Happy Birthday, Gilad

Dear Gilad,

What I remember most about the day you were kidnapped, 25 June 2006, were your thick glasses. In later pictures, pictures your family got to choose and send to the press, you would be wearing more stylish frames or no glasses at all. But what I remember on that first day, the day when the summer began to unravel so quickly, the summer of my own aliyah, were your thick glasses and your shy, childish grin beaming onto the newspaper page.

I thought you looked very young and also, no offense, like a dork. The newspapers said you had a low military profile so you chose to serve in a tank unit. But you still chose a combat unit when it would have been totally acceptable for you to serve as a jobnik. I would have done that, too.

We heard that you are good at physics and math, that you are quiet and gentle, and also that you can make anyone laugh. We don’t know much more about you than that. It’s been over a year since you were kidnapped, but still, you are in the headlines here almost every day. I think that means we haven’t given up yet on your return. We may be a generally impatient people, but we are equally as stubborn.

I hope that you haven’t given up either; I hope your life is not a cruel, taunting game and that you haven’t lost your imagination and the gift of blocking out reality by getting lost inside your head. I hope that when you are sleeping, you can still dream of beautiful things. If I am lonely sometimes, I cannot imagine your loneliness. If I miss my family, I cannot imagine how much you must miss yours.

And I wonder what it is like, to have been Israel’s looking glass for the past 14 months. When we look in the mirror, we see you smiling back – your thick glasses and shy grin – and then we see our own reflection. You did not choose this and yet here you are; our country’s reaction to your plight a recording of our own blunderings, our own wavering and indecision.

First we reasoned that we would not give into extortion, that there would be no prisoner exchange. If we give in, we will pay the consequences with even more similarly heart-wrenching abductions by setting the precedent that kidnapping Israeli soldiers is an effective bargaining chip, we thought. So we said that we would exercise tough love; we would not give in. There would be no prisoner exchange.

We thought about sending in a rescue mission but we were haunted by the botched rescue attempt of Nachson Waxman and then we got distracted with the Lebanon War. Many of us thought you may have been dead all along, but then in mid-September of last year, a letter in your handwriting came.

Finally we were ready to consider the prisoner exchange and then there was the constant back-and-forth, newspaper headlines assuring of your release any day, any hour, any minute, really. The negotiations stopped and started undulating with the back-and-forth of quiet and trouble in the region and again we saw our country’s own reflection in your plight.

Then on the one year anniversary of your capture, the audio tape was delivered. In it you read a message, its content probably dictated to you by your abductors. You implored us to accept a prisoner exchange and you said that your health was deteriorating; that you needed to be hospitalized. But soon after, the talks all but ended with the Hamas coup in Gaza. Now we hear of renewed talks, but are we more cautious this time? Or are we still convinced that it could be any day, any hour, any minute?

Where did we go wrong in this whole mess – what should we have done differently? I am not sure, but I am humbled by my inability to answer these questions. As we enter a new Jewish year, I hope the government will pick up its pace. I hope that we stay stubborn and defiant and continue to pray for and believe in your safe return. And I hope this year will be the one that marks the end of your nightmare.

I am haunted by knowing that you exist and think and breathe only a few kilometers away from where I type and yet you live in a parallel universe that may as well be on a different planet. But mostly I am haunted by your thick, dorky glasses and your wide, shy grin staring back through our nation’s looking glass, recording our rise and fall, our triumphs and failures, like a seismograph.

Happy 21st birthday, Gilad. I hope that for your 22nd birthday, you’ll be home.

List of Israel’s Missing Soldiers
Prayer for Missing Israeli Soldiers