Shelter Rock Jewish Center

This has been a gut-wrenching week for all of us who love Israel and who feel deeply committed to the Jewish state. Ehud Goldwasser, 31, was buried in Nahariya yesterday. Eldad Regev, 28, was buried in Haifa. These two men, both soldiers in the Israel Defense Force and both abducted and murdered by Hezbollah, were returned to Israel for burial as part of an enormous, and enormously lopsided, prisoner exchange: their bodies against the release of four violent and unrepentant Hezbollah militants, including the infamous Samir Kuntar, and the return of the bodies of 199 others to their families in Lebanon. Kuntar, convicted of the 1979 murder of an Israeli, Danny Haran (also, coincidentally from Nahariya) in front of his daughter, Einat, was the big name in the exchange. (Kuntar also murdered the Harans' daughter Einat, age 4, by crushing her skull with his gun.) The Harans lost a second child that day as well-while hiding from their would-be murderers in the crawl space above their bedroom, Haran's wife Smadar accidentally suffocated their other daughter, Yael, age 2, to keep her from crying and giving away their location.

You really would have to be made of stone not to feel the deepest sense of conflict about this decision.

Watching the news last night was horrific enough. First, the cameras brought us to Haifa and Nahariya, inviting us to share in the unfathomable grief of the Regev and Goldwasser families. Then we were brought to Lebanon, where we were invited to watch as the Harans' murderer was publicly greeted as a hero and given a hero's welcome. He spent almost thirty years in Israeli jails. While in Israel, he married and his wife, whom he later divorced, was given a monthly stipend. (It is customary in Israel for the wives of prisoners to be supported during their husbands' incarceration.) He even earned a correspondence degree at an Israeli university while in custody. But his hatred of Israel apparently never flagged and his comments in Beirut yesterday could not have made that clearer: he was proud of his role in the fight against Israel, seemed unconcerned that the specific role he played in that fight involved causing the deaths of innocents, and promised to return to Israel, which he referred to as Palestine, to carry out more raids in the future.

It fell to Shimon Peres, Israel's president, to put things into perspective and his words touched me deeply. This is what he said: "There are victory celebrations today in Lebanon. They are stepping out with drums and dances to greet Kuntar, the murderer who crushed the skull of four-year-old Einat with his gun and shot her father in cold blood. On the other hand, Israel is a nation in tears. Israel is just, and justice is the true expression of a person's victory. We will bow our heads in memory of the fallen heroes. We will stand upright, as befits a nation that holds morality to be the dearest of its possessions. In the end, where is the supreme moral victory and where is the defeat of morals? In greeting a cowardly murderer unlike any other, or in the remembrance candles lighted today across Israel to commemorate our loved ones? The answer should be clear: Lebanon will eventually be ashamed of its behavior, for it is that kind of shame that any country needs to justify its existence as a proper and moral state." And the president didn't have to finish his thought for it to be totally obvious where he was going: Lebanon will someday be ashamed, but Israel will always be proud of the fact that, in the end, there is nothing its government will not do in order to bring its soldiers back home where they can either be reunited with their families or, at the very least, laid to rest with dignity.

Those are powerful ideas. And just ones as well, I believe. The Israeli papers, especially the more right-wing ones, are filled to overflowing this morning with outrage, some editorialists asking pointedly what Peres will say to the families of Kuntar's next victims when they ask him how such a man, a man openly committed to murdering Israelis, could possibly have been released to kill another day. It is a horrific question to ponder, one that nations across the world that incarcerate and then eventually release criminals convicted of violent crimes have to ask themselves. But the truth is that we do release prisoners when their sentences end and we do that without reference to whether they have become upstanding citizens in the meantime. The mandate of any penal system has always to be to work in best interests of the citizens of the country that has put it in place, so the question is not really about what kind of person Samir Kuntar is or whether he deserves to go free. The real question is whether his release served the best interests of Israel. If it did, then the system is working. If it didn't, then a horrific mistake was made.

Put that way, the questions involved in this whole incident become even more painful to ask. Is there a bottom line? When we say that Israel must do everything to bring its soldiers home dead or alive, do we really mean everything including agreeing to release shameless and unremorseful murderers like Samir Kuntar? I suppose the whole concept of doing everything specifically includes undertaking decisions like the one that led to Kuntar's release, decisions that by their very nature are so painful as to be almost unbearable. We, of course, have luxury of contemplating these issues from afar. No one expects or wants us to decide whether or not the price in this particular instance was too high. (Nor do editorial writers have to decide such things.) But which of us can desist from formulating an opinion, from deciding whether or not we feel that Israel acted nobly and well, or foolishly, even naively?

In my opinion, "everything" means everything. To allow any Jewish person to go unburied is unthinkable to me, but the concept of having the possibility of bringing home soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of the Jewish state and not doing so because of political considerations that seems a thousand times more unthinkable to me. I have devoted my professional life to the proposition that behaving nobly is the greatest defense against the forces of evil that threaten to overwhelm us all. Indeed, I truly do believe that each of us has the power in his or her hands to do inestimable good for the world merely by living moral, decent lives devoted to the search for truth, to the quest for peace, to the propagation of deeds of lovingkindness, and to the study of Torah. That being the case, I cannot bring myself to fault Israel for behaving kindly towards the families of the fallen and justly towards the soldiers themselves. President Peres was right: the Lebanese will have to deal with their grotesque behavior on their own time. Our job-and the job of those who govern Israel-is set an example of nobility under fire and always to be prepared to pay even exorbitant prices for things of inestimable value. And behaving kindly towards the living and the dead is one of those things that I consider to be in that category of things the value of which cannot be quantified or estimated, and for which the price paid can never really be too high.

The leaders of Israel had a difficult decision to make and they made it. I find my blood boiling with outrage at the images of our enemies celebrating the release of a murderer with the blood of children on his hands. But I find comfort in the hope that, at least eventually, the Regevs and the Goldwassers will know the peace that comes from burying the dead with dignity, mourning them appropriately and in the company of caring throngs of neighbors and well-wishers, and, through the process of grieving, slowly becoming able to resume their lives.

May the memory of these brave soldiers be a blessing for their families and their friends, and for all Israel. And may they both rest in peace.

Sincerely,

Martin S. Cohen