Dateline Monday. I owe a debt to several commentators, whose recent reflections are a direct trigger for this week’s post. I would particularly mention Rabbi Doron Perez, Melanie Phillips, and, as always, Daniel Gordis. If your reading habits are similar to mine, you will recognize their fingerprints everywhere below.

This week, there is only one story, although there are many takes on it. Yesterday afternoon, three young Israeli women – Doron Steinbrecher, Emily Damari and Romi Gonen – were released by Hamas and returned to their families. Doron and Emily were both abducted from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, while Romi was snatched from the Nova festival.

Around midnight last night, 90, or possibly 96, Palestinian prisoners were released by Israel, the large majority (62, or possibly 69) women and a small minority minors. It is further reported that none of them had been convicted of murder, although at least some had been convicted of crimes of terror.

Thus was completed, with no major hiccoughs, the first stage in the hostage-for-prisoner exchange planned for the coming weeks as part of the ceasefire agreement.

I don’t want to discuss here whether this is an agreement that Israel should have accepted. I’m not even sure whether Iseael’s refusal to accept essentially the same deal when it was floated last June represented, at the time, a sensible decision. I don’t sit in on security briefings, so it is difficult for me to assess the situation in Gaza. Nor am I privy to conversations between Washington and Jerusalem, so I cannot determine how much pressure was applied.

(At the same time, I can’t entirely escape the suspicion that Bibi may have invited Trump to twist his arm, thereby potentially buying Bibi a little credit with the demonstrators while allowing him to plead force majeure when confronted by his right-wing coalition partners.)

Instead, I want to reflect on the duality of this situation, and to suggest that to recognize, and live with, that duality requires a quintessentially Jewish understanding of the world.

The public sphere in Israel has not, over the last 15 months, or, indeed, over the last two days, been characterized by much recognition of this duality. The Israeli mainstream media focused all of its attention on the release of the hostages, and the general mood of the country has been exultantly celebratory.

The release of the hostages was timed perfectly for Israel TV and radio, and for today’s newspapers. The release of Palestinian prisoners was timed to be too late for Monday’s papers, and so early as to be stale news by Tuesday. No details of the release were made public in Israel, and there has been little to no focus on them. There were, however, some demonstrators outside a prison, protesting the deal, and some arson of Palestinian cars and homes, apparently protesting the reception the released prisoners received in some West Bank villages.

It seems to me that the appropriate response to the events of the last 24 hours, and to the entire exchange agreement, is profound joy. After 471 days in Hamas captivity, three young women came home, with the promise of many more to come in the next 6 weeks.

It also seems to me that the appropriate response to the events of the last 24 hours, and to the entire exchange agreement, is deep sorrow and rage. After 471 days in which we have, reportedly, destroyed Hamas’ battalions and killed or taken prisoner the vast majority of its fighting force, Hamas still feels capable of continuing to torture us by raising new objections at every turn, over-running agreed deadlines, cynically offering the hostages, on their release, goodwill packages as a memento of their incarceration, and turning out in full force, armed to the teeth, to escort them, in a victory parade, to the waiting Red Cross vehicles.

A day into the ceasefire, Hamas continues to pledge to repeat the pogrom of October 7, 2023. Not to mention the horrendous price we have agreed to pay in terms of releasing security prisoners.

All of which means that the Zionist promise – the promise of “Never again” – is still shattered. It broke on October 7, and, if anyone harboured till now any fond hopes that it could be glued back together, those hopes have been exposed by recent events as delusional. We are now entering a new phase of Jewish history, although at the moment it seems a lot like reentering a previous phase.

We believed, perhaps most of us, that the existence of Israel meant that Jews would never again be left defenceless, without a response to antisemitism. The era of Jewish victimhood was over. We also believed, many of us, that the world, or at least the civilized world, would never again stand idly by when antisemitism reared its ugly head.

Both of those beliefs have been shown, in the last 15 months, to be baseless. The thousands sheltering in their ‘safe’ rooms and in roadside bomb shelters undermined the first belief. As for the second, I will offer two observations.

Until October 7, Palestinians depended partly, for world sympathy, on Pallywood, the enactment for the camera of staged fictions, allegedly demonstrating Israeli barbarity. These days, there is no need for Pallywood. Where previously much of the world required the figleaf of ‘documented proof’ before it would publicly accept the Palestinian lies, now no such figleaf is needed.

