Belonging is a commitment

The body of Omer Neutra has been returned to Israel.

I want to pause there — before the metaphors, before the collective language we reach for automatically. His body was returned, his life and potential interrupted.

Omer was twenty-two. He grew up in New York in a family that held Israel close. There are people for whom Israel is a concept, and there are people for whom Israel is a gravitational field. Omer felt the pull. He chose to enlist here. That kind of choice means something. It reveals what story someone believes they belong to.

On the morning of October 7, he was commanding a tank near Nir Oz. Not a metaphorical battlefield — a real one, with dirt, steel, heat, shock, malfunction, and terror. His tank jammed. The crew tried to fix it. They were overrun. They were taken.

And then — something that modern language fails to describe — his life continued, but not in the world of the living. His parents lived in the unbearable present tense of not-knowing anything about his wellbeing other than he was taken h*stage.

Time becomes viscous inside uncertainty. I don't know how parents learn how to make room for hope and despair to coexist in the same breath.

In December, they were told that Omer had been k*lled on the day of the attack.

And yet his body was still held h*stage for over 750 days.

Last night, his body was sent back home.

This marks the end of a chapter, but there is no real closure. There is only the long work of continuing to love him even though he is no longer here on this earth.

What strikes me about Omer’s story is not just the tragedy — tragedy is everywhere, endless, exhausting — but the choice he made before any of this began.

He wanted to stand inside the story, not next to it.

That choice says:

If I am part of a people, then I am responsible to them.

So today, I am thinking about Omer as a person who chose to live his life aligned with his values.

Because belonging is not sentimental.

Belonging is a commitment.

And Omer understood that.