Choosing Freedom and Agency Within Bondage (Rebecca Bardach - April 15, 2025)

Rebecca Bardach is a writer and practitioner in building Jewish-Arab shared society in Israel, with thirty years of experience in migration, conflict and development issues. You can follow her on Substack Between Despair and Determination. She is a periodic blogger for The Times of Israel, and contributor to Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post, and is currently working on a book. Originally from Berkeley, CA, she has lived in Jerusalem with her family for more than two decades. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

The fact that 59 hostages are still held in Hamas captivity after more than 550 days and that war, death and destruction continues has made this Passover one of the most excruciating many Israeli as well as Diaspora Jews have experienced. How can we celebrate this holiday of freedom with whole hearts given the horrific conditions and abuses of their bondage?

I have been involved in hostage release efforts from the beginning as both a family member (having a cousin who was held in captivity and then executed by Hamas – Hersh Goldberg-Polin z”l) and as part of the broader public insisting that the hostage issue is core to who we are as a country and society. As enormous as the relief and gratitude are for every returned hostage, it’s impossible to feel a sense of dayeinu – it would have been enough – until everyone is home and the war is over.

But even as the hostage situation represents a literal form of current bondage, many Jews in Israel and the Diaspora feel that they are becoming captive to threatening forces which they fear they can’t oppose or overcome, in ways which feel unique to this era, even as they feel hauntingly familiar. We seem to be at a historical turning point. But we are uncertain which way to turn, where we need to go, how to get there and who might be our trustworthy travelling companions.

Many Israelis have been on the streets demonstrating week after week for the hostages’ release, insisting that the state has a fundamental commitment to do absolutely everything in its power to rescue its citizens. But what began as an apolitical act of solidarity, has become increasingly political as the governing coalition has opposed and even explicitly and proudly torpedoed hostage release efforts in pursuit of a political and social reordering that most Israelis oppose.

Hamas and the Iranian axis are responsible for starting this war, and many Israelis feel that their security and even the country’s existence are held captive by these extremists. Tragically, this has made it harder to disentangle the legitimate desire of the Palestinians for freedom from Israeli control, from the illegitimate desire of Hamas to eliminate Israel. As much as innocent Israelis have suffered enormously, innocent Gazans and Palestinians are suffering incomprehensible multiples of that, crushed between internal extremism, the war and Israeli actors or actions which contribute to the violence.

But alongside the external threats to Israel there lies a very real internal threat, with many Israelis increasingly feeling they are held hostage by a governing coalition which is going to astonishing lengths to undermine fundamental aspects of the country – through the courts, in the halls of the governing institutions, in the security forces and in the media – and is working actively against core interests, hopes and values.

Hence the protest efforts, which have been going on, week after week, in various forms for the last two and a half years. Even as I have been part of these protest efforts, I also fear that the protests risk becoming a form of captivity. They are essential to help keep the roof from caving in, but they also risk coming at the expense of urgent work needed to strengthen the walls holding up the roof.

And even as Israelis are reeling from all this, as an American-Israeli I also am acutely aware of the ways that Diaspora Jews feel shackled and fearful of the waves of anti-Semitism and pernicious forms of anti-Israel attitudes which have emerged since October 7. And by the ways that America’s newly elected leadership is attacking the core institutions, norms and values which Jews in America proudly and wholeheartedly protected and advanced throughout their history.

But even in the face of all of these threats, perhaps the greatest sense of bondage comes from the paralysis which the onslaught of events in this situation generates. Wave after wave of events have revealed threats that are genuinely profound and systemic. This generates bewilderment, grief, anger and trauma, and a sense that it is all insurmountable. In turn, these emotional tides leave us in a state of exhaustion and despair, in which inaction and a turning inward towards personal and communal wellbeing seems like the only viable option.

Of all the threats, I believe this is actually the greatest, and of all the shackles perhaps this is the one which most ensures we remain captive to these forces. Because they mean that even when we could fight for freedom, we fail to do so. Remember, the Israelites had already been freed from Pharoah’s bondage when they begged to go back to Egypt and when they gave into the temptations of the Golden Calf, posing their own pits and barriers to getting to the Promised Land.

Giving into despair, exhaustion or overwhelm is the only thing that guarantees that we won’t get there – and if not to a mythic promised land, than at least to a better place. As much as these current dilemmas resonate with historical precedents, this is not the Pharoah or bondage of yore, just as what we are experiencing are not the pogroms, persecution or Holocaust of yore. Even within this place of captivity, we can’t forget that we do still have extensive agency and the obligation to use it to reach a better place.

The key is to remain clear-eyed about both what we are fighting against, but also what we are fighting for. At a time where there are so many attacks on Israel it is important to state explicitly that it is legitimate for the Jewish people to have a state representing them and characterized by their story. We must fight for an Israel that sees its Jewish, liberal and democratic characteristics as working in alignment not contradiction to each other. And we must still pursue a resilient Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation which enables, through both its policies and practices, both the Jewish people and the Palestinian people to live side by side in dignity and security as individuals and collectives.

It’s true that is not exclusively up to us. Even prior to October 7 Israeli Palestinian reconciliation felt almost impossibly beyond reach in so many ways – how much more so after what our two peoples have experienced at each other’s hands since then? But it doesn’t fundamentally change the reality that neither of us will be leaving and we must – eventually - find a way to live together. And there is still more we can do to advance this. My years of working with partners in the spaces of both Jewish-Arab shared and Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation has shown me that there are people in all of our myriad communities who share this vision, even as the situation threatens to overwhelm us all.

Remember – the Israelites experienced 400 years of slavery, and 40 years of wandering in the desert. It’s impossible to know how long it will take to work our way out of this current situation with its myriad threats. But I do know that the Israelites only got to the Promised Land because they embarked on the journey, and step by step, day by day, year by year, generation by generation, they proceeded until they got there.

Most of all, we have to remember that redemption – or, in this case, being a people or maintaining a state – is not ever really a final resting place. Rather, it is a state of both being and doing, debating and creating, striving and pursuing, which ultimately defines us.