We carry each other home

Every last hostage from Nir Oz, alive or de*d, has now come home.

It is a sentence too heavy to hold, and yet it is also a promise kept.

Nir Oz was shattered on October 7th. A community uprooted. Families torn open. Children, parents, grandparents, neighbors stolen from their doorsteps and from their lives. The silence that followed was unbearable.

How well we know their names. Their faces. Their stories.

And today, even in grief that has no bottom, something sacred has happened:

No one was forgotten.

No one was abandoned.

We brought every one of them home.

Some return to arms.

Some return to earth.

All return to love, dignity, and memory.

This is what it means to be Am Yisrael:

Even when our hearts are broken, even when we are exhausted from crying —

we carry each other home.

To bury with honor.

To say their names in the place they loved.

To let the soil they tended hold them one final time.

To begin, somehow, the impossible work of mourning, of rebuilding, of living.

May the surviving families be held with gentleness.

May the memories of the murdered be a blessing and a light.

May we find strength in each other, even now.

And may we see a day when no mother, no father, no child ever waits like this again.

Nir Oz — we are with you.

Your grief is our grief.

Your rebuilding will be our rebuilding.

We remember.

We carry.

We do not let go.

This is what it means to be one people with one heart.