Between Joy and Sorrow: Balancing Opposing Emotions in the Wake of the Hostage Release

We now stand at the crossroads of both joy and sorrow. 

For many of us, we are experiencing incredible joy at the release of the living hostages, and what is hopefully a close to this painful chapter. However, we also feel deep sorrow for the hostages who have not yet been released, the reality we face in burying the deceased hostages, and for all those who have lost loved ones in battle and throughout this conflict. Somehow, we’re expected to feel both. 

The question is, how?

How are we expected to do this, especially when feeling one seems to neglect the other, equally valid emotion?

When I was thinking about these questions, I was reminded of a speech I heard from Rabbi Doron Perez. Rabbi Perez came to speak to my college back in April about both the upcoming elections in the World Zionist Organization (he is the executive chairman of the World Mizrachi Movement, a religious movement within the WZO) and, relevant to this article, the experience of having a son in captivity. 

What Rabbi Perez emphasized then, and whose message resonates today, is the incredible power of our hearts to handle and hold opposing emotions. This was evidenced by his own experience. Only days after being informed that his son Daniel was taken hostage, Rabbi Perez walked his older son, Yonatan, to the chuppah, somehow juggling these contradictory emotions of sorrow and joy. And yet, as Rabbi Perez said, it was possible: “The curse and the challenge of what we’re going through with Daniel doesn’t cancel the bracha and hakarat hatov we went through with Yonatan…And I don't know why, but I feel both.”

It is not about either-or, he emphasized, but about “gam v’gam,” leaving room for both emotions to coexist. And this, according to Rabbi Perez, encapsulates the entirety of life. From the experience of having a divine soul within a physical body, to the experience of marrying off one son and having the other in captivity in Gaza, life is about these experiences of holding complexity and holding two things that shouldn't go together. 

And this, I believe, is the thing to remember now. We can rejoice in the simcha of having the hostages return, and we can feel the deep, incredible sorrow for those who still need to come home and for those whose lives have been lost in this fight. Feeling one emotion doesn't mean you’re choosing it over the other. It’s not one or the other, but gam v’gam. Somehow, our hearts can handle both.