Today marks the Shloshim of Ran Gvili, the thirtieth day since he was laid to rest in his hometown, Meitar, on January 28, 2026.

Ran Gvili was 24 on October 7, at home on medical leave from the Police Special Patrol Unit, waiting for surgery to fix the clavicle he broke riding his motorcycle a few weeks before. When the WhatsApp messages started coming early that morning, Ran Gvili put on his uniform and told his father he was joining his unit, shoulder be damned. When Ran decides something, his father Itzik Gvili said, “he cannot be stopped.”

Two hours later, he was in a shootout with Hamas men near Kibbutz Alumim, and two hours after that, he was in Shifa hospital in Gaza City. There is a picture, but it does not reveal whether he was alive or dead. Months passed before a committee of doctors, forensic scientists, intelligence officers and rabbis, studying film and intelligence reports, determined with certainty that Ran Gvili had not survived the day. Nearly two more years passed before he was brought home – the last hostage returned. It has been said that was the first to leave his house when the war began, and the last to come home. The war is bracketed by Ran Gvili.

Thousands of people came to Ran Gvili’s funeral in the small cemetery outside Meitar; the president was there, and the prime minister. There were singers, writers, rabbis, reporters, and many people who just showed up. And in front of all these people Talik Gvili, Ran’s mother, spoke to her boy:

Rani, you went out to defend everybody, [and] they all deserved your sacrifice. Seven hundred soldiers searched for you; 700 soldiers found you; 700 soldiers brought you home. There is nothing like this people anywhere in the world. The eye cries bitterly, yet the heart is happy.

That was 30 days ago.

The Rambam, Maimonides, prescribes a 30-day period for mourners during which they should not get haircuts, iron clothes, marry, “find joy in the company of others,” or travel abroad for business. It’s an odd list. It suggests that for those first 30 days, the ordinary and the joyful alike are out of reach – haircuts and fresh shirts, love and laughter. It is only when 30 days have passed that they start to come back.

For all 873 of the days since October 7, we were in those first 30 days of mourning for someone killed in this war, until today, the end of Ran Gvili’s Shloshim. For the first time in all those days, we can start to do the normal things: wash our clothes, trim our hair, declare our love, meet friends for drinks. Which makes today, I think, as close to an end of the war in Gaza as we are going to get.

Israel was born in war, and each of its wars has ended differently. In February 1949, the day Yigal Yadin went to Rhodes to sign an armistice agreement with Egypt, David Ben-Gurion wrote a long entry in his diary that included this: The Rhodes talks will be decisive. … We have to plan the absorption of 800,000 immigrants within four years. How many industrial plants will be needed, what types of industry will be developed, which lands shall we settle, how much money will be needed, what equipment will be required, what [will we] import and export?….

The entry goes on and on, and with great specificity, about the need for factories, roads, labor, housing, finance, science, arms, and the passage of laws (including legislation to encourage childbirth).

This was how the War of Independence, ended, with manic to-do lists and a rush of planning, training, moving, organizing, collectivizing, absorbing, paving, draining, irrigating, transporting, cultivating, forging, fabricating, constructing, building, establishing, planting, harvesting, settling, enlisting, legislating, regulating, codifying, administering, guarding, and patrolling.

And all this came despite staggering losses – one in every 100 Israelis was killed. There was no one who did not know someone killed. Yet grief was largely private. Newspapers avoided printing death notices. The wounded were everywhere, but no one paid much attention to them. There was so much suffering from that war (compounded, of course, by the lingering effects of war in Europe), and it was mostly not talked about, not recognized, not acknowledged.

There was, the thinking went, no time for all that.

There was a country to build.

1967: Triumph and doubt

Eighteen years later, the Six-Day War ended with, at first, a hushed shock at the victory. In the anxious months ahead of the war, many people here worried that the country would not survive a large-scale, combined attack. When it ended, existential angst gave way to relief and joy. The photo of Chief IDF Rabbi Shlomo Goren, blowing a shofar at the Western Wall on June 7, 1967, hung in falafel-stand everywhere, and Motta Gur’s proclamation, “the Temple Mount is in our hands,” played over and over on the radio.

There were proposals for a victory arch 30 stories high. For cutting a new “Gate of Return” into the Old City walls. For moving the United Nations to Jerusalem. The poet Natan Alterman wrote: “The people are drunk with joy.”

Two books of lasting importance came soon after the Six-Day War ended. One, called “Everything: The Borders of Peace of the Land of Israel,” was a collection of writing by some of Israel’s greatest poets, essayists, professors and politicians, arguing, as Natan Alterman had written in Maariv a week after war ended that “What matters about this victory is that it effectively erased the difference between the State of Israel and the Land of Israel. This is the first time since the Second Temple was destroyed that all of the Land of Israel is in our hands.”

