Or perhaps breakfast, local standard time.

After two excruciating years, almost to the day, the 48 remaining hostages are set to be coming home. We are waiting, and praying, with bated breath, for what the next few hours will bring.

Anyone who thinks this is the end is naive to the point of delusion. This is just another beginning. The beginning of healing for the living hostages; the beginning of proper rest for our deceased. It is the beginning of new opportunities in the world to choose coexistence, to choose cooperation, to choose love, or at least civility, instead of hate. The Ceasefire Now crowd has finally said the quiet part out loud, which is that they don’t actually want a ceasefire, they just want dead Jews. So, ya know, that’s cool. Smokescreen gone, makes it easier I suppose. Isn’t it better to peg a hateful bigot outright, than for there to be uncertainty on the matter? As the old saying goes, it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. I have less doubt about some of the world now. So, thanks for that.

But for the rest of the world…for the rest of the world, there is hope. Varying degrees of it, and not without concern to go along with it. But…hope. For the first time in two years, there is palpable hope among the Jewish people.

Since the ceasefire deal was announced, I’ve been processing it as a matter mostly of becoming aware of just how afraid I’ve been for two years. Afraid for myself, my loved ones, my community, Jews and our allies all over the world (because we do have some, even if it often doesn’t feel like it). We have been living in fear since before October 7, 2023, but since that fateful day, the level of fear has risen so high for so many of us that we have been choking on it.

But…hope.

What does hope look like after enduring such despair and bearing the weight of such fear for so long? Well, there’s a song we sing at this time of year, one that I learned in college during Sukkot, that has been playing in the back of my mind like a broken record for weeks:

כלו

כל העולם כלו
גשר צר מאד
והעקר לא לפחד כלל

Kol Ha’Olam Kulo

Kol ha’olam kulo
Gesher tzar me’od
Veha’ikar lo lifached k’lal.

The whole world
Is a very narrow bridge
and the main thing is to have no fear at all.

Lyrics: Rabbi Nachman of Breslov; Tune: Rabbi Baruch Chait. Translation courtesy aish.com.

What may not translate from just reading the words is how this song is sung; it starts off with the lyric about the bridge, soft and slow, before the lyric about having no fear rises up loud and fast and strong. It repeats a couple of times (or as often as the crowd feels like doing it, ha). It’s really the perfect song to harken to right now, in understanding that everything is balanced on a knife’s edge, a very narrow bridge; with one slip, one misstep, we could fall into the abyss. But we must have courage in our convictions, and hope in our hearts, and faith in ourselves and each other. The main thing is to have no fear at all.

Hope. It’s what’s for dinner. With any luck, we can have it for breakfast and lunch too. May hope sustain us all like the manna that came from Heaven while we wandered in the wilderness, navigating new terrain to find our way home, just like we are now.

The cover photo for this post is of a large painting I was commissioned to complete for our community’s 10/7 commemorative event this year. I painted the base coat of a 24×48 inch canvas in earth tones; I then facilitated the painting of the teal and pink colors (so chosen to coordinate with the original poster of the Nova Festival) during a community festival where I led people to join me in drum painting, a technique I designed where the paintbrushes are used as drumsticks to drum along on the canvas to music. The idea of community involvement in this way harkened to the refrain of our people, that we will dance again, we will make art again, we will celebrate again. Next, I added the word Nova in hostage-yellow, and carefully splattered red paint with a light hand to honor the casualties of that day. Final touches were a border of music notes and a dove of peace in the upper right corner.

They are coming home. And we will dance again. We will have hope.