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Will the Release of the Hostages Be the Next Phase of Our Renewal?
Israeli protestors take part in a rally demanding the immediate release of the hostages kidnapped during the deadly October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas, and the end of war in Gaza, in Jerusalem September 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
With all the talk of “deals” and “final phases,” it feels a world away from those days — only recently — when Israel felt more vulnerable than at any moment since 1948.
On the morning of October 7, 2023, as the full horror of the Hamas pogrom unfolded, Israel’s invincibility — that almost mythic confidence built over decades of survival against the odds — shattered in a matter of hours. Images of slaughtered families, homes in flames, the kidnapped and the violated, flooded our screens — not scenes from history books, but unfolding in real time, and on Israeli soil.
The world’s only Jewish state — the nation that had vowed “Never Again” — suddenly felt helpless. Battle-hardened soldiers wept as frightened parents clutched their children in bomb shelters. The idea of safety and deterrence — the IDF and Iron Dome as an impenetrable shield — was shaken to its core.
And even as the shock turned into rage, another kind of pain began to set in — the pain of inexplicable isolation. The world, which very briefly stood with Israel in the days immediately after the massacre, quickly turned.
Within weeks, university quads and city squares were filled with angry crowds chanting slogans that blurred the line between anti-Zionism and old-fashioned antisemitism. Hostage posters were torn down by ordinary passersby who denied the reality of Jewish suffering and Hamas terror.
Western governments — even close allies — urged “restraint,” as if Israel’s response to the atrocities required an apology. And the headlines found their favorite refrain: “disproportionate response.”
For Israel and Jews around the world, the vulnerability deepened — not only military but moral. For in the wake of October 7th a jarring truth emerged: the world’s sympathy is as fleeting as a news cycle, and Jewish blood is still cheap in the court of global opinion.
Then came the grinding months of war — tunnels and booby traps, rockets raining down from near and far, hostage vigils, funerals of young soldiers, sleepless nights without end. Israel’s mission to destroy Hamas — so just and so necessary — was widely portrayed as cruelty and overreach.
And although the country carried on, bruised and defiant, every Israeli, and every friend of Israel, knew their world would never be the same again.
But out of that national trauma, something remarkable emerged. Instead of despair, there was determination. Israel didn’t collapse; it recalibrated. The chaos of October 7th and its aftermath hardened into resolve — arguments and missteps notwithstanding. The IDF went into Gaza and, slowly and methodically, dismantled an infrastructure of terror once thought untouchable.
And now — two years since that black day — Israel stands at the brink of what few dared to imagine then: a deal poised to bring home the remaining hostages and which signals the absolute capitulation of Hamas. If only this moment had come sooner.
The dark night that began on Simchat Torah two years ago is, at last, giving way to dawn. And it’s here — at this exact point of transition — that we arrive at Parshat Vezot Habracha, the Torah’s final portion.
Moshe stands within sight of the Promised Land. He knows he won’t cross the Jordan, and he knows the nation will. His mission — with all its triumphs and heartbreaks — is complete. And before he departs, Moshe does something extraordinary: he blesses the people.
He doesn’t bless them because everything and everyone was perfect. Far from it. The wilderness years were marked by rebellion, doubt, and tragedy — this was a nation that often fell short of God’s lofty expectations. And a journey that should have taken months took forty years.
But Moshe looks at the broken and scarred nation before him and sees beyond the pain. He sees the promise. He understands that blessings don’t land when life is smooth – they come into focus when we can see the rough edges of our journey and still believe in our purpose. That’s why he blesses them: to mark the passage from survival to meaning, and from suffering to renewal.
Vezot Habracha — together with Simchat Torah, the festival on which it is always read — has never felt more resonant. For two years, Israel wandered a wilderness of fear and grief. Every headline, every hostage — living or lost — and every fallen soldier, reminded us that the price of Jewish existence is still unbearably high.