The book “Everything,” was a founding document of The Movement for a Greater Israel, a group of intellectuals and activists, professors and poets, mostly secular Zionists, who saw in the capture of the Old City, the West Bank and Gaza, maybe God’s work, and in any case, something like the ultimate fulfillment of the aims of Zionism.

The other book to come from the end of the Six-Day War was different. It was called Soldiers Converse: Moments of Listening and Introspection (in English it was called “The Seventh Day: Soldiers’ Talk about the Six-Day War”). The book was a redacted transcript organized by a few young kibbutz intellectuals of discussions among young kibbutz men back from the war. Amos Oz wrote that the project was an effort “to give authentic expression to what the people who came back from the war feel.”

People, Oz noted, “did not come back from this war happy. There is a distress that the people writing in the newspapers do not capture.” He concluded: “Maybe this is not a great service to the national morale, but it is a small service to the truth.”

When the book arrived in bookstores, it shocked people. It was not giddy, not joyful, not proud, not triumphant. It was rather a record of melancholy, confusion, and guilt. One of the young kibbutz fighters recounted being assigned to carry out an “evacuation.”

“…it was like you take an Arab who has roots in his village and you make him into a refugee, you just expel him from there, and it wasn’t just one person or two or three, … and when you see a whole village going like sheep to where you take them, without any resistance, you see the meaning of the word ‘holocaust.’”

The kibbutz soldiers who talked in the book worried that they had seen and done things that were wrong and terrible. They were troubled and the official joy of official government ceremonies and the constant stories on the radio about the heroicl things soldiers had done in jeeps and tanks and planes just made them feel more troubled still.

To everyone’s surprise, The Seventh Day was a best seller; more than 150,000 copies were bought, one copy for every 20 people in the country at the time, which suggests that the Six-Day War ended with feelings more fractured than you’d gather if you paid attention just to the parades, the victory albums, and speeches of politicians. The Seventh Day said something these other things did not, and it was something many people needed to say and to hear.

And that is how the Six-Day War ended: in exultation and triumph and expectation. And in doubt and unease and worry that maybe our pious confidence was somehow misplaced.

Protest and accountability

There is a story like this to be told about the end of every war we have had. Four months after fighting stopped in the Yom Kippur War, a newly decommissioned reserve officer named Motti Ashkenazi, who commanded the only one of the 22 outposts in the Bar Lev Line that did not fall to the Egyptians, set up a small table and chair across from the Prime Minister’s office in chilly Jerusalem, surrounding himself with crudely markered placards, demanding that the politicians who had let the disastrous war happen be held to account.

Before a week had passed, thousands of people joined his protest. A new Russian immigrant brought him a bottle of vodka “so that he’ll be warm in this cold.” Members of Moshav Beit Zayit brought him a crate of apples; lecturers and students came from the Hebrew University campus nearby; someone presented a petition of support with 3,500 signatures. In the end, Golda Meir resigned the premiership. That war ended with a sense that we had been let down, that our leaders were not the leaders we maybe thought they were.

The only war that I fought in, the First Lebanon War, started just after I finished college, just before I was drafted, and it ended eighteen years later, when I was on my way to tenure, and just before the retirement age for infantry reserve soldiers of 40. By then, the war had lasted half my life. When it finally ended, it ended because of a woman named Rachel Ben Dor, a Hebrew University Talmud scholar, who had a kid in the army, in Lebanon. Rachel Ben Dor said she’d enough of waiting for that terrible knock on the door. “I started to say to anyone who would listen, we have to do something now, instead of weeping later.”

Ben Dor formed a group she called “The Four Mothers,” after the four Biblical matriarchs, saying the time had come to end a war that started before most of the soldiers who were fighting it were in nursery school. Every time a soldier died in Lebanon, Rachel Ben Dor’s group organized a memorial vigil. She wrote editorials. She went from TV studio to TV studio. She organized end-the-war Passover seders. Ahead of the 1999 elections, the Four Mothers got the candidates for prime minister – Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak — to pledge that, if elected, they would end the war in Lebanon. It helped that by now 80 percent of the country wanted to end the war. In 1999, Ehud Barak was elected, and within a year, at his order, the last IDF tank rumbled out of Lebanon.

And when the war was over, it was for many of us a mystery. It was unclear why it had happened in the first place. Why had all those people died or been hurt, over all those years? It felt futile, pointless. Alongside that, what I felt when the war ended, and about how it ended, was that it showed that what the generals and politicians say doesn’t necessarily have to go. The old idea that there was no place for criticism when it came to the army was gone. In the end, a Talmud teacher and mother, and the people she’d brought together had made an army retreat.

