Let me begin by saying that we in Kiryat Arba have been praying for the hostages for 15 months, and we are glad that they are being released, whatever mixed feelings we have about the terms.

Hostage deals with extravagant price tags are not something new. The first big hostage deal was in 1985, when Shimon Peres was prime minister. It was called the Jibril Deal, and I remember protesting against it at a Tel Aviv demonstration. It freed 1,150 terrorists in exchange for three Israeli hostages held by the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Israel had never seen the likes of that.

Later, in 2011, there was the Shalit deal, which freed arch-terrorist Yihye Sinwar, mastermind of the October 7^th attack, and 1,026 other terrorists in exchange for one soldier.

In November of 2023, after a month of heavy fighting following the October 7^th attack, Israel achieved a hostage deal in which 108 hostages were released in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners. At some point, negotiations broke down and the Gaza war resumed.

Last month, a year later, presumably following pressure from Donald Trump for a deal, an agreement was reached in which 33 of the remaining 82 Israeli hostages were to be released by February 16 in exchange for the release of about 1,900 terrorists, a thousand of them serving life sentences. Another 49 living hostages remain after that, and their release will involve further negotiations.

As I was walking down to Hebron this morning, my elderly friend Zechariah Nahari reminded me that yesterday was the end of shiva for Shalom Nagar, an 86-year-old Kiryat Arba resident. Zechariah, as a fellow Yemenite and family friend, was at the ceremonial meal held (by non-Ashkenazim) on the seventh day.

Shalom, a”h, had two claims to fame as far as I am concerned. First, he was the policeman who, in 1962, at age 26, hanged Adolph Eichmann, Hitler’s architect of the Holocaust. Chosen by lottery from among 22 policemen, and the only one of the 22 who did not want to do it, he pushed the button that caused the trapdoor to fall away, leading to Eichmann’s death. When you google pictures of Eichmann in his glass cage at his trial, the policeman on the left with the mustache is Shalom Nagar. This was the only case of capital punishment in Israel’s history as a modern state.

Second, he was the uncle of Rabbi Uzzi Nagar, who has been teaching us Daf Yomi for 14 years in Me’arat HaMachpeila.

Shalom, the uncle, born in Yemen in 1936, arrived in Israel as an orphan at age 12, served in the paratroopers, and then joined the prison service. For many years, he was irreligious, but as he advanced in the prison services and became head of Ramla Prison, he returned to his faith. Throughout his 25 years of retirement, he studied in one of Kiryat Arba’s many kollels. If you google Shalom Nagar, you will see a man in his eighties with a beard and peyos.

When Rabbi Uzi Nagar, the nephew, completed high school, he went straight into the air force for three years, and then he obtained a BA in engineering from the Technion, Israel’s MIT. As a student in the Technion, he met his wife Michal, and together they decided to devote their lives to Torah. Rav Nagar studied in an Ashkenazi Kollel in Jerusalem for seven years and then became a Torah educator. When I began Daf Yomi, Rav Nagar had already been teaching Daf Yomi for five years, so he is now approaching the end of his third teaching cycle.

It was May, 1967. The mood in Israel was tense. Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt was riling up the masses, talking about driving Israel into the sea. There was a fear that the surrounding Arab countries were about to attack Israel from all sides with the intent of destroying it, and there was a sense of imminent tragedy. High school students were put to work digging trenches around Israeli towns to impede foreign attack. City parks were consecrated as burial grounds. The common black humor of the time was, “Will the last person to leave Ben Gurion Airport please turn out the lights?”

When there are wars in Israel, they arouse fierce emotions. To the extent that they involve us personally, they make us ask ourselves who we are and what is important to us. Here is a “war story” from my own past.

A friend of mine, a pulpit rabbi in a large city in the United States, was approached by parents from his congregation when the 1990 Gulf War broke out. Israel was being bombed by Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The couple had a son in his “gap year” learning in a Jerusalem yeshiva, and they were concerned. They asked the rabbi if they could bring their son home. He answered, “You can do it, but realize that if you bring the boy home, he will remember for the rest of his life that you pulled him out of Jewish history.” This gave them new focus, and they let their son stay.

Before I start, a few words about Rabbi Moshe Yechiel HaLevi Tzuriel (Weiss), born in 1938, who passed away 24 Av, three days ago. He was a musmach of Rav Ruderman, zt”l, in Ner Israel, and moved to Israel as a young man. An enormous talmid chacham, the author of 49 books on halacha and Jewish philosophy, he also came into contact with the writings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook and was attracted to them. In Israel, he learned in both Mercaz HaRav and Kollel Chazon Ish. He remained a chareidi rabbi all his life, raised a chareidi family, and was revered in Bnei Brak. But he also served as a moral beacon to the Torah-true settler community, particularly during the difficult 1990s and 2000s, the years of Oslo and the Disengagement, and provided guidance when it was needed. His son, Rav Avraham, is the Chief Rabbi of Nes Tziyona, a medium-sized Israeli town.

As I wrote a month ago, Israel’s religious and rightwing parties won a major victory in Israel’s November 1 elections, winning 64 out of 120 seats in the Knesset (53 percent versus 47 percent), and this after three years of stagnation and stalemate. When one considers that 10 of the losing seats went to Arab parties, who will never be a part of the rightwing, and that four politically prominent rightwing Knesset members (Avigdor Liberman, Gideon Saar, Matan Kahane, and Dov Elkin) were part of the losing side, the rightwing victory within the Jewish population was much more pronounced than 53 percent (58 to 42 percent or, arguably, 61 percent to 39).