And yet, perhaps this moment — this stunning deal put together by President Trump and his determined team — is our Vezot Habracha. Like Moshe’s farewell, it arrives at the close of trials and tribulations. The enemies have been fought, the losses mourned, and the next chapter — rebuilding, redefining, renewing — stands ready to begin.
Moshe’s blessing ends with a vision for Israel’s future in its land (Deut. 33:28): “Israel shall dwell in safety, alone.” Those words have always felt poetic but unrealistic — aspirational dreaming rather than a reality we can experience. Today they sound prophetic, as intended.
For the first time in years — perhaps since its inception — Israel stands secure, unthreatened by the terror that has shadowed it from the start. The very movement that sought its destruction and the killing of all Jews wherever they are — Hamas — has been broken, and its former patrons have been knocked out or forced to abandon it.
There’s a divine symmetry here: what began when we read Vezot Habracha now finds its conclusion as we read Vezot Habracha again.
It’s truly fitting that Vezot Habracha is always read on Simchat Torah — the day we dance, sing, and celebrate the Torah’s completion. You’d think we’d pause to reflect, maybe catch our breath after the long journey from Bereishit to Devarim.
But no — the moment we finish the final words, we roll the scroll right back to the beginning and start again. That’s the Jewish way. There’s no such thing as “The End,” because every ending is the start of something new.
After all, Moshe’s death isn’t an ending — it’s the prelude to Yehoshua’s story and the Jewish nation’s metamorphosis into one of history’s most influential forces. The Jewish people don’t stop, nor are they paralyzed by the past. They move forward.
And in our own time, as Israel stands at the end of one of the darkest chapters in its history, the same truth applies. As we close the chapter of pain that has been the past two years, we immediately stand on the threshold of renewal, raring to go.
On Simchat Torah, as the scroll rolls from the end back to the beginning, we will all remember the horrors of October 7th. Even so — through our tears — as we lift the Torah and dance with it again, we’ll be declaring something profoundly Jewish: that light follows darkness, that faith outlasts fear, and that life never stops.
So when the hostages come home, when the guns fall silent, and when Israel can finally breathe again, let’s not linger in the horrors of the past. Let’s celebrate. We are turning the scroll from tragedy to triumph, from mourning to blessing — from October 7th to Vezot Habracha — and beginning anew.
Like our ancestors before us, we will start again — stronger, wiser, and with our faith renewed — ready to write the next chapter of the Jewish story.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Jewish man attacked in Montana by self-proclaimed Nazi on Oct. 7
A Jewish man in Missoula, Montana, was assaulted on Oct. 7 by a self-proclaimed “Nazi,” according to the Missoula Police Department.
On Tuesday, the suspect, Michael Cain, 29, got into an argument with the victim who had a visible tattoo of the Star of David on his forearm. Cain asked the victim about his tattoo and allegedly identified himself as a believer in the teachings of the Nazi party.
When the victim, who told Cain he was Jewish, then asked Cain to show him any Nazi-related tattoos on his body, Cain allegedly kicked and punched the victim, who was seated on the ground.
Missoula police then responded to the Poverello Center, a local homeless shelter where the assault took place, and later apprehended Cain who had fled the scene.
While en route to the local detention center, Cain disclosed to the arresting officer that he was a member of the “4th Reich” and said that while he did not attack the victim because of his Jewish identity, he would have if he had been more adamant about his beliefs, according to court documents obtained by local news outlet KGVO.
Cain was charged with felony malicious intimidation or harassment relating to civil or human rights and his bond was set at $50,000. Missoula police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Montana is home to just under 1,500 Jews out of a general population of over 1.1 million. In 2023, the Anti-Defamation League recorded just 21 antisemitic incidents in the state.
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US Jews who revile Trump’s domestic policies say he must be praised for Gaza deal
Walking and chewing gum. Nixon and China. Fighting against the British in Palestine while fighting with the British in Europe.
