First, a disclaimer: I’m recording this on Friday afternoon, October 10th, 2025. As you know, things are changing by the hour. By the time you listen, the situation may have shifted; new headlines, new numbers, new realities. But this episode, and heck, this podcast, isn’t really meant to cover the news. It’s about what these past few days, and really, these past two years, have felt like for so many of us. The uncertainty, the hope, the grief, the exhaustion. So even if the facts evolve, I hope the reflections still hold true.
My first instinct, in general, is not to be the most mystical, or the most superstitious, I know they’re different things, or the most spiritual. It’s just not my instinct. I like many aspects of those things but it’s not my instinct.
Yes, I believe in God, which means making space for the inexplicable. But honestly, I don’t spend much time thinking about that stuff. Supernatural phenomena are not my bag. And the afterlife is a lot less interesting to me than what we do here and now. If remnants of our beloved dead still linger in this world, I haven’t felt them the way others seem to.
So I was utterly unprepared for my dining room to become haunted.
For two years, an invisible presence has loomed over our table – a silent, everpresent accompaniment to every meal.
From the outside, we look like many other families. Mom. Dad. Four kids, a high chair wedged between the “big” seats, from which my youngest daughter gleefully tosses Crispix, her cereal of choice when it’s not Shabbat when she gets Fruity Pebbles, yes, I know all about red 40. Chill out. In other words, it all looks like normal, joyful chaos.
Except for the haunted chair, sitting grimly at the head of the table.
It doesn’t look grim. If you didn’t know better, you’d think a velvety grey chair draped with a bright yellow ribbon was festive. A chair decorated for a birthday, a graduation – any normal, precious milestone.
But two years after October the 7th, we all know better. A yellow ribbon is not a celebration. A yellow ribbon is a plea. It’s a wound. It’s an emptiness.
It is a symbol of despair. It is a symbol of hope.
That first dazed Shabbat after the massacre, as we adjusted to our remade world, my wife vowed that the chair would sit empty until every single hostage came home. And she has kept that promise, even as we shoved folding chairs around the table when we had too many guests. Sometimes, I get an almost childish, defiant urge to just pull out the chair and sit there, yellow ribbon be damned.
It’s exhausting to be haunted. Day in. Day out.
Of course, I’ve never taken it out on the chair, and not just because my wife would kill me. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had pulled off the ribbon, plunked myself down, and announced from now on, no more sadness. That’s not how haunting works. Or hope. Or grief.
Because the chair is just a chair. A symbol. Of the emptiness that has lived inside of me, inside of all of us, inside of so many of us, since the night of October 7th, 2023, when I turned on my phone after the holiday and learned that the world that I had trusted to keep on existing day after day had just gone up in flames.
Sukkot had just ended.
The holiday in which we read the most honest book in the entire Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh. It’s called Kohelet. Ecclesiastes.
And it reads like a painful personal diary. It’s one long, aching reflection on the fragility of life. On how to be human when you know you’re living on borrowed time, in a borrowed world. “Hevel havalim, hakol hevel — Vanity of vanities, all is fleeting.” (Kohelet 1:2)
We think we know, in a distant, theoretical way, that everything ends. That you can build a home, a rhythm, a life, and watch it turn to ash in a single morning. But we don’t really know. Not until it happens.
Not until we watch the smoke rise from the ruins of our shattered world, dazed and wondering, what now?
In those first horrible, heady months, we stumbled around like abandoned children, no longer sure of our place in the world. Setting up the chair felt like stability. Like doing something. Externalizing the pain.
Again, I took comfort in the poetry of Kohelet: “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” (Kohelet 3:1)
A time to weep, a time to build, a time to rage, a time to remember. And somehow, a time to eat dinner again, accompanied by ghosts.
The chair became a kind of talisman – heavy, immovable. If everyone kept an empty chair, maybe the world would be forced to reckon with the emptiness that 251 hostages and their families and their friends leave behind. And maybe the pain would be so intolerable that it would not be allowed to continue existing. If we just reminded the world, every day, of the 251 hostages, the farmers, the dancers that had been dragged to Gaza, then maybe the world would do something to save them. Because that’s just crazy.
That chair accompanied us through the past two years, sitting silent through the pain and hope and waiting. Standing sentry to our desperation.
That chair is how I want to tell the story of the past 735 days. Because sometimes, the only way to understand the enormity of a moment is through the prism of something small and tangible.
A few weeks into the war, the IDF rescued a single female hostage, a soldier named Ori Megidish, found alone in a tunnel. It feels so naive to say now, but I expected this to be the first in a string of Entebbe-esque missions, (remember that whole story from 1976? Remember that?) each more daring and triumphant than the last.
I was wrong.
Instead, after more than a month of bombing, Hamas and Israel agreed to a brief ceasefire. By November 30th, 2023, they had released 105 hostages – less than half of the people they had stolen. But still: more than 100 chairs, filled in just a few days.
