This week, a family in Israel received the phone call they had been waiting 44 years to get.
Yehuda Yekutiel Katz was 22 years old, a yeshiva student from Kerem B’Yavneh serving as a tank gunner, when he disappeared into one of the worst nights in the history of the Israeli Armored Corps. On June 11, 1982, an Israeli armored force pushing through Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley ran into Syrian troops holding the high ground. They fought through the night and were pulled out the next morning under artillery cover, hours before a ceasefire took effect. Twenty-one soldiers were killed. Three were never found.
Zachary Baumel’s remains came home in 2019. Zvi Feldman’s came home in May of last year. Yehuda Katz was the last one still out there.
His parents, Sarah and Yosef, searched for their son for the rest of their lives. Both of them died without finding him. A friend who fought beside him that night, now the head of a yeshiva in Jerusalem, said this week that he had not stopped praying for this day in 44 years. On Tuesday, after four decades of intelligence work carried on across every Israeli government since that war, Katz’s remains were brought into Israel and identified. The IDF Chief of Staff told the family that a circle had finally closed.
Forty-four years. For a handful of bones.
People explain this in a few different ways. Love, first of all. Then the unwritten contract between Israel and the men it sends into battle, that nobody gets left behind. Some add a colder version: it is simply good policy, because an army whose soldiers doubt that promise stops being an army.
Every one of these is true. But this particular obsession did not begin with the IDF, and it is not a modern invention at all. It begins in this week’s Torah portion, in a law that has nothing to do with soldiers.
Ki Teitzei describes a man executed by a Jewish court for a capital crime, whose body is then hung on a stake as a public warning. The Torah interrupts:
This is the worst man in Israel. Tried, convicted, executed, and then deliberately put on display so that the whole country will see what happens to a man like him. He has no claim on anyone’s sympathy. He has forfeited every consideration a person can forfeit.
And the Torah gives you until sundown.
Why should God care what becomes of a criminal’s body after dark?
The Medieval commentator Rashi answers with a parable. Two identical twin brothers grew up in the same house. One of them became king. The other became a bandit, was caught, and was hanged. And everyone who passed by the gallows looked up at the face on the rope and said, “The king is hanging there.”
Notice what Rashi is not saying. He is not appealing to the criminal’s dignity, and he is not asking us to feel sorry for him. He is talking about God’s honor. A human body is not a container that a soul used to live in and has since vacated. It is a face, and it is God’s face, stamped into a man on the day he was made and never once taken back, not by his crimes and not by his death. Leave that face lying in a field overnight and you have not shamed the criminal. You have shamed the King he resembles.
The Sages take this law written about the guiltiest man in Israel and make it the source of the obligation to bury every one of the dead. If even he must be in the ground by nightfall, then certainly everyone else must be.
Maimonides draws the line explicitly. The Torah commands burial for the man executed by the court, he writes, and the same obligation applies to everyone else who dies. That, he says, is why we call a body with nobody to bury it a met mitzvah. He has no family to claim him and no one whose responsibility he obviously is. So the commandment claims him. Whoever finds him is bound to him. Under Jewish law, a body is never nobody’s problem.
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik takes this even further. He taught that the duty to bury the dead was never the family’s alone to begin with. It rests on the entire nation from the outset. Relatives carry it first because the one who died is theirs before he is anyone else’s. But he is the nation’s dead as well, and when the family cannot act, nothing lapses and nothing expires.
Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the first Chief Rabbi of the IDF, insisted that recovering the fallen was a religious obligation and not a courtesy. He went behind enemy lines to do it, walked into minefields, and more than once did the work with his own hands. Rabbi Shlomo Brody names two things Goren was after. One was sparing widows the agony of a husband declared missing and never confirmed dead. The other was the commandment to ensure that every person has proper burial, which begins in Ki Teitzei.
The unit that identified Yehuda Katz this week was the Military Rabbinate’s Center for the Identification of the Fallen. The rabbinate Goren founded, still doing the work he taught was crucial, more than thirty years after his death.
Which brings us back to Sarah and Yosef Katz. They searched for their son until the day each of them died. His brother and sister have been waiting since 1982. But a family cannot do what needed doing here. You cannot run agents in Syria from your living room. You cannot authorize an operation, or fund four decades of intelligence work, or send other people’s sons into enemy territory to bring back your own. Everything the Katz family had, they gave. It was never going to be enough, because the thing required was not within a family’s power to do.
But the obligation was never only theirs. It sat with the nation from the beginning, and the nation was the only one who could act on it.
That is why Israel never closed the file. Not sentiment, not stubbornness, not morale, though all of those were there too.
Yehuda Katz was still their son, but he was also ours.