And all this – wars of the past and how they ended – is on my mind today, on the Shloshim of Ran Gvili, marking the end of our terrible war in Gaza. How is this war ending?

Nine days after October 7, there was a wedding in Yad Binyamin. The groom, Yonatan Peretz, had been wounded fighting near Nahal Oz. His brother Daniel was missing. The wedding almost did not happen. After many bedside discussions at Soroka Hospital, Yonatan and his fiance Galia decided to go ahead with their wedding without Daniel.

Under the chuppah, Yonatan and Daniel’s father, Rabbi Doron Peretz spoke of “the light and the dark, the pain and the fear and the gratitude.” He offered a reframing of Ecclesiastes, Kohelet’s text telling us that “for everything there is a time… a time to be born a time to die, a time to weep a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance.”

“Maybe,” said Rav Peretz, “these aren’t all different times. Maybe it all happens together.”

That is what this moment feels like.

There is, as after 1948, a great pull to do things, and all around, things are getting done. In Tel Aviv, where I live, cranes are everywhere. Long-delayed construction is back in full sway 24-7. Everywhere, there are new projects, new university programs, new municipal initiatives. Political parties are whirring back to life. Organizing is underway for the upcoming elections. Up the block, a new coffee shop just opened, and a new bookstore. So much to do.

Alongside all that, there is now, as after the Six-Day War, the sense that something historic just happened, something that will leave us changed, forever. And there are, as in 1967, hard conversations happening among soldiers everywhere, about what they did, what we did, in the war.

And there is, as there was after the Yom Kippur War, a dull feeling that, when we most needed them, we did not have the leaders that we most needed.

And there is, as after Lebanon, a feeling that what happened in the city squares – the vigils, the protests – made a difference, made, maybe, the difference. After Ran Gvili was buried, General Gal Hirsch, who had been the government’s Coordinator for Negotiations over the Captives and the Missing, told Haaretz that all the “bring-them-home-now” protests during the war “caused very, very great damage” because it gave Hamas the feeling that it had fuel to continue” and kept the government on its heels, forcing its focus always back on the hostages.

What Gal Hirsch said angered many people who, like me, showed up at the vigils week after week. But Gal Hirsch was right, we did put the government back on its heels, and he was right that there were surely those in Hamas who took the bring-them-home-now vigils as a sign that Israel was divided, our will about to snap. The Four Mothers of the Lebanon War were, in this war, thousands of mothers – and fathers and sisters and brothers — and we see now that, once again, as Gal Hirsch said, they made a difference. And but for the protests, the war might still be going on, and some of the hostages would still be in Gaza.

All around now, are signs of us returning to life. The other day, in my role as a Tel Aviv-Jaffa City Council member, I met in the Tola’at Sefarim bookstore café with a young woman who, during the war, started Minyan: A Home for Bold, Edgy Jewish Culture and Creativity – a kind of Jewish salon on Friday nights. Since the war ended though, the thing has just exploded. Hundreds of people want to come drink wine and learn and talk into the night. She needs more space. Can the city help her?

After the meeting, I skirted the book tables in the store and there in the poetry section was a stack of probably 50 copies of a book with an Arabic title and underneath a Hebrew translation: Crying At the River Twice, by Husam Maarouf, a poet from Gaza City. Leafing through a copy, I found poems from the war in Arabic with Hebrew translation. A one-line poem called Wreckage reads: “Who will clear the wreckage that has accumulated in our own bodies because of this war?” And customers, one on my right and one on my left, are leafing through Husam Maarouf’s book.

Last week, friends of ours who have lived together for 20 years got married, seeing this moment, said the groom, “as a time to make a statement, to take a stand, for hope, for optimism, for love.” And we all felt it.

The philosopher Avi Sagi has just written a book called “There Is Hope: A Philosophical Existential Journey.” While the book is a journey through the worlds of literature, poetry, philosophy and Jewish thought, Sagi concludes in the end that the act of hope entails simply deciding to get up in the morning and go back to our daily life.

The philosopher Avi Sagi’s new book, “There Is Hope: A Philosophical Existential Journey,” is a journey through the worlds of literature, poetry, philosophy and Jewish thought. But in his concluding paragraph, Sagi writes that the act of hope entails simply deciding to get up in the morning and go back to our daily life. Rising up from mourning and loss starts at the moment when, despite everything we have been through, we decide to get up in the morning, to go to work and to live our normal lives. This is the first appearance of hope that, after this, will spread to our dreams, our prayers, and our aspirations to mend the world. This is what shows who we really are, what it is to be human.

Today, on Ran Gvili’s Shloshim, you can feel it. We are getting up, going to work, living our lives. This is such hope as we have, poised to spread to our dreams, our prayers, and our aspirations to mend the world.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)