Hostages are coming home. Thank God.

(RNS) — Everyone is talking about the geo-politics of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas — of Trump and Netanyahu and Hamas and Gaza and Qatar.

They will speak of how the agreement is an act of cooperation between the departing Biden administration and the incoming administration and of whether Trump put pressure on Netanyahu, on the implications for Trump’s unfolding relationship with the Jewish community and Israel.

They will speak of missteps and moral errors on all sides, of the depravity of Hamas’ leaders, of Israel’s coalition members Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the finance minister and national security minister, respectively, who worked strenuously against all such deals, of the fate of the coalition.

They are arguing about how good a deal it really is — because it leaves Hamas in place. They are arguing about the moral calculus: the deal frees as many as 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are vicious terrorists with Israeli blood on their hands.

All of those conversations are important.

But right now I am thinking of the hostages. In the first phase, Hamas will release 33 hostages. The remaining hostages, and the corpses of dead hostages, will be released subsequently.

That the hostages be released: That is the prayer that has been on my lips daily since Oct. 7, 2023. On that day, Hamas kidnapped approximately 250 people — citizens of Israel, the United States, Britain, Mexico, Thailand and other countries. They have been living in the hell of the tunnels. They have been ill-fed, tortured and sexually abused.

Photographs of Israeli hostages being held by Hamas militants are projected on the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, Nov. 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

Landing at Ben Gurion Airport, their images are the first things you see. You can’t walk a few yards along the streets of Israeli cities without seeing their photographs on posters and billboards. In Israel and elsewhere, I have attended rallies with their names and fates on our lips and in our hearts. I visited Hostage Square in Tel Aviv, with its empty chairs symbolizing the absence of those hostages from their homes and tables. There has not been a single holiday in which we have not thought of them.

In America and elsewhere, you would have seen their faces on lampposts and buildings. In many cases, Jew-haters ripped their images, because they wanted to erase their identities and what happened to them. Let’s also remember those who pushed back against the poster-rippers (obscenity alert).

We have been praying about the hostages — the focus of countless rallies in Israel, America and elsewhere. In many synagogues, empty chairs are put out on the bima for them.

We now know the names of the first to be released: Romi Goren, 23; Emily Damari, 28; and Doron Steinbrecher, 31. There are hostages whose names do not yet appear on a list of those to be released. I weep with their families; I cannot imagine their anguish and anger.

It is impossible to celebrate without recalling those who died in captivity. Some are well-known; others, less so. Each one was a world unto themselves.

Which brings me to Torah, to the book that we are now reading in synagogue, the Book of Exodus, the book of redemption from the darkness of imprisonment.

Exodus begins with the Israelites in Egypt, prospering; with a new king adopting xenophobic and genocidal policies; with midwives committing civil disobedience, and saving the lives of Israelite children — and with the birth of an as-yet anonymous Israelite child.

His mother places him into a basket and sets him afloat in the Nile. Pharaoh’s daughter came down to the Nile to bathe and spied the basket and sent her slave girl to fetch the basket.

And then: “When she opened it (the basket), she saw that it was a child, a boy crying.”

“Vatiftach,” the text reads in Hebrew. “And she opened.”

What did she open? The basket? Or, herself?

The infant was crying, of course. We can imagine the howls were very loud — so loud that they were audible over the waves of the river. That child would become Moses.

I am thinking of the words of Rabbi Tzvi Yechezkel Michaelson, one of Warsaw’s most revered rabbis. He died in Treblinka in 1942.

In his commentary on this text, Rabbi Michaelson suggested Moses was not the only infant crying. His cries contained the cries of the entire Jewish people across eternity. (Rabbi Michaelson knew the cries of Jewish babies. He had heard so many of them. The cries filled his ears until his dying day.)  

I am thinking of one family, taken hostage on Oct. 7 and reportedly to be released: the Bibas family — Yarden, 34; his wife, Shiri, 32; and their children, Ariel, 4, and Kfir, who was 9 months old on that dark day and who will, we pray, turn 2 years old this week. They are the youngest hostages.

In the past 15 months, I did not need to strain to hear the cries of the Bibas children. Their cries are the echos of the cries of the infant Moses. The cries of Moses contained the cries of all Jewish children, across time and space.

But let us broaden our moral and auditory skills. The cries of Moses did not only contain the cries of Jewish children. Let us now imagine that those cries were also the cries of the children in Gaza who have also been victims of this war. Pharaoh’s daughter — a non-Jew, let us remember — could open her ears, her heart and her hand to save that child.

So, too, the descendants of the child she saved — we, the Jews — must have open ears, heart and hand to remember the cries of Palestinian children.

I close with this: “Prayer,” by Avital Nadler, translated by Heather Silverman, Michael Bohnen, Rachel Korazim, found in “Shiva: Poems of October 7.”

A mother speaks to her child, who is a hostage: