(RNS) — I am angry.
Actually, “angry” does not begin to describe how I feel right now.
I want you to feel angry as well. Please, don’t tell me you’re “sad.” This is not sad. This is not even heartbreaking.
All good people should be enraged and, metaphorically or actually, tearing their clothing in utter despair.
After more than 500 days, this is what we get. Israel agrees to a hostage deal. Hamas releases our hostages, who have been kept in dark tunnels, malnourished, looking like survivors of Buchenwald, tortured and humiliated. Their only “crime”: being Jewish and being in harm’s way on Oct. 7, 2023.
In exchange, Israel releases thousands of Palestinian prisoners. Their crime (notice that I did not use the word “only” and I did not enclose “crime” in scare quotes): acts of violence against Israelis.
Mock coffins are displayed at Westminster in London, Feb. 20, 2025, to mourn hostages who have died in Gaza and demand the release of the remaining captives. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
Many said that it was a bad deal — certainly, a numerically unequal deal — but Israel is accustomed to such deals. In 2011, for example, Israel exchanged 1,027 prisoners for the life of one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit.
We knew many hostages were dead. We experienced each death as if it were our own child. That is how it was with Hersh Goldberg-Polin. He represented all of us. His parents’ anguish became our anguish. In particular, his mother, Rachel, became every Jewish mother — the matriarch Rachel, as imagined in the Book of Jeremiah, who weeps for her lost children.
And now, the worst has come. Today, Israel has received the bodies of Shiri Bibas and her two children, Ariel, who was 4 years old when kidnapped, and Kfir, who was 9 months old when kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz. The body of Oded Lifshitz has also been returned. Hamas murdered them.
There is a text in the Mishnah, the ancient code of Jewish law: “Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar said: do not appease your fellow at the time of his anger; do not console him at the time his dead lies before him.” Let the anger rage; do not attempt to appease it.
So, let my anger rage. Let our anger rage.
Many of us have been debating the precise designation of the events of Oct. 7. Many have said it was what it appeared to be: a pogrom.
People react at the so-called Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 20, 2025, as the bodies of four Israeli hostages, including a mother and her two children, are handed over by Palestinian militant groups to the Red Cross in Gaza. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)
Let me take you back — more than 120 years ago, to Kishinev, in Moldova.
In 1903, citizens of Kishinev went on a rampage — a pogrom against the Jews. That pogrom claimed the lives of 49 Jews and injured 92 Jews. The marauders raped Jewish women. As Steven J. Zipperstein has written in his amazing book on the subject: Prior to Buchenwald and Auschwitz, no place-name evoked Jewish suffering more starkly than “Kishinev.”
The Jewish poet Haim Nachman Bialik wrote two epic poems about Kishinev. The more famous poem, “In the City of Slaughter,” written in 1904, might be the most influential poem in Jewish history since the Middle Ages. It is a classic work of Jewish and Zionist literature.
Israeli students learn the poem in school — and for good reason. It not only graphically describes what happened to the Jews; it also describes what did not happen. Jews did not fight back. Quite the contrary. It speaks of pious Jewish men who hid and watched their wives being raped. After the horror, they could only crawl forth from their hiding places to ask the rabbi if they could resume sexual relations with their wives again.
To which Bialik responded: Hell, no. No more Jewish passivity. Kishinev inspired Jewish self-defense.
But, before “In the City of Slaughter,” there was another poem — “On the Slaughter,” which Bialik wrote immediately after the events in Kishinev.
I invoke its words:
And cursed be he who cries out: Revenge!
Vengeance like this, for the blood of a child,
Satan has yet to devise.
Let the blood fill the abyss!
Let it pierce the blackest depths
and devour the darkness
and eat away and reach
the rotting foundations of the earth.
Some cry out for vengeance for the death of the Bibas children. I honor their anguish and anger.
But please note: The poet is saying something different. Yes, we might want vengeance. But there is insufficient revenge to avenge the cruel, monstrous deaths in Kishinev — and I would say the same thing about the deaths of the Bibas children.
When traditional Jews faced horrific deaths, they would say, and still say: “May God avenge those deaths.” They understood that there would be no earthly vengeance, that those who commit such evil will suffer at God’s hands.
But that would not be enough for those who were less pious. In the European ghettos of the Holocaust, Jews said something different: Yidn, nekhama! Jews, take revenge. That might have been what inspired Quentin Tarantino to create his revenge fantasy, “Inglourious Basterds,” in which he imagined a Jewish woman, the sole survivor of her murdered family, summarily dispatching the leadership of the Third Reich.
I am a mourner. We are all mourners. All civilized people should be mourners.
And, please:
If you celebrated, contextualized, rationalized, explained and/or justified the Hamas violence against Jews (I am looking at you, tenured faculty members at prestigious colleges, and their students, and other “useful idiots”): You, too, have blood on your hands.
If you tore posters of hostages off lampposts (including, obscenity of obscenity, the miscreant who put a swastika over the face of one of the Bibas children): You, too, have blood on your hands.
The gloves are off. I am done being nice.
Let us rage, and let us mourn.
Again, Bialik:
See, see, the slaughtered calves, so smitten and so laid;
Is there a price for their death? How shall that price be paid?
Forgive, ye shamed of the earth, yours is a pauper-Lord!
Poor was He during your life, and poorer still of late.
When to my door you come to ask for your reward,
I’ll open wide: See, I am fallen from My high estate.
I grieve for you, my children. My heart is sad for you.
Your dead were vainly dead; and neither I nor you
Know why you died or wherefore, for whom, nor by what laws;
Your deaths are without reason; your lives are without cause.
May the memories of the Bibas children be a blessing.
May God comfort their families, the extended family of the Jewish people, and all of us.
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