There are numbers that feel heavy to say, heavy to hold. This Friday marks 700 days. Seven hundred days since families were shattered and hostages were taken into captivity in Gaza. After so many months, as the world’s attention shifts and fades, hope can feel thin, and the act of remembering can feel like a painful, powerless gesture.
This Shabbat, we read Parashat Ki Tetzei, a portion filled with dozens of individual laws for building a just and compassionate society. Among its many instructions, we find the mitzvah of hashavat aveidah, of returning a lost object. The Torah commands us not to see our kinsman’s lost sheep and simply ignore it; we are obligated to return it. But the text adds a phrase of profound moral power. Concluding the instruction, it says: lo tuchal l’hitalem – ‘you are not able to ignore it’ (Deuteronomy 22:3).
This is more than a legal rule; it is a spiritual command against the slow erosion of apathy. You cannot look away. You cannot pretend you did not see. You cannot allow the passage of time to make the lost simply disappear from your conscience. It is a demand to remain stubbornly, actively aware.
The hostages, of course, are not lost property. They are lost pieces of our collective soul, stolen from the body of our people. Our sacred obligation, commanded in this week’s parashah, is lo tuchal l’hitalem. We cannot, we must not, ignore them.
Here at Wimbledon, this obligation has a name and a place. The empty seat we keep in our sanctuary is for Segev Kalfon. It is our quiet, constant refusal to be indifferent. It is our public declaration that we have not forgotten, and we will not forget. Every Shabbat, that empty space reminds us of the full space he, and all the hostages, ought to be occupying in the world, with their families, in freedom.
Seven hundred days is a measure of pain, but it is also a measure of our faithfulness. Our remembering is an act of hope. Our prayers are an act of hope. Our simple refusal to forget is our most profound declaration that our hope is not, and will never be, lost.
May Segev, and all who are held captive, be returned to us, speedily and in our days.
