An open letter to a grieving daughter: Choose life and light, get married - opinion

Dear Hodaya,

We’ve never met. I don’t presume to know how you feel while mourning your 49-year-old father, Elon Waiss. He was killed fighting in Gaza, two weeks after your sister Racheli’s wedding, three weeks before yours. Without judgment, allow me to intrude: Plunge ahead! Get married! Live life!

Rabbis debate whether mourners can marry during the shloshim, the 30 days of mourning. Some approve weddings if the two never married and had already set the date. Others consent if postponing merely causes financial stress.

I speak as a father who had the joy of seeing two sons marry amazing women during this crazy war. I’m also a mourner, having lost my father six weeks before our latest wedding, and an immigrant to Israel and army dad, who ended our latest euphoric wedding weekend sobered by 12 holy soldiers’ deaths, including your blessed father’s.

Please accept my condolences and our gratitude. Ignore the media naysayers. Lacking a government that bothers to explain its strategy, cursed by an increasingly defeatist opposition, allow me, as a historian, to assure you: Your father and his comrades did not die in vain. Since entering Rafah, the IDF has routed Hamas, killing 550 terrorists, closing 200 tunnel openings, destroying dozens of death tunnels, some miles long, and, finally, closed the Philadelphi Corridor. Israel should have sealed it October 8, if not years earlier, despite Egypt’s smuggling profits.

Our soldiers are doing what we need them to do – grinding down Hamas’s war machine. Blockading Gaza from the sea, our border, and Egypt, offers a path to victory. Sealing Gaza reduces the war to arithmetic. As their firepower diminishes, our safety grows.

Unfortunately, and Zionists learned this decades ago, we will never reach zero. Gaza’s north, where terrorists killed your father, will always pose some threat. Nevertheless, his death doesn’t mean we wasted our efforts crushing the northern infrastructure of terrorism.

Until the Palestinians accept Israel’s existence, terrorists will haunt us, imposing some casualties. Still, politically, we can never again tolerate such buildups. Militarily, if we crush Hamas enough, the shrunken threat becomes manageable.

Ignore the renewed partisan finger-pointing – it betrays you, the grieving families, our soldiers. Both sides miscalculated. The Right underestimated Hamas and the Gazans, discounting their abilities. Meanwhile the Left overestimated Hamas and the Palestinians, foolishly believing that if we withdrew from Gaza, they would seek peace. Unfortunately, most Palestinians prefer targeting us to pursuing their happiness.

In fairness, the world validated these delusions. Middle East “experts” pressured us to tolerate the intolerable; most remain stuck in Oslo assumptions. How could any serious thinker conclude from Palestinian violence and vituperation following the Oslo concessions, then the Gaza Disengagement, that Israel should give Palestinians more land or more autonomy? Until the world challenges the Palestinians to change their leaders, rhetoric, ideology, and addiction to terrorism, Israel has no serious negotiating partner, just lethal, untrustworthy enemies.

Looking forward to festivities and spending time with family amid grief

BUT ENOUGH politics – you’ve got a wedding to plan! All I’ll tell you is what I tell my kids – life continues. Getting married is more important than ever. Whether you stick to the date or postpone it, is a detail. But I believe you owe it to your dad to rejoice on that sacred day; we the Jewish people need it, too.

Your father and many others fought so we could feel safe enough to build new families in our beloved homeland. He died a heroic death so we could live full, meaningful lives, continuing his legacy, living his values.

Under the huppah, the wedding canopy, carve out a moment to cry, feeling his absence. Pray for him, and, as my kids did, for the fallen soldiers, the evacuees, the kidnapped. You might want to release yellow balloons, as my kids did Thursday – recalling the hostages, as the groom breaks the glass, that goose-bump-inducing, mixed-message moment of remembering our losses while forever vowing to survive, revive, thrive.

That’s the easy part. When you’re mourning, crying, ritualizing, adding touches helps memorialize the loss, the confusion.

Your challenge will be flipping that switch – Remembrance Day to Independence Day style, and deciding to dance, dance, dance.

You know how Israelis dance at weddings – both secular and religious. We – especially you, our youth – dance with such abandon, intensity, joy. In truth, by dancing Israeli style, like there’s no tomorrow, you guarantee a better tomorrow.

We ended my father’s shloshim by studying Rabbi Moses Feinstein’s famous teaching that the desire not to cause “distress” to the couple temporarily suspends mourning restrictions. My groom-to-be added: “my fiancée and I also wondered how dare we celebrate at a time like this, having buried so many friends... but how dare we not?”I think people are sometimes too solemn at weddings – especially while taking photos. Last week, while posing with my son, I jumped into his arms. It’s a great metaphor for this topsy-turvy time!

So many adults, especially our leaders, our generals, failed us – not your father, of course. Since October 7, our young keep carrying us – they’ve sacrificed the most.

You, too, by marrying, choosing life, starting a Jewish family, will carry your father’s legacy, boost your grieving mother, and elevate us all. Your courage will intimidate our enemies, while reminding us that they can murder some of us, kidnap and maim others, but they will never, ever stop us.

So, allow me, even in this dark mourning week, to wish you, your sister, and your entire family, Mazal Tov, too. Lehayim – to life!

The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His next book, Identity Zionism: Letters to My Students on Resisting the Academic Intifada, will be published this fall.