Posted on 02/02/26
A New Language of Am Yisrael
A new language is taking shape before our eyes, and I encountered it three times this week.
1.
The eulogy delivered by Tali Gvili is echoing around the world. I have heard Tali speak countless times, but what struck me most was the single moment she keeps returning to, out of her son’s entire life story. She returned to it again in her eulogy:
“Rani was proud to be a police officer. Not long ago, he came home from a violent demonstration and told me, ‘They spat on me at the protest.’ I don’t know who they were, but Rani said, ‘How do they not understand that we’re on the same side? That we are one side?’ Rani—you reminded us of that.”
It’s remarkable. Tali did not describe how he left the house on Simchat Torah morning while still recovering from shoulder surgery. She didn’t recount how many terrorists he eliminated at Kibbutz Alumim, or how, on the way there, he saved people who had been at the Nova music festival.
Who is this woman? Where does such clarity and strength come from?
Not long ago, at an event in Tel Aviv, Tali was interviewed about her personal transformation. “I’ll never forget one of the first videos I saw after October 7,” she said. “There was a reservist holding a tallit. He spread it out and said, ‘I’m putting on tefillin for the first time in my life. I’m not religious, but I am Jewish.’ I saw that when the war was still so raw, and I said to myself: Wow, we are Jews.”
The interviewer, Avigail Bachar, nodded emotionally, and Tali continued, “Rani went out to fight those fiends because we are Jews. Suddenly everything connected. My husband now goes to shul every Friday night. I light Shabbat candles, which I never did before. We’re not religious, but we are Jewish. We’re doing many, many things—and maybe we’ll draw even closer.”
The audience rose to its feet and applauded her then, just as they did at the end of the eulogy this week. Tali ended with one sentence:
“I don’t know how we would have made it through these two years and four months without you, Am Yisrael, our Jewish brothers and sisters.”
2.
Now to the latest episode of Omri Peled’s podcast. Peled is one of those interviewers who set a certain frequency online, content creators who challenge the accepted discourse and speak about unity and inner strength. In this episode, he interviewed Shir Siegel from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, whose parents, Aviva and Keith, were kidnapped.
Neither Shir nor Tali received talking points. And yet, they spoke the same language.
Shir described how, at first, she wanted to burn everything down—to block roads, to scream. “That’s where I was,” she said. “But I learned something. There is an entire nation here, with all kinds of people. Some are the complete opposite of me.
“At the beginning of the war, when I heard the phrase ‘we are all brothers,’ I thought: How can anyone believe that? There are people who don’t want a deal that would bring my parents home. But I changed. Today, even people who think differently from me feel like biological siblings.”
It’s a full hour-long conversation worth listening to. But like Tali, Shir speaks about a surprising discovery that emerged specifically in the hardest days.
“The idea of Am Yisrael, the Jewish people, didn’t exist in my reality,” she said. “I had my family, my class, my kibbutz. But Am Yisrael? That had never been part of my story.”
3.
Last week, I was in Jerusalem at the shiva for baby Ari Katz, who died at a daycare together with baby Lia Goloventzitz.
I learned that the grieving mother, Chani, had led a volunteer memorial initiative in which thousands of necklaces and pieces of jewelry bearing photos of fallen soldiers were given to bereaved families. Now, those families came to console her. People from every sector filled the home. Miriam Peretz had just left. Rabbi Lau was there as well. A Druze family entered, followed by another family who said they had come from the Binyamin Regional Council “on behalf of the entire community of Neria.”
In an extraordinary step, Chani left in the middle of shiva and went to the courthouse. Through tears, she asked that the caregivers be released from detention to house arrest. She spoke about her three children who had been in that wonderful daycare, and about how there was no point in treating the caregivers “like terrorists.” To this day, she told me, she has no idea what actually happened there, and we may never know. There are no clear findings.
That didn’t stop many people from rushing to judge, to issue verdicts, and to attack her and her community within seconds.
Chani is furious about the media coverage and the discourse on social networks. When I asked her what strengthened her most during the week of shiva, she thought about all the rabbis and public figures who had passed through her living room. Then she answered, without coordination, without talking points: “In the end, what strengthened me most was Am Yisrael.”
Five Points on Parashat Yitro
The practical commandments—Shabbat, tefillin, festivals, kashrut, and many more—have been the defining feature of the Jewish people for thousands of years. Wherever we have gone, and whatever challenge we have faced, our response has been: we will do, and only afterward we will hear. We begin with action, and then we learn, discuss, deliberate, and come to understand its meaning.