Indeed, much of the world is now able to block out the actual documentary evidence that the Palestinians themselves provide, whether it is evidence of brutality and rape on October 7 itself, or the footage of thousands of Gazans, looking fit and full of energy, dancing in the streets and celebrating their victory with trays of baked goods being passed around the well-dressed crowds, and all this in a Gaza strip that had been the victim of Israel’s genocide and that was suffering a famine.

My other observation is that 241 Israelis, alive and dead, were snatched from their beds and from a dance party and abducted to Gaza, to be held for hundreds of days, in appalling conditions… and the world effectively stood by and watched. The United Nations, the Red Cross, the EU, carried on as if it were not their concern. No ad hoc group of like-minded political leaders issued a joint statement of condemnation.

There was no united call for Hamas to return the hostages immediately. No international action was taken, or even threatened, against Hamas. In its silence and inactivity, the world sanctioned the mass abduction of citizens of an internationally recognised state from their homes and a party. .

Imagine a similar abuse of the citizens of any other country. For example, suppose a South Korean or Tibetan terrorist group brutally murdered over 1200 random North Koreans or Chinese and abducted 241 others. Such an act would not be met by the same lack of response from the world at large. This also clearly exposes anti-Zionism as the antisemitism it is.

That represents, I think, a shift in sensibility in the world at large. If the world chooses to define antisemitism (to cite Sir Isaiah Berlin’s aphorism) as ‘hating Jews more than is absolutely necessary’, then the world has, over the last 15 months, raised that bar considerably. It is now acceptable to hate Jews considerably more fiercely than it was 50 years ago, without risking being branded by the world as an antisemite.

So here we stand, at this crossroads: thanking God that some more hostages have begun to return to their lives, and worried sick over what the future holds for us. How are we expected to cope with that?

The answer lies, for believing Jews, in the example set by our daily prayers. Towards the end of the Amida that we recite three times daily are two seminal blessings: Shma Koleinu (Hear our voice) and Modim Anachnu Lach (We give thanks to you). In the first, we beseech God to answer our requests. It is customary to interpolate into this prayer any individual requests that we may have, for ourselves or our family. Then, almost immediately afterwards, in Modim, we thank God profusely for creating and sustaining us.

There is an apparent contradiction here. If I sincerely and wholeheartedly thank God, how can I still have any requests of Him? If I have problems in my life that I beseech God to resolve for me, how can I wholeheartedly thank Him.

The answer, suggests Rabbi Perez, is that we have two hearts: a broken heart and a whole heart. Our challenge, as Jews, is to love God with both of our hearts (which may be the reason for the second letter bet in the first paragraph of the Shema, in which we are besought ‘to love the Lord your God’ בכל לבבך, instead of the more normal בכל לבך. The second ב of לבבך suggest two hearts (indicated by ב, which represents two).

How can we love God with both of our hearts? How can we serve Him as faithfully at our times of greatest loss as at our times of greatest joy. How can we, as we are required to do, proclaim Baruch Dayan Ha’emet (Blessed is the Judge of Truth), the blessing recited on hearing bad news, typically the news of a death, as wholeheartedly as we proclaim Hatov veHameitiv (the One who is good and who does good), the blessing recited on hearing good news?

The ’simple’ answer is that we serve God by saying the first blessing with all our broken heart, and by saying the second with all of our whole heart. This requires being able to sustain both hearts. And how can we achieve that? The answer lies at the very beginning of the Amida. The first two blessings acknowledge God as He who will ‘bring a redeemer’, who is ‘eternally mighty’, who ‘revives the dead’.

It is not given to us to understand the ways of God, nor the exact nature of the Messianic age and the revival of the dead, but it is given to us to accept that everything that happens is part of God’s plan. That acceptance is never easy, and sometimes all but impossible, but if we can achieve it, then we can love God, in good times and bad, with one of our two hearts.

And if we can achieve that acceptance, then we also have the perspective to view history as something that we can shape, to recognise that the promises of Zionism have not been fulfilled, that the promises of Western liberalism have not been fulfilled, and that it may be time to rethink how Jewry as a people and Judaism as a religion is to continue to thrive and to continue to offer enlightenment to the world.

This has happened before. To cite the most obvious example: Judaism adapted dramatically after the fall of the Second Temple, developing Rabbinic Judaism, which enabled it to survive dispersion to the diaspora and to flourish there.

And if we can achieve that acceptance, we can also, on this bittersweet day, laugh for joy wholeheartedly and weep in pain broken-heartedly.

At this point, I am picturing some specific readers of mine who will be vehemently shaking their heads. You, particularly, I thank for reading this far.