The Nazis tried to hide their crimes. Hamas terrorists glory in their crimes

People pay their respects during the funeral service of late Israeli hostage Oded Lifshitz, in Rishon Lezion, February 25, 2025. (Photo by Miriam Alster/Flash90)

I see the evil.

I deeply resent needing to live with it, and cannot fathom the lives of those who live with it far more — infinitely more — than I do.

The black masks. They say it all. The Hamas criminals who delivered the innocent Israeli and Thai hostages wore black masks.

Cowards. Conscienceless. But far more — infinitely more — is the signal that these black masks send. The signal: It is these monsters with whom these hostages had to live, and the rest of the hostages still have to live. Not for the few moments I saw them on the screen, but full time, each day, for hundreds of days. I see the evil. The hostages were absorbed by it. It is beyond my ken.

I deeply resent needing to live with this evil — to live knowing that it’s out there. Knowing that its intent on murder is unbridled. “Knowing?” Not really, not intimately. Not knowing in the sense that these released hostages knew — and that all of the remaining hostages still know.

The Nazis tried to hide their crimes. Hamas terrorists glory in their crimes, but it’s still worse. Yes, they glory in their crimes, but still cover their faces. Not in shame. But as a brazen signal that were it not for their “victory” of securing the release of fellow criminals, including murderers, they would happily kill and mutilate and body-burn again. Yes, I deeply resent needing to live knowing that these evil people live in the same world I do.

The ceasefire is a terrific deal: Innocents released. Families reunited. Hope ignited. Evil, to an extent, defeated. Jewish solidarity reinvigorated. A terrific deal.

A terrible deal. Criminals rewarded as they, too, are reunited. Their hope for destruction is reignited. Evil, in a concrete way, is victorious: freedom to rearm, freedom to rebuild — not homes, but terror tunnels. Perhaps the most evil victory of all: the perverse motivation to change nothing that motivated the October 7 murder and mutilation to begin with.

Closure? There is not even closure for the freed hostages and their families. Boundless joy, of course. But not closure; instead, every manner of medical and psychological rehabilitation lies ahead.

Certainly no closure for the rest of the hostages. Certainly no closure for a war that set out to, and still needs to, eliminate Hamas. Certainly no closure for an Israeli society rent by bereaved families and thousands of wounded. Certainly no closure for a government that must prosecute a war while also bearing responsibility for the failures that led to it to begin with. Certainly no closure for the Iranian threat.

Certainly no closure for the gaping hole that this war revealed: Israel’s inability to produce all of its own weaponry; Israel’s dependence for its very existence on the whims and politics of the leaders of other countries. No closure: a terrible deal indeed.

But, as Doron Perez says, a sweet deal nonetheless. Sweet for the released hostages and sweet for their families, but sweet on a community level also. Remember, the speaker is a man who lost his son on October 7 and was faced with deciding whether to proceed with the marriage of another son scheduled for two weeks after October 7.

If he can speak of sweetness, surely I must. If he deeply resents needing to live with this evil but also can relish the sweetness of hostages released, surely I can. If, despite everything, he can pronounce himself optimistic about the Jewish future, me too.

This terrific deal. This terrible deal. The paradox of Jewish history up to and including Israel today. A thriving technological powerhouse filled with poverty. An incubator of intellectual genius — its religious and secular embodiments at loggerheads. An ingathering of the most diverse population on earth whose immediate neighbors cannot make their peace with even a single different religion in their midst.

Perhaps most of all — a society that, consumed though it is with this terrific, terrible deal, pushes ahead just the same. Perhaps most perplexing about Israel and about the Jewish People worldwide is that though we must live with this evil, though we must gaze upon these evil masked men, though we must face war, we also have a way of ignoring it all, of continuing to inspire ourselves, as if there were closure.

Hamas will revel in its continued torment of the Jewish People with its drip-by-drip release of hostages, but in the end, optimism must rule. We know that Hamas, too, we shall overcome. This evil, too, shall see its demise. Just as the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Babylonians, Crusaders, Cossacks, and Nazis did. We are the Eternal People.

Rabbi Hillel Goldberg is the editor and publisher of the Intermountain Jewish News, for which he has written a weekly column, “View from Denver,” since 1972, and the author of numerous seforim about the mussar movement and other subjects.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1051)