But the ceasefire fell apart before the remaining hostages could be freed. And then, in December of 2023, the IDF mistakenly killed three hostages who had managed to escape, and the chair seethed with horror and grief at the spectacular waste of it all. Young soldiers who would never forgive themselves. Young hostages who could have come home.
But the chair felt lighter, almost hopeful, in May of 2024, when the IDF finally entered Rafah after months of hesitation. We had been told repeatedly that Rafah was very important. That there were hostages there. For weeks, we held our breath. In June of 2024, we got to exhale. It was Shabbat, I remember that. The night before, we had lit candles, said our customary prayers to free the hostages. That morning, we woke to the news that the IDF had rescued four hostages alive. Sometimes, the author of the universe throws in a miracle. Sometimes, amid the vanity of vanities, the impermanence of it all, we are given a chance to rejoice.
For a day, the chair felt light again. Less accusatory. Like it was allowing us to put down the weight we’d been carrying for months, stretch, take a breath. Like, maybe soon, it too could shuck off the weight of being a symbol and go back to just being a chair.
For the past two years, we’ve vacillated between despair and triumph, triumph and despair.
Triumph when the IDF killed Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’ military wing, in July of 2024.
Despair, two weeks later, to the day, when Hezbollah murdered 12 children as they played soccer on a balmy Saturday night.
Triumph when the IDF rescued hostage Qadi al-Farhan that August.
Despair when the army discovered the bodies of six hostages, murdered only hours before. Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Ori Danino. Eden Yerushalmi. Almog Sarusi. Alexander Lobanov. Carmel Gat. It felt like October 7th all over again. A horrible, horrible day.
We never quite got used to the ups and downs. To riding the parabolic curve of world-changing events.
Many of us were on a high when electronics began to explode across Lebanon, defanging Hezbollah, even as we reflected on the cost for Lebanese civilians who had nothing to do with this war.
And we were overwhelmed with relief when an anonymous low-ranking soldier killed Yahya Sinwar, a year after the massacre he had planned. When the living female hostages came home in January of 2025, smiling, waving, defying all our most awful predictions.
But every high felt like it was punctuated by pain.
The horror of Eli Sharabi’s emaciated face when he came home in February of 2025. I saw him speak at a local synagogue soon after, and it was impossible not to feel his anguish even as he tried to make sure no one saw it. The cruelty of Hamas, who knew what he did not: his family was not waiting for him with open arms and bated breath, because they were dead. Murdered on October 7th, minutes or hours after he was dragged away.
And then the low point of all low points, a couple of weeks later. The gut-wrenching spectacle that Hamas made of the Bibas family’s release. Terrorists had dragged four Bibases into Gaza. Yarden, 34. His wife Shiri, 32. His redheaded, smiling sons: Ariel, 4, and Kfir, not quite 9 months. But only Yarden returned alive.
I quit hoping for a few weeks after that. It hurt too much.
The chair seemed to get bigger after that, swollen with pain and guilt and failure. Some days, I wanted to smash it. To take it apart, rip up the velvet, unscrew the legs and pulverize the whole thing. But over time, the grief ebbed. And I thought I learned how to hope without letting it tear me apart.
Until last week, when reports emerged that negotiators, led by the United States and President Trump had finally reached a deal. The headlines called it a ceasefire of indefinite length, a possible end to the war. At least, that’s the hope.
According to the details reported so far, the deal includes a significant Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, international monitoring, large-scale humanitarian aid, and the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners, including many serving life sentences for the murder of civilians. Those prisoners will be given a hero’s welcome. This is the price Israelis have agreed to pay.
But. But. But. There’s also the stipulation we prayed for every day for the past two years. All hostages, living and no longer living, are supposed to come home. I pray that by the time you hear this, that promise has been fulfilled. That our empty chairs will have returned to be just that: four legs, armrests, spindles, seats. The most mundane and functional of objects, waiting innocently to be used.
The least dramatic exorcism I can imagine. No holy water, no blessings, no ancient words. Just a line of emaciated men, shuffling back to their families at last. Followed by a grim procession of coffins, the delayed journey of dozens of bodies to their eternal rest.
But of course, nothing is that simple.
Ghosts don’t disappear so easily. And I am so afraid to trust this hope.
Already, Hamas has made some caveats.
- We don’t know where all the bodies are.
- It’s gonna take time to return the remains.
A multinational team will enter Gaza to search for every last body, for as long as it takes – a gruesome, thankless task. It’s possible some remains will never be found, lost to the rubble and the months of devastation.
