“First to go in, last to come out” was the motto printed on a large backdrop behind the eulogizers at the levayah

Less than two weeks ago, I was on a highway in central Israel when the car made a sharp turn. Suddenly, a friendly, familiar face greeted me from a large billboard, accompanied by bold Hebrew letters: “Ran Gvili, hero of Israel, we’re waiting for you.”

I knew Ran’s story. You probably did, too. Two years ago on Simchas Torah morning, Ran, a member of an elite police unit, was taking it easy at home while awaiting surgery for an injured shoulder. But when he learned that terrorists were flooding the southern border, he grabbed his gun and — despite his parents’ protests about his injury — hurried to defend his people.

He fought heroically in Kibbutz Alumim, felling many terrorists and helping save the members of the kibbutz, before taking two bullets. As he bled out, the terrorists dragged him to Gaza. His family never heard from him again.

For more than two years, Ran’s parents continued speaking of “our Rani” in the present tense, holding to a pinprick of hope that he might still be alive — even though intelligence assessments established that he had almost certainly died of his wounds.

This year, on a miraculous Hoshana Rabbah morning, all the living hostages were suddenly, stunningly reunited with their families, some of whom had never received any indications their loves ones were still alive. The Gvilis waited for their son. He didn’t return. Then the terrorists began unearthing the remains of deceased hostages, and transferred them to the IDF in a slow, agonizing trickle. The Gvilis waited. Ran still didn’t return.

Just last week, more than three months after the return of the last living hostages and after 843 days of captivity, Ran’s remains were unearthed, identified, and brought back to his family. The last hostage was back.

Last week, most of us were occupied with Iran’s horrific decimation of its own citizens, with Trump’s bewildering Greenland campaign, and with a punishing snowstorm that crippled the Northeastern US. Ran’s return may not have registered as starkly as some of the earlier ones. But it deserves more than a footnote in the news cycle; certainly in our personal and national news cycle.

Did you know that there are at least 36 American citizens currently being held hostage by enemy countries across the world? Yet there are no weekly protests, no sustained media campaigns, no mass prayer rallies, no faces plastered on bus stops or airports. The average American citizen isn’t even aware of these hostages’ plights.

Israelis may envy many aspects of the American lifestyle, but this they know: When Israelis were taken captive and dragged across the border, their fellow countrymen could not sleep at night. They could not celebrate fully during the day. There were many who applied a numbered piece of masking tape to their clothing as they got dressed each morning. Hundreds who risked their lives mapping out tunnels and planning special operations to rescue their imprisoned brothers and sisters. Quiet women who wouldn’t make challah or light their Shabbos candles without an intense, whispered tefillah for the hostages subsisting on crumbling pita. Bareheaded men who donned tefillin every day as an extra merit for these captive Jews. Entire communities who wouldn’t consider their daily Shacharis complete without those extra pirkei Tehillim.

Does that mean this entire two-plus-year period was a shining era of unity and love? Was it all sheves achim gam yachad? Sadly, it wasn’t.

I remember one of the cover stories we ran soon after October 7, about the formation of the Hostage Forum, an official body that would advocate publicly and diplomatically for the return of the hostages. We were buoyed by the feeling that we were seeing a real turnaround: All the resources, the brainpower, the drive and passion that had been poured into protesting the proposed justice reforms would now be devoted to something apolitical, strictly humanitarian. The Israeli left and right were coalescing around a shared, elevated goal. It was so heartening, so hopeful.

The hope dissolved over the next few months as we watched those passionate weekly Motzaei Shabbos protests swivel from anti-Hamas to anti-Bibi, from shared prayer to shared ire, from a unified government and military to a marked mistrust between the various organs of leadership and defense.

During that long, crushing wait for their loved ones, we watched different hostage families take different approaches. No one can judge a family enduring this kind of crisis. Perhaps we can judge the politicians and media who seized and amplified the families’ pain and used it to further their own agendas.

Even now, when there are no longer any hostages in Gaza, the media is covering another rift, between the government-appointed hostage envoy and some of the families, over alleged death threats and forced silencing. And much of the country has been riven by more rounds of demonstrations. There’s a sense that whatever fragile coalition we formed at the start of these two-plus years of shared concern for the hostages has splintered beyond recognition. And the splinters are piercing our skin, drawing recriminations and accusations along with blood.

But last Wednesday, as heavy gray storm clouds loomed, there was a solemn gathering in Meitar, north of Be’er Sheva, where Rani Gvili grew up and lived, and from where he’d embark on his final journey. Family and friends, colleagues and politicians, all found places on the chairs lined up at his levayah. And for a short while, all that strife and blame and conflict lifted.

Watching his parents approach the microphone to speak about their son, I remembered a Times of Israel headline I’d seen two days before: “The Gvili family’s hopeful, dignified struggle to bring Ran home.” The headline encapsulated so much of this particular hostage family’s story — and was a potent forecast of the tone of his levayah.

Standing before the flag-draped remains of their son, his parents didn’t speak of blame. They spoke of pride. Pride in their son’s accomplishments and sense of responsibility to his people. Their list of thank-yous wasn’t punctuated by pointed omissions. They thanked Bibi and Trump, the military and diplomatic teams, the left-aligned Hostage Forum and the right-aligned Tikvah Forum.

As Talik Gvili shared her fierce pride in Rani, I remembered an interview she’d conducted during the long wait for his return. The reporter asked, “In hindsight, do you wish your son would have chosen otherwise on that day — not to grab his gun and hurry to fight?”

“As a mother,” she answered, “yes, of course I wish he wouldn’t have gone. But from a bigger-picture view — this is how I raised my son. I brought him up to have a certain sense of purpose in life, and his purpose was to keep his fellow Jews safe.”

The world of the Gvilis sometimes seems very distant from ours. How many readers have ever heard of his hometown Meitar or can place it on a map? How many have family members who serve in the police force? I’d guess that a lot of our readers dream of different occupations, different uniforms, for their sons. But there is something inspirational, even aspirational, in the idea of raising a child who is willing to sacrifice his very self for his ideals. To have that kind of drive, that passion, that clarity of mission… that is something we can’t help but admire in Ran and his parents.

“First to go in, last to come out” was the motto printed on a large backdrop behind the eulogizers at the levayah. It described Rani, who jumped out of his comfortable bed that terrible morning, ignored his injured shoulder, and raced to save his people.

I wonder if the pithy formula with its callout to that first dark day could also remind us all — those who kept Rani in their thoughts every day, along with those who shifted his smiling face and waiting family to the distant margins of their busy lives — of the way our hearts all beat together two years ago. Of that sense of shared purpose, shared vulnerability, and shared strength we all felt, back on October 8.

During Talik’s hesped for her son, she mentioned the time Ran came home from work, clearly disturbed. He had been assigned to police a demonstration, and it had been stormy.

“Ima,” he said, “I was stationed at a demonstration today. And people spit at me! Can you believe it? They don’t realize,” she paraphrased him, as she spoke to all those people sitting beneath the gray sky, with her son’s coffin before her and two years of dashed hopes and bitter strife behind her, “that we’re really all one people, one nation.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1098)