“Tell me, how do you live broken-hearted?” sings Bruce Springsteen in “Mary’s Place,” a song from his 2002 concept album, The Rising, about 9/11.
There are different interpretations of the meaning behind “Mary’s Place,” but I have always seen it as the words of a man searching for redemption in the wake of losing a loved one in the 2001 terror attack as he decides to celebrate her life.
As we await the slow release of 33 hostages out of the 98 still held by Hamas in Gaza since October 7, 2023 in the first part of the hostage deal, this line has been going through my mind.
These hostages have become, for many of us, like family. We see their relatives daily on television, and we can recognize their names and photos.
Many of us have been glued to the news even more than usual in the past few days, eagerly awaiting any crumb of news about who will be coming home and when. We are still traveling on the wild ride that started almost 16 months ago when Hamas attacked, and like the man in “Mary’s Place,” we are trying to embrace the joy of the hostage return as we grapple with the price of the deal.
As much as we hope for good news, we know that much of the news will not be good. Some of these hostages will not return alive. Knowing the truth will bring important closure for their families, who will be able to bury them and at least know, as Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the mother of the hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin who was killed by Hamas at the end of August, said in her eulogy, that “… finally, you’re free.”
Those who have survived the hostage ordeal will have endured unspeakable horror. Although they will receive all the care that the medical establishment and their families can give them, they will carry the scars of what they have been through forever.
To a much lesser but still significant extent, so will we.
October 7 attack
We have to live every day of our lives in the shadow of the near-total collapse of the government and the army in the first hours of the October 7 attack. Those who were in Israel on that day will never forget how the military bases and police stations in the south were so quickly overrun.
How the kibbutz defense squads valiantly tried to fight off hundreds of Hamas terrorists with a handful of fighters. How, for hours, only small numbers of special forces were dispatched to the area. It was hard to absorb the reports of dozens, then hundreds, of deaths of participants at the Supernova Music Festival.
We can’t forget running to bomb shelters that day and turning on the news only to discover that the newscasters seemed to know as much or more about what was going on than the government.
Many Israelis have gone to fight for the hostages, and some have lost their lives. Many of the soldiers and their families have understandably mixed feelings about this hostage deal.
It’s far from clear that the ceasefire will bring an end to this multi-front war, and even as I was writing this piece, I was interrupted by a siren alerting me to a missile attack. In my building’s bomb shelter, we discussed who had fired this missile. It turned out to be the Houthis in Yemen.
Out of all this destruction and loss, many of us feel that, although there is a heavy price to pay, we owe it to the hostages to bring them home. I’ve been told, mainly by well-meaning Americans, that the only way forward is to abandon the hostages and to continue to fight for “total victory” in Gaza.
Mistakes were made, as they always are, and these 250 people who were kidnapped were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, these people suggest.
This point of view, which makes sense on paper, shows an astral misunderstanding of Israelis. We cannot turn a blind eye to the hostage families’ pleas because we have come to know and care about them.
We will do what we need to do to save our family, and in the broadest and most important sense, they are now our family. We know if circumstances were different, these families would do the same for us. And we know that it’s simply a lucky accident that we were not among the victims.
This point of view also underestimates the cruelty of Hamas. If there were no hostage deal, they could simply keep the hostages alive for decades, as they have done with Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, two mentally ill Israelis who crossed the border by mistake in 2014 and 2015, respectively.
Who knows what torture these disabled men have suffered in the past decade and how they have longed for their families? And who knows what the hostages who will begin to be released on Sunday have suffered? Does anyone think that “total victory” means Israel would be able to search literally every home and possible hiding place in Gaza to free all those left behind?
We may be able to live broken-hearted, but we cannot live knowing we have condemned dozens of our brothers and sisters to decades of torture and misery.
In the song, Springsteen sings, “My heart is dark but it’s rising/I’m pullin' all the faith I can see/From that black hole on the horizon/I hear your voice calling to me.”
The hostages have been calling to everyone in Israel from that black hole for so long. Like the narrator of “Mary’s Place,” we are waiting to welcome them home, to play their favorite records for them, as Springsteen says he will do at Mary’s place. “I drop the needle and pray,” he sings. And so are we.