The Hostage Rescue, the Midrash and a movie
Hi and welcome back to another fiery episode of Torah Goes Hollywood. TGH is coming in hot hot hot from our class at the Hadar retreat over Shavuot about Judaism and the cosmos. Which means TGH this week will be slightly shorter shorter shorter, since the time to generate a new episode, she is limited.
Thanks to all of you who came out to the class. If you weren't there and want to know more, it built on this TGH from a couple months ago and broadened out the themes with a number of other sources, including this great passage from Neil deGrasse Tyson:
"The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth, with carbon serving as the foundation of biochemistry. We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us…We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out."
This week we're going to take a swing in a very different direction — the hostage rescue. It happened last weekend, after our episode went out. So we'll take a look at it through the lens of both an enigmatic text and a classic film. Plus a hint of the parsha, Naso, because we’d never leave you hanging.
For last year's entry on the portion and its mysterious rules of the nazir, go on over here. And the archive here.
Now on to matters of redemption.
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Like many of you, I found myself struggling to put words to the emotions felt last weekend upon news of the rescue of four Jewish hostages after eight months in captivity in Gaza.
There was, to be sure, pure exultation. The liberation of Andrey Kozlov, Almog Meir Jan, Shlomi Ziv and Noa Argamani was the sweetest interlude after eight months of bitterness. The mere sight of them — let alone with their family on Israeli soil — was enough to bring smiles to the most dour doom-scroller among us (me included).
So much gave us feeling. The improbable nature of the rescue deep behind enemy lines; the idea that some of our darkest memories of Oct 7 — Argamani pleading not to be taken to Gaza on a motorcycle of course a touchstone image — had for a moment been brightened. And maybe most of all, the simple everyday details of a return home. "I haven't spoken Hebrew in so long," Argamani reportedly said. It was as though she had been deprived of the chance to sing. And now, finally, music.
But this rosy picture was complicated by other data points. By the knowledge of the unimaginable pain these freed hostages faced over the last eight months, and the many years of challenges and work ahead of them. By all the other hostages left behind, each of them still facing their own hell, their state of mind — or even any facts about their awareness that some in their group had been freed — deeply unknown. By the toll on truly innocent Gazan civilians (I'll leave to everyone's individual moral calculus on how to define this).
And by the brave soldier and leader Arnon Zamorah, who died even as he enabled this life-saving mission and so many others . (Meaningful tribute here.)
So, contradictory feelings abided. Joy mingled with outrage. Zen with anxiety. Relief about the outcome with anguish about the situation. And the grand distinction that underlies all of it — a desire for peace and a push to keep fighting.
To not feel happiness at the rescue, it seemed to me, was to miss the point of everything we were fighting for. But to only feel happiness at the rescue, it also seemed, was to overlook what we have lost in the fight.
It was the strangest of emotional states, and while the human heart can abide multitudes, I, perhaps like some of you, felt this pull at times to be so irreconcilable — to yank in such opposite directions — I couldn’t imagine ever feeling whole again. The pure anger and sadness that had abided for so many months had been given respite, and welcomedly so. But in its unitary place was the most impossible of binaries.
I wondered if there were any Jewish texts that captured this feeling. The Torah's most prominent hostage-rescue incidents alas do not have much to say in this regard. The case of Avraham rescuing Lot and others after the war of the four kings in Genesis 14 emphasized the swiftness with which he jumped to the rescue but not the psychic aftermath of his actions.
The war of the Canaanites that led to hostage-taking in Numbers 21 shades the narrative to the Israelite commitment to God (they pledged the spoils to the Tabernacle) — an important message, but one that elides feelings.
Similarly, the Talmud’s comments on the subject that one does not pay a ransom above market value — “k’dei d’meihen” — were born of very different circumstances in which pirates typically kidnapped people for money, not politics. The comments are of limited legal applicability, let alone emotional insight.
But then, courtesy of the Yeshivat Har Etzion scholar and rabbi Moshe Taragin, I was put on to a midrash in the Yalkut Shimoni, also quoted by Maimonides. The Yalkut, which compiles older Aggadaic traditions according to the sequence of the portions (it's like Torah Goes Aggad'ta!), says something striking. It says that God can both appear as a "Man of War," as He does at Yam Suf when the Israelites were under military attack from Egyptians, and that God can also appear as "An Older Man Filled With Mercy," as He did at Sinai when the Israelites had sinned with the Golden Calf and God forgave them.
Now, the Yalkut says, that could make it seem as if there were two gods. So in order to fully dispel this very wrong notion, God appeared at the revelation at Sinai "k'etzem Ha'Shamayim" — as “the essence of (/as clear as) the sky." A cryptic statement. But it appears to be some kind of specter that unifies — that takes two seemingly opposite visions — and in one mystical turn resolves them.