All are cliches signifying two seemingly contradictory actions that are possible — and potentially preferable — to do at the same time. And all were cited this week by Jewish critics of Donald Trump as apt metaphors for what they are doing this week in the wake of Trump’s successful brokering of a ceasefire in the Gaza war.
Jewish Americans are reeling as a president many blame for undermining democracy brokered a deal that appears poised to return the Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Unlike many jubilant Israelis, some reliably liberal Jews here are having a hard time praising Trump and his team for the kind of diplomatic breakthrough that his Democratic predecessor couldn’t bring about. But they are largely figuring out how to do it.
“It’s important to recognize that the vast majority of American Jews, just as Israelis, want a return of the hostages, and they want this war to end, and if Donald Trump and his team can help to bring that about, they deserve credit for doing so,” said Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, the leading Democratic group in the community.
Trump in his second term is deeply unpopular with American Jews. Prior to the announcement of a long-awaited ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, his backing for Israel did not dent the disapproval he draws from a demographic that votes overwhelmingly Democratic.
A poll in April found 72% of Jewish voters disapproved of Trump. A robust majority opposed his signature policies, including deportations and retaliating against political enemies. A majority even opposed his efforts to combat antisemitism.
At the same time, Trump also has not hidden his disdain for legacy Jewish groups: The FBI earlier this month cut off all ties with the Anti-Defamation League, and its director, Kash Patel, likened the group’s tracking of right-wing extremists to terrorism.
Abe Foxman, the former ADL CEO, was appalled by Patel’s actions against his former colleagues and campaigned in 2020 for Joe Biden, the Democrat who ousted Trump after his first term. But he said the community should praise Trump for the peace deal, and he was surprised the praise was not more robust.
“The American Jewish community needs to walk and chew gum at the same time. We should be able to differentiate and say, ‘Thank you, Mr. President’ and ‘No thank you, Mr. President,’” Foxman said in an interview. “He did something so many of us yearned for in the last two years, and he made it happen, and Biden didn’t make it happen.”
Rabbi Jonah Pesner, who leads the Reform movement’s advocacy arm, the Religious Action Center, said there was a Jewish ethical obligation to thank Trump, based on the Jewish imperative to publicly “recognize the good,” hakarat hatov, even if the administration does not reciprocate.
“We would look at it through the lens of Jewish learning and Jewish wisdom,” Pesner said. “We have a president who has done exactly what we asked, bring the hostages home, end the war and the suffering in Gaza, both for the sake of the innocent in Gaza, but also for [Israelis], and get back on a path to a sustainable, lasting peace so that both sides can live in peace.”
That does not mean opposition to Trump’s domestic policies should flag, Pesner said, noting the Reform movement’s activism in opposing the deportations and Trump policies targeting transgender people.
“Our people are in the streets in Los Angeles and Chicago, trying to be a human buffer between troops that are being deployed [to arrest undocumented migrants] and the people who will be impacted,” he said.
Pesner’s predecessor at the RAC, Rabbi David Saperstein, said Trump “deserves to be commended for an extraordinary achievement” – but the Trump administration’s strident hostility to groups that might disagree on some issues made it hard to express. (Earlier this month, Trump shared on social media a meme calling Democrats “THE PARTY OF HATE, EVIL, AND SATAN.”)
Saperstein lamented the passing of an era when Jewish organizations would be comfortable working with a president whose policies they mostly opposed. He recalled being present at the White House, as RAC CEO, when President George W. Bush signed RAC-backed bills on human trafficking, on Sudan and on prison rape.
“While we staunchly supported a number of the efforts of the [Bush] administration, both domestically and in terms of Iraq, one always knew that the White House would accept that dichotomy as a norm of how American politics functions, and wouldn’t stop that from working collegially in places we could find common ground,” Saperstein recalled. “This administration is woefully different.”
