SAN DIEGO –He is ever so slight, frail-looking, and, in many ways, the physical antithesis of the perceived, muscular modern Israeli soldier. In fact, Israel Defense Forces originally labeled him almost too delicate a young man to even be inducted into its lauded Army, someone with “a low medical profile.” But he insisted on combat service, a national rite of passage in the beleaguered Jewish state—which has been under the siege of war and terrorism since the very day of its independence from Great Britain, May 14, 1948.
Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit, an unlikely international hero who has suffered through five years of internment by the Palestinian terror syndicate Hamas, wanted to be like his older brother Joel, a regular in the armored corps. He was abducted by Hamas terrorists near Gaza at dawn on Sunday, June 25, 2006. Other than the fact he is still alive, and pray God, about to be released in an uncommonly lop-sided exchange of prisoners between Israel and the Palestinians [some 1000 of them for the single Israeli], we really don’t know much about Shalit’s physical and spiritual conditions. He has been denied visits from the Red Cross and other humanitarian agencies since his abduction.
Gilad Shalit, who has just wanted to go home to the town of Mitzpe Hila in the western Galilee, has been named an honorary citizen of Paris, Rome, Miami, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. His release has been entreated for by a myriad of voices, from the small Catholic parish in Gaza City to the president of Russia. Hamas has ignored global opinion about his detention, at one time announcing that his significance was equivalent to that of “a cat, or less.”
His abductors, preying on his vulnerability, have used the lad as a prodding and propaganda device all these years, including the transmission of cruel videos showing him forcing a wan smile while looking at a Hamas newspaper to verify the date and his unhappy predicament.
Israelis, most of all Gilad’s mother and father—who have taken many governments to task over this horror, including their own sometimes vacillating Israeli leadership—are jubilant about his imminent release. The singular, silent Gilad has become a symbol of hope, despair, and the increasingly evident impatience of the Israeli public with its government’s calcified position on any bold initiatives for a regional peace. But the feelings that Jews and all decent peoples carry about Gilad Shalit are ultimately not about politics. They are a reflection of our love of and for human life.
In the Talmud, it is written: “Save a single life, and you save the whole world.” Every Israeli mother knows this about his son or daughter pressed into the compulsory military service in Israel that is as intrinsic as the resurrected Hebrew language of the nation. Every mother and father in Israel became Gilad’s parent; every person his brother or sister.
When two other Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, were similarly abducted by Hamas’s sibling terror-army in Lebanon, Hezbollah, in 2006, we awaited their return with both anticipation and dread. The deal had been struck for those two; an ethereal hope lingered that Ehud and Eldad would walk back over into Israel. Instead, the terrorists, cynically playing on our life-dreams, delivered two coffins.
Every Israeli chest was broken as though it carried two hearts.
Meanwhile, Gilad Shalit has really not been able to say anything to us as we have prayed, protested, and pleaded for him to come home to his family’s kitchen and his own bedroom. The value of his life is beyond any words and any number.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may bew contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com