alive.