Twilight Zone
My recent posts...Twilight Zone בֵּין הַשְׁמָשׁוֹת Bein hashemashot, literally, between the suns. בֵּין הַשְׁמָשׁוֹת A twilight zone of time, or rather, out of time, between one day and the next. Our sages of old used this concept to explain certain miraculous...
When to Pray Yizkor
My recent posts...My edited comments from this past final day of Pesach. Ellie’s mom, Julia Helfman, died on her 95th birthday, December 24, 2025. This was the first Yizkor service Ellie feels obligated to attend. She said, “I’m now a member of a club I was not eager...
Timing
It had become a Kremer household Pesach tradition, or rather, a pre-Pesach tradition. Somewhere within a couple of days prior the first seder and noon on erev Pesach, something would go awry in the kitchen.
A Moment of Hebrew
My recent posts...רֶגַע שֶׁל עִבְרִית regga shel ivrit: A moment of Hebrew The summer of 1970, I was one of 250 teens in Israel with Camp Ramah. (Ellie was on the same program, but we didn’t meet then.) I got an outsized pleasure of riding an Egged public bus in...
843 Days
Ran Gvili, an Israeli police officer, was killed by Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. His body was taken into Gaza to be used as a pawn in the terrorists’ anticipated negotiations with Israel and as a tool for waging psychological warfare upon Israel.
The last of the living hostages were released on day number 738. Gvili’s remains were the last recovered of those who killed in captivity or who were taken already dead. 843 days after his death, Israeli forces repatriated his body for a proper burial.
According to the Times of Israel, some 250 bodies were exhumed from a Muslim cemetery in Gaza and matched with dental records and/or fingerprints. “The IDF said it would be returning all of the other exhumed bodies to their graves and cleaning up the cemetery, out of respect for the dead.”
At kiddush lunch on Shabbat I had a conversation with a congregant about the “hostage dog tags” Ellie and I had been wearing since February 2024. (The number/s were updated daily.) She had stopped wearing hers when the living hostages returned; most Israelis had done the same. We shared stories of those tags eliciting expressions of solidarity on city streets, in airports and elsewhere.
What now? Will a tzitzit-wearing young man ever again catch my eye, stop loading his luggage into a shuttle and bring his hand to his heart? At a recent interfaith event, the imam of a local mosque engaged me in conversation about the dog tags. Our daughters made sure we’d heard of Gvili’s retrieval, and asked if we had retired our tags.
What now? Do I adopt a different sign of support for Israel, a public statement of being a proud Zionist?
What now? Does the Israeli protesting public now turn its full attention to other challenges such as the West Bank, Haredi draft, housing affordability, the Knesset and international relations. (For such a small country…!)
We hope to never again need to sing “Acheinu,” that haunting and, unfortunately, timeless 9th-century prayer for Jews in dire straits. We hope that the aspiration to peace and prosperity overcome the cult of murder and martyrdom.
For the souls of the dead we wish eternal rest, and, for the living, healing of the heart.