How did the post-October 7 righteous river of outrage get diverted from its true target?

“WE

will keep fighting.” As three more hostages embraced their families, these rousing words echoed throughout the world.

What does it mean to keep fighting? For some, it’s the effort to keep up their spirits and hopes — not an easy struggle, especially with our emerging knowledge of the tortures the hostages are enduring. For others, it’s the fight to keep the hostages’ plight in the public consciousness. Some see the military effort as the fight that will bring them home.

And many refer to a different fight. A fight against the villain of this macabre story.

As for who that villain might be, here are the top choices offered in Israel’s mainstream media and public discourse:

• a military and intelligence apparatus that bungled its most essential task
• a prime minister who puts his political survival before innocent civilians’ fates
• an extremist flank of the country that prefers land grabs to lives
• an inept team of negotiators who need their hands forced in order to bring results

The correct answer, of course, is none of the above. The villains are Hamas and its enablers. Seems so clear, doesn’t it? Yet somehow in the fog of this war, too many impassioned, compassionate Jews have forgotten that none of the targets favored by the media, the public, and the protesters want the hostages to suffer. These targets aren’t angels, and they don’t possess Divine wisdom. But they’re also not the guilty party who snatched, starved, and tortured innocent people — and then sadistically dangled and refused deal after deal over the course of more than a year.

So how did we get here? How did the post-October 7 righteous river of outrage get diverted from its true target, rushing in channels of foaming animosity toward our fellow Jews instead?

In part, that’s the natural human response when we’re let down by the people we trust to keep us and our children safe. Ire and disgust, slogans and smears — those are the weapons people instinctively grab when betrayed by their leaders’ powerlessness in the face of evil.

But this urge to accuse, blame, and shame has been very cynically magnified and manipulated by our enemy. Remember, they’ve studied our nation very well. They know our strengths and soft spots, and they’ve been very intentionally seeding discord and doubt among us.

Julie Kuperstein, whose 22-year-old son Bar was snatched by Hamas on October 7, refuses to give in to that urge.

This isn’t Julie’s first encounter with a shattering nisayon. Years ago her husband Tal, a volunteer paramedic, was injured in a severe car crash on his way to an emergency call. He lost his ability to work, walk — even to speak. Their family was left reeling — and without any source of income.

Bar, not yet 17 at the time, took on the burden of supporting his family in place of his father. A strong and resourceful young man certified in first-aid, he found a job in a security firm. His job landed him at the Nova Festival last year, and when the fields of dancing revelers morphed into a human abattoir, his sense of responsibility and initiative positioned him as the unofficial commander of a desperate rescue operation. Amid the shooting and screaming, he split up his team of guards and gave them precise instructions — secure this area, evacuate these people, help me provide first-aid to the wounded. Until he was captured by Hamas.

Julie didn’t grow up in a frum household. When she made her journey to observance, her husband chose not to come along. For a while, she urged teenaged Bar to follow her example and keep Shabbos, until she realized the pressure he felt to provide for their family was an obstacle too challenging to overcome.

But a day before that fateful Simchas Torah, he called her to wish her a good Shabbos and Yom Tov — and told her that he’d made arrangements so that he wouldn’t have to drive for the duration of Shabbos.

That final message only served to crystallize Julie’s sense that the fight to bring home Bar — and all the hostages — would be conducted on a battlefield much more cosmic than a negotiating table or protest rally; that political protests, commando operations, or government ultimatums wouldn’t play the decisive role in bringing her son home. She would find other tools: not finger-pointing, could-haves, or should-haves.

One of her more public efforts is the “Tefillin Bar” campaign — in which each male captive was matched with a fellow Jew who signed a contract detailing a commitment to lay tefillin in his zechus for the duration of his captivity. Soon, she added public tefillin stations, each situated in a location handpicked to fit the personality or hobbies of the chosen hostage. This is the type of activism that has filled her life during the past 500 days.

Yet in a bizarre and cruel episode of psychological warfare, Julie recently received a phone call from a man with a heavy Iranian accent. He identified himself as a Hamas terrorist.

“Do you want to see your Bar again?” he asked. “If so, you have to do a lot more than you’re doing. You have to go to The Hague and advocate for his release. You have to show up at the public protests. You know, the families of the hostages have a lot of power in Israeli society, and you haven’t been public enough. You’re not doing enough for your son. You have to make much more noise to get him free!”

Julie’s many spiritual efforts to save her son apparently aren’t the type this terrorist, who clearly kept a watchful eye on Israel’s weekly protests, would know about.

When Julie heard the terrorist’s accusations, she began to shake. But she kept her voice firm and steered far away from the whirlpool of swirling dissent.

“My Bar is not in your hands. Only in the hands of the Creator,” she told the caller. “And you know something? You, too, are in the hands of the Creator.”

The terrorist was quiet. Then he said, “Kol hakavod, geveret.”

When asked what people can do to help the hostages, Julie’s simple response was “tefillot, tefillot, tefillot, and kabbalot to do more, to do better.”

She’s not the only one who maintained clear long-range vision through the fog of war. During the months her son Ori Hy”d was imprisoned in a Hamas tunnel, Einav Danino avoided any activism with political undertones, focusing on accruing zechuyos for him instead. Upon her release just a few weeks ago, Liri Albag reminded everyone that what our enemies fear most of all is our unity and enduring hope. Meirav Berger, mother of released hostage Agam Berger, commented that the spiritual strides we make toward our Creator bring His lost children home, in the most literal sense.

The slogan chosen for the effort to free the hostages is “bring them home.” It was probably crafted with good intentions, but the phrasing is a bit unfortunate. A slogan like “let them go” clearly addresses the perpetrators that abducted and continues to imprison the hostages. “Bring them home,” in contrast, serves as an accusation hurled at people on our own side of the fence, as if they possess the ability to accomplish that.

This is a battle being fought in many spheres. But when you know, like Julie does, Who holds the power to release the shackled, you can refuse the temptation to get ensnared in the discord seeded and watered by our enemies. You can learn from their sickening battle tactics just how powerful a vessel our shalom can be. And then “bring them home” can be your motto — because you’re addressing all your earthly efforts and supplications to the One who can truly do so.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1050)