Joel Rubin, a deputy assistant secretary of state during the Obama administration, drew two historical analogies to explain why Democrats and Jews should more robustly praise Trump on his Mideast diplomacy: Richard Nixon, who brokered peaceful relations with China while under even as he faced investigation for spying on Democrats, and David Ben-Gurion, who in 1939 said Jews in Palestine should resist British oppression with the same dedication they showed in joining the British in fighting Nazis.
“I think it’s been a very, very difficult thing for Democrats to admit that, you know, Nixon went to China on this one,” said Rubin, who in 2020 was the Jewish community liaison for the presidential campaign of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the de facto leader of progressives.
Trump, Rubin said, was able to do what Biden was not: pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to defy his far-right coalition partners and make a deal by enticing him with unfettered military and diplomatic support.
“Biden didn’t have the leverage to pressure Bibi [Netanyahu], the way that Trump has the leverage to pressure Bibi.” Biden, he said, “failed to capitalize on the window that he had opened after Oct. 7,” when the Democratic president expressed unalloyed support for Israel. “He kind of sat passive, and he just didn’t know how to do it. And Trump didn’t take any of the recommendations from the ‘pressure Israel’ crowd. He didn’t cut off military aid. In fact, he accelerated it. And that built up huge equity inside the Israeli body politic.”
Jewish political conservatives have been beyond effusive in their praise. The Republican Jewish Coalition has not only called for Trump to win the Nobel Peace Prize, it said the prize should be renamed for Trump.
Jo-Ann Mort, a public relations consultant who has worked with liberal Jewish and non-Jewish groups, said Trump deserved thanks, but the deal was not the game changer that Trump and his acolytes were claiming. Its terms have been on the table since the Biden administration, she said, and keeping the peace in the Middle East has been part of the presidential brief since at least Israel’s inception.
“It was an agreement that was on the table a year ago that Bibi didn’t take,” she said. “This is what the president of the United States is supposed to do in a place where the U.S. has so many interests and is so deeply involved – it would have been contrary to his role as president if he hadn’t tried to solve it.”
Soifer, the Jewish Democrats’ CEO, said that even as the deal deserves praise, its elements needed further scrutiny, particularly the ensuing enhancements in security cooperation between the United States and Qatar, a country that has backed Hamas. She noted for instance a deal he brokered with Yemen’s Houthi militia earlier this year that stopped attacks on U.S.-flagged ships – but allowed them to continue on Israeli flagged ships. On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Qatar would establish a military installation within the United States, which has also offered Qatar security assurances designed to prevent Israel from striking Hamas leaders living there.
“Israel’s security has not been a part of every calculation in terms of foreign policy of this administration and the Houthis are one example,” Soifer said. “This deal with the Qataris may be another, and we do need to consider Israel’s security. His tunnel vision may serve his short-term interests” of securing a Nobel Peace Prize, “but it doesn’t necessarily serve our long term national security interests as well as that of Israel.”
Betsy Sheer, a leading Florida-based fundraiser for Jewish causes and for Democrats, said praise for Trump’s deal should be unstinting — as should be resistance to his domestic policies.
“Trump has figured out a way, unlike his predecessor, who I thought was extremely supportive of Israel – he’s figured out a way through knocking heads and embarrassing people and promising God knows what that got us to this moment, and I don’t think we can overlook that,” she said.
“His domestic policies are abhorrent, and you know, I’m not going to let up on that at all,” Sheer said. “You still have to look at the shutting down of civil liberties and voting rights and the authoritarian stance and the punitive way of suing everybody that’s ever been an enemy.”
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Opinion: Why Canada must keep pushing for peace in the Middle East
Oct. 7, 2023, was a day that changed Israel—and Jewish communities across the world—forever. The murder of more than 1,200 people and the kidnapping of hundreds more by Hamas terrorists marked not only the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, but the beginning of a tragedy that has since displaced over 1.5 million Palestinians, forced nearly 100,000 Israelis from their homes, and left tens of thousands grieving on both sides.
