By Rabbi Judy Chessin, Temple Beth Or

It has now been a year since Israel executed Operation Golden Hand, Mivtza Yad Zahav, Feb. 12, 2024 in Rafah, Gaza, successfully rescuing Fernando Simon Marman and Luis Har, Israeli Argentinian hostages kidnapped during the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak.

The rescue was aptly named, for Judaism has a long history of paying for hostages with both blood and treasure.

Jewish tradition places immense value in the redemption of captives, viewing pidyon shvuyim as one of the greatest mitzvot (commandments).

Our biblical patriarch Abraham faced a hostage situation when four kings carried off his nephew Lot. Abraham responded militarily, gathering his household to chase and defeat the four kings and rescue Lot.

Thus, Gen. 14 reports the first time captives were freed in the recorded history of the Jewish nation.

Redeeming the captive is a recurring theme in the Torah. When members of the desert generation were taken captive by the king of Arad, the nation quickly mobilized to return them.

A later rabbinic commentary derived from Hebrew grammar states that it was merely one maidservant who was taken hostage, yet even for a single marginalized slave, the entire community’s resources were expended.

In the Book of Kings, the Amalekites attacked King David’s early home base of Ziklag. They carried off all the women and children, including David’s wives — Ahinoam of Jezreel and Abigail, the widow of Nabal of Carmel — as captives.

Upon returning to Ziklag, David and his men, overcome with grief, wept ceaselessly. Despite David’s renown for military prowess, he yet consulted the Divine, and only with God’s assurance did the king mount a successful military campaign to liberate his people and family.

Due to our history as a nation once redeemed from captivity and slavery in Egypt, freeing captives from captors was considered a supreme moral value in the development of Judaism.

Hostage-taking was such a grievous sin that one of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not steal,” was interpreted by our rabbis to refer to kidnapping. Stealing people and selling them was considered a capital crime.

And yet, the same rabbis of the Talmud expressed reservations about the cost of redeeming captives.

With no Divine assurances, the rabbis of the Mishnah warned Jewish communities not to ransom hostages for “more than their worth” to discourage further hostage-taking.

This dilemma, balancing the burning emotional desire for hostage return against the cost to future communal safety, was and is still a conundrum.

One Jewish luminary, Meir of Rothenburg, the Maharam, exemplified this concern. Born in Germany in 1220, the Maharam was the main rabbinic authority of Ashkenazic Jewry.

The law at that time forbade Jews from leaving German borders. Yet Rabbi Meir believed that every Jew must try to reach the holy land. Setting out on a difficult journey to reach Israel, he was caught in Italy and handed over to German authorities.

The Maharam of Rothenburg was imprisoned, and the German rulers demanded an exorbitant sum for his release. The great rabbi commanded the community not to pay the ransom. He preferred to die in prison — as he did seven years later — rather than put others at risk, impoverishing his community, and encouraging future kidnappings.

After his death, having left behind brilliant commentaries that he wrote in prison, the German authorities would still not release his body to be buried. It was 14 years after the Maharam’s death that a wealthy Jew, Alexander Ziskind Wimpen, paid an exorbitant sum and buried the rabbi next to his own burial plot in Worms.

Such impossible choices have been operative since the Oct. 7 pogrom, during which Hamas kidnapped 251 innocent Israelis — men, women, and children.

By now, that number has dwindled to 94, some by death, a few by release or rescue, but the ancient dilemmas around rescue and redemption arise yet again.

Conflicting opinions as to what fulfilling the Jewish mitzvah pidyon shvuyim means in modern society have strongly divided both Israel and world Jewry.

Concerns about incentivizing future hostage-taking are not financial in nature; they are matters of security and military deterrence. Well do we remember Israel’s controversial deal with Hamas that secured the release of hostage Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Palestinian militants in 2006.

In exchange for releasing the single soldier, Israel released 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. That exchange, in fact, returned to the street Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the Oct. 7 massacres, as well as 280 terrorists who were serving life sentences for implementing terror attacks posing a direct threat to Israel’s security.

It incentivizes future hostage-taking and threatens national security, and makes concessions to Hamas, the very terror organization that Israel has vowed to eliminate after the Oct. 7 massacre.

Yet weekly, demonstrators and families of hostages gather for rallies all throughout Israel, tearfully demanding swift action for their loved ones’ release and protesting the government for perceived delays and hesitations in negotiation.

They argue that Israel is refusing to end the torture of its citizens and the heartbreak of the surviving family members in a cynical power play.

Moreover, the modern state needs to maintain the motivation of its troops and citizens with the assurance that the Jewish state will do everything possible to ensure their release if they are ever captured.

Finally, the Jewish state must emphasize the sanctity of every Jewish life when our enemy’s goal is to end Jewish life. That, indeed, is the very mission of the Jewish state.

When a Talmudic debate could not be definitively resolved, the phrase “Eilu v’eilu divrei Elokim chayim” was employed: “These and those are the words of the living God (Eruvin 13b),” meaning both sides are valid expressions of the Divine truth.

We yearn for the days when we could receive assurances from the Divine or could depend upon Solomonic wisdom to see our way through.

The verse in Malachi 3:3 states that “God will sit as a refiner of silver. The Levites will be refined like gold and silver.”

To derive meaning from this verse, a rabbi once went to a goldsmith and watched the refining process.

The goldsmith held a golden nugget over the fire and placed it where the flames were the hottest to burn away impurities. The technician explained that he had to hold the material in the fire and watch it carefully lest it be in the flame too long and become destroyed.

The rabbi then asked when you know when the gold is fully refined, and the master answered, “When I can see my face in it.”

Our hostages, our politicians, our soldiers, and our diplomats have all been tried by fire since Oct. 7, 2023, as they seek the balance of redeeming and rescuing our hostages while not jeopardizing the safety of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

And now, a fragile hostage deal has been reached. It has been greeted in Israel and abroad with a mix of joy, anger, relief, and disappointment. Israelis remain committed to two mutually exclusive truths: “We must bring our hostages home,” and “We must defeat Hamas.”

We pray if not for another Operation Golden Hand, at least the golden opportunity to bring back our remaining 94 hostages in a not too costly way for our people.

May the crucible of this war define us as a people and refine us to see, and to address the needs of every suffering soul. May we merit the honor of fulfilling the mitzvah of pidyon shvuyim soon and in our time.

To read the complete February 2025 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.