I am recording this on Friday, October 10, and we’re releasing this on Monday morning, right before the holiday of Simchat Torah – the two year anniversary of the Hebrew date of the massacre. Ha-shabbat hashechora, black Saturday. According to the latest reporting, all living hostages are set to return by noon, local time, this Monday, October 13. Five AM my time. An hour before this episode is scheduled to hit your feed. But of course, by now, that may have changed — for better or worse.
And I know what I will be doing, in the hours before the holiday begins at sundown. I suspect most of us will be doing the same thing: staring at our phones or laptops or TVs, hearts hammering, breath held, to watch hostage families embrace, sobbing, overwhelmed.
I always feel like a voyeur watching that footage, but on this occasion, I won’t be able stop myself. We have shared in the hostage families’ anguish for two years. And we share in their joy.
But even the most joyful celebration will be tinged by sorrow. For two years of hell. Of destruction. Of death. Of lives cut too short. Of attacks against Jews in the diaspora, whose safety no longer feels guaranteed.
And, of growing rage between Israelis – the toll of two years of war, two years of bitter disagreement over the aims of the war, the way it’s been fought, the people drafted to fight it.
Joy, and sorrow. For thousands of years, Jews have ritualized the mingling of joy and sorrow. We smash a glass at weddings to remember the destruction of Jerusalem. Many of us leave a tiny part of our homes rough and unpainted – a reminder that our world is not whole. These are customs honed by centuries of grief.
But there is no ritual that I am aware of for the return of hostages, both living and dead. No formal customs to mark the wild tangle of emotions at the end of two years of suffering.
What comfort can we offer to families with no living loved one to hug, who will plan funerals rather than reunions? Who will embrace coffins rather than living, breathing bodies?
What comfort can we offer to the Gazans whose lives have been destroyed, to the families who have lost their children, to the toddlers and teenagers learning to adjust to a life without limbs, without parents, without hope?
What comfort can we offer to the reservists who fought for hundreds of days as their lives collapsed around them? To the couples whose marriages disintegrated underneath the pressure? To the families struggling to keep a roof over their heads, because the war devastated their finances? To the families who lost children, husbands, fathers, uncles to IEDs and bullets and ambushes and bombs? To the communities of Be’eri and Nir Oz and Nir Am and dozens more, whose homes and fields have become graveyards? Who will replant their lives in the same soil from which their neighbors’ blood is screaming?
What comfort can we offer each other?
A nation divided. A nation on the brink.
A few months into the war, an Israeli rapper named Noam Tzurieli released a song called Another Day in Gaza. The 20something should have been on stage, promoting his rap career. Instead, he was serving in an elite combat unit, next to men who didn’t come home.
He wrote the song well before we could imagine an end to this war. When we were still reeling from the attack. Reflecting on the divisions that had threatened to rip us apart.
And there’s a stanza I love and can’t get out of my head.
A lesson for us to remember, every single day.
October 6th, my nation is ripping itself apart from the inside.
We chose sides.
We called each other traitors.
The next morning, they burned Jews.
They didn’t ask if you marched in the streets.
They didn’t ask who you voted for.
Every soul that ascended that morning commands us, with their death, to love one another.
To be worthy. To be worthy.
Not just this week. Not just this year.
Our whole lives.
Please forgive my clumsy translation. The awkwardness of the words does nothing to diminish their power. When you pray from the heart, the words don’t matter. And this is a prayer, even if it wasn’t written by a rabbi, can’t be found in a siddur.
A prayer. And a warning. A reminder that this lesson did not come easily.
We’ve learned and forgotten it many times before.
Each time, we’ve been reminded with fire and blood.
Ecclesiastes, once again: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again.” (Kohelet 1:9) History is not linear. It’s circular, a spiral that keeps drawing us back to the same heartbreak, asking if this time, we’ll learn.
The lesson began in 722 BCE, when the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel – a kingdom that had split from its cousins in the south.
It continued in 586 BCE, when the Babylonians finished the job, eradicating the southern kingdom of Judah – which, again, should never have existed as a separate entity from the north.
In 70 CE, when years of vicious infighting between Jews gave the Romans a door through which to enter, ripping us apart.
In 133 CE, when a charismatic guerilla fighter briefly reclaimed Jerusalem and earned the title of messiah – only to be killed two years later, his rebellion crushed, his people slaughtered, his biggest proponents publicly tortured to death.
We didn’t quit dreaming after that. But for thousands of years, we quit rebelling. Quit fighting to return to our lost home.
Until the 19th century. Until the dream became too pressing to ignore.
Israel’s Eurovision entry this year was called New Day Will Rise.
It’s a fitting title for this moment, as the Jewish people and the State of Israel stand on the brink of that new day, watching dawn break over the ruins.
And my prayer, my wild, desperate hope, is that we will watch it break together, hand in hand, arm in arm, as all of us – ALL OF US – begin slowly, agonizingly, to pick up the pieces. Slotting them into a foundation that can support the weight of every single one of us, standing together, faces turned at last to the light.