In the two years since, grief and anger have filled every corner of Jewish life. Yet out of this devastation, one truth has become painfully clear: there is no alternative to peace. The cost of abandoning a two-state solution is too high, and the moral and human consequences are intolerable.
Canada, for decades, has stood firm in its support for two states for two peoples—a policy rooted in diplomacy, compassion, and justice. Successive governments, of every political stripe, have recognized that Israel’s long-term security is inseparable from Palestinian self-determination. While the region and its politics have shifted, the vision must remain constant: a sovereign Israel living in security alongside a sovereign Palestine built on dignity and equality.
Disarming Hamas is not enough. The terror organization that launched the barbaric attack of October 7 can have no place in whatever comes next. Israelis must know they are safe and secure. Palestinians must have the agency to demand leadership that is committed to a collaborative path—one that builds governance for the people they serve, not vengeance or victory, but safety, stability, and normalized relations.
As fragile as it is, the most recent agreement between Israel and Hamas has once again placed both peoples in a tense waiting game. Hostages may soon come home. Violence may slow. Humanitarian aid may finally reach Gazans who have endured unimaginable suffering. Israelis and Palestinians alike are waiting to exhale—to imagine, perhaps for the first time in years, what “normal” might look like.
But peace requires courage. It demands leadership willing to risk political consequence for moral clarity. I know this from experience.
During the height of the war, I travelled to Ramallah—not because it was politically convenient, and certainly not because it was easy as a Canadian-Israeli and a cabinet minister—but because it was necessary. That meeting was one of the few quiet steps that helped build a foundation for the difficult conversation that continues today: what conditions must the Palestinian Authority meet to open a genuine path forward?
Those conditions are not new. They include transparent elections, an end to corruption, the dismantling of the welfare system that rewards terror, and the rebuilding of a generation through education for reconciliation and mutual recognition—not violence. These are the steps that make peace possible.
Hope, I have learned, is not naïve. It is strategic. It is an act of defiance in the face of adversity. Hope is how we persevere through despair, how we shape policy that serves people rather than politics. It is how we remind ourselves that courage does not come from certainty, but from conviction.
Leadership and agency must also come from within. Hamas has led the Palestinian people into ruin. Their unrelenting pursuit of violent resistance—at the cost of their own citizens’ lives—has turned Gaza into a place of devastation and despair. For Palestinians to have a future, their national movement must reject Hamas’s ideology of annihilation. The Palestinian people deserve leaders who understand that a viable, independent state can only exist alongside a safe and secure Israel.
This truth lies at the heart of the matter. If we are to rebuild trust and establish a lasting peace, Israelis and Palestinians alike must confront a simple, uncomfortable reality: our lives are intertwined. Our safety depends on one another.
For Jewish communities here in Canada, this truth carries a parallel responsibility. We have lived through two years of fear, mourning, and rising antisemitism. Many of us have felt isolated in our grief and anxious about our safety. But even in those moments, we cannot lose sight of our values—the belief that peace, security, and justice are not mutually exclusive but mutually dependent.
We are tired, yes—but we are not broken.
This moment, fragile as it is, offers an opening. It calls for moral courage—not only from leaders in the region but from allies like Canada who can help nurture reconciliation, rebuild institutions, and ensure accountability. Canada must be part of that work.
It is not enough to stand with Israel in solidarity; we must also stand with Israelis and Palestinians who are willing to build a different future. Peace is not inevitable, but it is possible—if we insist on it.
As our sages taught: “Lo alecha hamelacha ligmor, v’lo atah ben chorin l’hibatel mimena”—“It is not upon you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
That teaching has guided the Jewish people through millennia of hardship, and it must guide us now.
We cannot complete the work of peace—but we must never stop trying.
Ya’ara Saks is the former Member of Parliament for York Centre and the former Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, and Associate Minister of Health.
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