My parents were taken hostage on 7 October. This Passover, we pray for leaders who bring dignity and peace | Sharone Lifschitz

Passover has an depth I’ve all the time cherished. I like the sense of group, household, custom, inclusivity and togetherness. We mark it with a ceremonial meal – the Seder – with rituals, particular meals and a communal studying of the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. In London, we invite a joyous array of friends, Jewish and never Jewish, and discover inventive methods to interpret the story of the trail to freedom.

Every year we’re inspired to replicate: “In each era an individual is obliged to treat himself as if he had come out of Egypt.” This line from the Haggadah asks us to empathise with the freed Hebrew slaves, to place ourselves of their footwear. It’s the thread that binds our era to all those that got here earlier than us.

This yr, within the midst of our era’s bloodiest struggle, we should additionally put ourselves within the naked ft and ripped pyjamas of the hostages, brutally snatched from their properties in Israel to the underground tunnels of Gaza, and people who survived the atrocities of seven October. Within the title of freedom, Hamas slaughtered harmless civilians and took others captive, amongst them my mother and father, the political activists Oded and Yocheved Lifschitz, who have been taken hostage on 7 October. Now we have firsthand accounts of hostages going through terrifying abuse, torture and rape. This actuality makes the thought of sitting on the Seder Passover desk nearly unimaginable to bear.

On the day after Seder, it is going to be 200 days for the reason that remaining 133 hostages – youngsters, ladies and men, the aged and the frail – have been taken into the labyrinths of Gaza. For his or her households, this thought is inescapable and limitless. It lives inside us, taking root, wrapping itself round our very important organs. Their time is up. Earlier this month, Hamas stated that there are now not 40 hostages who qualify for return on humanitarian grounds, putting much more concern into our hearts.

But within the title of peace and safety, many too above floor in Gaza are struggling within the struggle. I have to broaden my compassion, throughout the political divisions and throughout nations, to see others’ ache as mine, simply as my mother and father did, and simply as my father, a journalist, did when he wrote that “when the Palestinians don’t have anything to lose, we lose massive time”. I hear his voice nonetheless, and have all the time understood that he was talking of our interconnectedness, as neighbours. Six generations of my household have lived on this a part of the world.

The households of the hostages have been heartbroken once more to seek out that the latest deal between Hamas and Israel had failed. Understanding that many are murdered already, we hurtle down a slope, hoping to rescue our family members, crashing as we fall. Our despair after almost 200 darkish days and lengthy nights is thrust to the depths of the Earth, the place no daylight can attain and nothing can develop.

We who’re a part of the Nir Oz group – the idyllic kibbutz my mother and father helped to present in 1956, and the place I lived till I moved to London 32 years in the past – have realized to hug one another, to share sort phrases amid the devastation. Most households misplaced family members, and all have misplaced lifelong buddies. Uprooted from our burnt house, therapeutic can’t start till our family members are returned.

On 7 October, the kibbutz was devastated, burned, looted and pillaged. My mother and father’ home, with a lifetime of their possessions, work and reminiscences, has been destroyed for ever. The tight-knit group of 400 individuals, simply 1.7 miles from Gaza, misplaced 117 individuals who have been kidnapped or murdered on that catastrophic morning. Complete households have been eradicated. Fourteen Thai residents working at Nir Oz have been additionally murdered. Immediately, whereas some have been launched (together with my mom), 36 Nir Oz inhabitants are nonetheless in captivity, together with my father, together with 97 others.

My father has typically stated: “Struggle is the failure to make agreements prematurely.” Via our ache and struggling, we should discover the shared humanity that may type the idea for the hostages’ protected return, coexistence and lasting peace within the area. But empathy alone is just not sufficient. Each side should discover the power to look into the eyes of the youngsters of my kibbutz and the youngsters of Gaza and promise them a protected future. Then the abductees can return and we are able to transfer to the following stage – that’s, striving for an finish with worldwide help.

The query is just not a lot what Sinwar-Hamas will say, or what Netanyahu-Israel will say, however what the residents of Israel and Gaza want now. We’d like a regional safety association, primarily based on the Abraham accords, with the supporting nations of the world. We’d like a deal to launch our households from captivity and torture. We’d like leaders actually dedicated to a extra optimistic imaginative and prescient for the area who can ship outcomes that profit the individuals of Israel and Gaza. Solely then can we honour the spirit of Passover and produce the anguish to an finish. It’s a ethical crucial. We should discover a solution to acknowledge one another’s ache, and to stay with our neighbours in peace and dignity.

So how can we sit on the Seder desk when our fathers, moms, sisters and brothers are nonetheless held in Gaza? Our kibbutz all the time sought a secular studying of Jewish rituals. In 2008, it created a Haggadah with 4 chapters. The fourth chapter speaks of peace: peace amongst ourselves, peace with others and with our Palestinian neighbours, and peace as a lifestyle and a worldview. Due to this fact peace is on the coronary heart of our reiteration of the Haggadah. As we collect across the Seder desk this yr, we keep in mind that the journey from slavery to freedom is not only a historic occasion, however an everlasting calling for all.

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