The Hostages

I ask Chat:

What are the different Hebrew words for hostages?

Hostages, some still in Gaza,  חֲטוּפִים 

 

 חֲטוּפִים, שְׁבוּיִים, חבל 

It isn’t that I don’t know the word. Living here and not knowing the Hebrew word for hostage would mean I live under a rock. But my spelling is atrocious, so I ask to make sure it is correct. For you. 

Correct spelling in Hebrew makes a world difference.

A nanosecond reply:

Transliteration: chatufim

Meaning: Kidnapped people, abductees 

•  or שְׁבוּיִים

·       חָטוּף (chatuf) – male singular

·       חֲטוּפָה (chatufah) – female singular

·       חֲטוּפִים (chatufim) – plural (mixed or all male)

·       חֲטוּפוֹת (chatufot) – plural (feminine)

 Often used for civilians taken by force, e.g., on October 7 

I stopped saying thank you to Chat when my daughter AI-shamed me for thanking a computer. 

On a roll, I ask for the names of the חֲטוּפוֹת (females) and חֲטוּפִים (males) in Gaza. 

The robot directs me to the Chabad website for a more complete list. Chabad is an international organization dedicated to serving the Jewish people and bringing those who have lost their way or who never had a map—back to Judaism.

It is 6 am. Why ask now? So that I can pray with more intention (I am sharing here). It is one thing to have the hostages in mind. It is quite another to name them. 

Names, as my good friend Raya told me years ago, are important.

I read that there are 54 hostages still captive in Gaza. 

Fifty-four people, some young, some old, still captives, stolen from families and country, some mutilated, some raped, all starved, either dead or languishing in tunnels, alone. It is almost 2 years since their abduction on October 7, 2023. 

Of the 54 about 24 may be alive, 30 are confirmed dead.* 

How does that happen? How are deaths confirmed and by whom? Why do the dead matter so much, anyway? They are gone, no? Shouldn't we concentrate on the living? 

I ask why do the dead even matter, a rhetorical question, with more than a twinge of guilt. I know they matter. I am part of a big club. Members of the club have all lost someone, seemingly for eternity because that person went missing, never to be found again, likely murdered, kidnapped, or drowned. A human who left and never came back. 

We got our body back. It was not pretty.  

When he went missing 52 years ago I felt, albeit with the naiveté of a teenager, a glimmer of hope that he would come back alive, that he could come back, not as a גוף a body, the container of the soul, but as a living, breathing human being. 

It is denial to say (and I like denial very much) that it is the ones who are alive, the living that we  really do need, that we need to bargain for, need to get back at any price, the living more than the dead. 

But in Chicago, standing in front of a bronze plaque with our brother's name on it, the son of our two parents with bronze plaques next to his, I pause and give honor, shake my head. There is no feeling quite like this. It shatters denial with only a thud.   

But still, even though I know the answer, almost to test Chat GPT I type in: 

Why is burying deceased hostages in Israel so important ?

Introduction: 

Burial is deeply important, says Chat (not making a pun intentionally with the word deeply) not only emotionally and nationally, but also religiously and culturally.

There are five reasons that burial is important:   

1. Jewish people have a religious obligation. They are commanded to bury the dead promptly, decorously, an act of kindness that cannot be reciprocated. 

Deuteronomy 21:23: “You shall surely bury him the same day.”   

Before we die, when we are very much alive to hear the Old Mighty's commandments, we hear a commandment to be holy, this in our lifetime.קְדוֹשִׁים תִּהְיוּ (Leviticus 19:2).

 A commandment to bury on the same day is an affirmation of the body's sanctity even after death. It should not become as bodies do after our hearts stop beating.  

2.  Seeing to the return of the deceased to Israel is a moral and national duty.  

It provides closure and honor to the victims of terror, the captives. 

3. Burial in Israel restores identity. 

No longer a statistic, the life has a name and all of the honor that name affords. The body's proper caregivers are family and friends. 

4. Burial in the land of Israel returns the deceased to the ancestral homeland of every Jew. There is spiritual merit in this. 

It is why the Jewish dead are flown to Israel via El Al Airlines for burial. No matter where in the diaspora a person dies, that person symbolizes a link in an ever-growing chain of national and historical continuity. From ancient prophets to modern heroes, a Jewish person, dead or alive, is one of the people of Israel. 

5. Returning a body delivers a blow to terrorism. 

It is one swift kick in the uh, psyche, especially today, to sociopaths who resort to this tactic, using the dead as bargaining chips, such unconscionable objectification. Bringing them home is resistance, active protestation to foul play. 

There we have it, five neat categories. And Chat didn't even mention that feeling I had at the bronze plaque.

So add the sixth and we have an explanation, cogent reasons why we need them all. Every last one of them. 

therapydoc

*From Times of Israel reporting (24 hostages alive: 22 Israeli, 1 Thai, 1 Nepali):

Over a week aga a cry rang out with the news of the death of a young soldier, Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld. The nation, memorializes him, classes are dedicated to this beautiful young man. The shiva in a small tent, standing room only, 500 others. People in Israel travel all over the country to pay respects to people they do not know. This is what it means to give honor. More assassinations followed last week. 

Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld