October 8, 2023 — At Last
January 28, 2026
This was written on late in the day on January 26, 2026 and intentionally posted after International Holocaust Remembrance Day — a moment when history, memory, and the present collided in ways I’m still processing.
Today feels like an exhale that’s been trapped in the body for far too long.
For the first time since October 7, 2023 — after 843 days — there are no hostages in Gaza.
For the first time since 2014, there are no Israelis — living or deceased — being held there.
Read that again. Slowly. Let it land.
No hostages.
It has been over two years of holding our breath.
Two years of counting names, faces, ages.
Two years of birthdays missed, lives frozen mid-sentence, families suspended in time.
Two years of yellow ribbons looped around our wrists, our fences, our social feeds, our hearts.
Eight hundred and forty-three days of learning how to function while a piece of our collective soul was somewhere else — underground, in darkness, in terror.
And now — today — they are home.
All of them.
The relief is real.
The joy is real.
The pain is real.
The grief is real.
They are not opposites. They are roommates.
I didn’t expect the tears to come like this — not quietly, not politely. They arrived in waves, uninvited and unstoppable. The kind of crying that comes from somewhere older than language. Somewhere communal. Somewhere ancestral.
When Hatikvah plays, it does what it always does — it bypasses logic and goes straight to the marrow. The same with Habayta. Songs about hope and home land differently when hope has been rationed and home has felt conditional.
Today, they cracked something open that has been sealed tight for survival.
I watched the videos.
People retiring their yellow ribbons.
Untying knots that had become muscle memory.
Folding them carefully. Some kissed them. Some pressed them to their chests. Some couldn’t finish without breaking down.
I had to stop watching.
Because today was also the day I finally turned off the menorah.
It had stayed fully lit in my window since the end of Chanukah 2023 — long after the holiday ended. Long after it made sense on a calendar. It wasn’t decoration. It wasn’t ritual.
It was a vigil.
A refusal to let the light go dark while our people were still waiting.
Every night, it glowed.
And today — for the first time — it felt permissible to let it rest.
Not because the story is over.
Not because the wounds are healed.
Not because justice has been done, or the dead restored, or the trauma erased.
But because the waiting — that particular agony — has ended.
There is a unique cruelty in waiting without end dates. In counting days without knowing how many there will be. In waking up each morning and checking the same headlines with the same dread and the same fragile thread of hope.
After 843 days, that chapter has finally closed.
What opens next is complicated.
There will be reckoning.
There will be mourning.
There will be rehabilitation — physical, psychological, spiritual.
There will be anger that has nowhere tidy to go.
There will also be joy that feels guilty.
Relief that feels fragile.
Smiles that collapse without warning.
That doesn’t make any of it wrong.
It makes it human.
It makes it Jewish.
We are allowed to cry today.
We are allowed to breathe today.
We are allowed to say finally — and mean it without apology.
And we are allowed to hold the names of those who didn’t make it home alongside the unbearable miracle that others did.
Tonight, the menorah is dark.
But the light it stood for — the insistence on life, on return, on am yisrael chai even when it felt impossibly heavy — hasn’t gone anywhere.
It has simply moved back inside us.
Welcome home.
All of you.
