Forty-four years.
Try to remember something that happened to you forty-four years ago. Then think how many whole lives have passed since.
Forty-four years ago, the State of Israel was fighting for its life. In one of the bitterest battles of the First Lebanon War, the battle of Sultan Yacoub, a column of tanks drove into a planned ambush. Twenty soldiers fell that day. Dozens were wounded. And six were missing.
Three of them remained missing for decades: Zachary Baumel, Zvi Feldman, Yehuda Katz. Zachary was buried in 2019. Zvi last year, in an operation deep inside Syria.
And on Friday, on the eve of Shabbat, Sergeant First Class Yehuda Yekutiel Katz was laid to rest on the Mount of Olives. The last missing soldier of that accursed day. He was twenty-two years old when he fell. His funeral procession left in the morning from the study hall of Yeshivat Kerem B'Yavneh, the very place from which he went out to war. His parents, Sarah and Yosef, waited for this day all their lives and did not live to see it.
For forty-four years, the State of Israel did not let go. Intelligence officers. The Mossad. Operations in the heart of enemy territory. All of it for bones. Because in Israel no one is left outside. No fallen soldier is ever given up. Every one of them comes home to a Jewish grave, even if it takes forty-four years.
What stands behind this?
The answer is written in this week's Torah portion, the one read hours after Yehuda Katz came home to the soil of Jerusalem.
Parashat Ki Teitzei. A court, in a rare case, executes a man and hangs him on a tree. And then the Torah commands:
לֹא־תָלִין נִבְלָתוֹ עַל־הָעֵץ כִּי־קָבוֹר תִּקְבְּרֶנּוּ בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא כִּי־קִלְלַת אֱלֹהִים תָּלוּי
"Do not leave his body overnight on the tree. Bury him that same day, for a hanged man is an affront to God" (Devarim 21:23).
Notice who this verse is speaking about. A man who sinned, who was judged, who was put to death. Even him. From this verse the Sages learned the mitzvah of burial for every human being. From here comes the honor we owe the dead. From here comes a state that moves heaven and earth for the bones of one soldier.
Why? Rashi answers with a parable. Twin brothers, identical. One became king. The other went down a dark road and was hanged. Everyone who passes by and sees him says, "The king is hanged."
Man is made in the likeness of the King. Even this man. Even now. A human body is not an object forgotten in a field. It carries the image of God that lives in man. And so it is never abandoned, never left behind, never given up on, until it is brought home to the earth. That is what we saw on Friday on the Mount of Olives. Not sentiment. Tzelem. The image of God.
Now read Rashi's sentence again, slowly. "Everyone who sees him says: the king is hanged."
The Torah is legislating here against a picture. Against the very possibility that a person would look at a man hanging on wood and conclude that the King is the one hanging there.
Because a picture like that places the date in the past. The decisive thing already happened there, on the wood. Nothing remains but to wait and to gaze.
And the Torah says: bury it that same day. Because the King is not hanged. The King lives. And His image in this world is not a body on wood. It is a human being, walking.
Look at what the family and the state did for forty-four years. They did not stand before a frozen picture and gaze at it. They walked. They returned. They tried again, and again, and again. Four decades of a walk that keeps returning. Their Emuna was not a feeling they gazed back at. It was meetings, files, operations, years. Faithfulness you could see in deeds.
And these forty-four years do not end here. They are one link in a long chain of generations, the ancient path of kevod ha-met, the honor owed to the dead. Generations before us walked this path, and generations after us will walk it again. The faithfulness of the living to the honor of those who died.
That is the definition itself, and here two worlds part ways. One way of thinking treats believing as an experience. A moment of feeling. Something that happened inside you once, on a date you can name, and everything after it is memory. But an experience is also a picture. You stand before it and gaze back at it, and the date is in the past.
Emuna is something else entirely. Emuna is not what you believe, and it is not what you once felt. It is whom you are faithful to. And faithfulness does not live in a moment. It lives on a road. It is measured in the morning, in the next step, in the daily act, in coming back again after forty-four years. The One you are faithful to is alive. He leads. He calls forward. And the road is not over.
The Hebrew language itself testifies to this. Emuna and ne'eman, faithful, loyal, grow from the same root. The language refuses to separate what you know in your heart from how you walk tomorrow morning.
And if somewhere along your own road something in you could no longer look at that picture, that was not loss. That was your soul, recognizing the living King.
On Friday, on the eve of Shabbat Ki Teitzei, the last picture of Sultan Yacoub came down from the tree. Yehuda Katz came home to the soil of Jerusalem before sunset. Lo talin. Do not leave him overnight. Exactly as it is written.
And when Shabbat goes out, the road continues. That is the whole of it. Emuna does not stand still before any picture, not on wood and not in the heart. It rises the next morning and keeps walking.
From the series "A Hebrew Reading of the World," nine sessions on Rav Kook's "Lights of Emuna."
"Just be strong and very courageous..." [Joshua 1.7]
Shalom from the Land of Israel.