From this text it turns out these two aspects — war and respite, relief and outrage, conflict and peace — are disunited even in the Heavenly realm. That the feelings that were riddling me after the hostage rescue of wanting to give in to the joy of reunion and not wanting to give in to the forces of evil — of wanting to feel peace and wanting to keep fighting — are embedded even within God and the universe itself. Not only embedded, but so contradictory that it takes a Divine trick, as it were, to synthesize them.
I found this comforting. Since the beginning of the universe, baked into the universe, are these twin ideas: happiness and unrest, peace and militancy. They are both there, in opposition, pulling at each other, roiling beneath the surface, as they were last weekend. And yet we go on. And yet God finds a way to bring them into coexistence.
I wondered what other moments in modern Israel history encapsulated this idea. There is, of course, the annual pivot from Yom Ha’Zikaron to Yom Ha’Atzma’ut, the Day of Remembrance to the Day of Independence. But while those are part of one history they are describing two distinct sets of events and, at any rate, are deliberately not marked simultaneously. What else epitomized the simultaneous competing feelings of the present moment?
I found myself turning to the 1977 Israeli movie "Operation Thunderbolt," about the famous raid on Entebbe, Uganda, to rescue Jews who'd been taken hostage after the terrorist hijacking of an AirFrance flight.
A startling three films about Entebbe came out within eight months of the July 1976 raid — the slow movers of today's entertainment world could take a cue — and this one was easily the best. (The other two were shaggier TV movies.) You may well have seen the film, which dramatizes our current situation with surprising accuracy.
Starring Israeli A-lister Yehoram Gaon as mission commander Yonatan "Yoni" Netanyahu, "Thunderbolt" has an almost-documentary feel as it cuts between the hostage scene on the ground and the military and political machinations back in Israel, before culminating in an (over-the-top) extended action sequence for the rescue.
The film was written, directed and produced by the late Israeli filmmaking mainstay Menahem Golan (he would go on with producing partner Yoram Globus to churn out scores of 80's action movies; Globus also produced this) and had enough richness and authenticity to earn a foreign-language Oscar nomination (just try to ignore that cringe-y 70’s disco score). Several prominent public officials, including PM Yitzhak Rabin and Defense Minister Shimon Peres, even appear as themselves.
Impossible to miss when re-watching the movie in a post-Oct 7 world are the parallels to our current reality. The terrorists commit numerous acts, like separating out the Jewish victims, to evoke the Holocaust. Protesters and family members accost PM Rabin, saying he's not doing enough to bring them home in scenes that, but for the attire, feel like they were recorded in Tel Aviv last week. (There are, no doubt, distinctions between the situations.)
And of course there is the meticulous planning by a leader of what would be called Operation Yonatan echoing excitedly back to all the accounts we've been reading about the preparation of Operation Arnon in the weeks leading to last Saturday's raid. Indeed, if the 1977 movie seemed to prefigure our own moment, it also reverberates with a message of the durability of Jewish survival in the age of Israel. For so many years bad actors have sought to target the citizens of the Jewish state; for as many years ingenuity and fearlessness have stopped them.
But the most notable element to me about “Operation Thunderbolt” is how it captured the contradictory feelings of the past week. The liberation of the hostages literally comes as Yoni is dying — he watches, wounded, as they get on the plane airlifting them out, and then they watch him as the man who enabled their rescue dies in front of them on the plane. All our emotions entwined in one disunited but somehow harmonious six-minute scene.
And then, as soon as that ends, the plane lands, and shofars and joyous cries of “David, King of Israel” literally ring out on the tarmac celebrating the liberation. (Both those scenes below.) Man of War, as Yoni certainly was. Man of Mercy, as the people no doubt feel.
Our portion, in noting the roles of the Levites, makes a strange notation. Moses and Aaron are told to take a separate census of this tribe to determine their roles in the Tabernacle. “From the 30 years to 50 years, all who come to the army (“tzava”) to do the work in the Tent of Meeting.” (4:3) It is the oddest of usages — the whole point of the Levites is they don’t join the army, as we’d been told numerous times in earlier portions. Ah, but even their pastoral service cannot be fully divorced from a patriotic militaristic role, the text is telling us. War and mercy, all entwined.
In the middle of “Operation Thunderbolt,” as the Israeli government is weighing how to respond to the terrorists’ demands to release prisoners, an Israeli official tells reporters that the government, in a unanimous decision, has agreed to a negotiation. The immediate next scene has an army commander telling its leaders "The government has been forced to give in to the terrorists. The Defense Minister has asked us to immediately prepare a convincing military operation." The desire to seek peace and desire to fight — “Man of War” and “Man of Mercy” — in one persuasive snapshot.
Or as Taragin puts it poetically, "Let's take our charity and our mercy and allow it to service our war.” I can think of no easier way to deal with something so hard.
Thank you, as ever, for reading, and have a good, peaceful and reconcilable weekend.