On Monday, January 26th, Sgt. Ron Gvili, a 24-year-old Israel Police Special Patrol Unit volunteer from Meitar who fell in battle on October 7, 2023, and whose body was abducted to the Gaza Strip, became the last remaining Israeli hostage to be returned home for burial. And today, Tuesday, January 27th, for the first time in 844 days, Israel can finally exhale. When I read the news, I cried. I’m certain many of you did too. The yellow hostage pins could finally be removed, the signs taken down. Our people were home.
Throughout this impossible season, something remarkable kept happening: the weekly Torah portions we read in synagogue have aligned with the events unfolding in real time. This week brought perhaps the most striking parallel of all. As we welcomed Ron Gvili’s body back to Israeli soil, we opened our Torah scrolls to read about another set of bones that made the journey home, the bones of Joseph.
Why would Moses, at the most dramatic moment in Jewish history, stop to retrieve a coffin?
The scene is already set for the greatest escape story ever told. After centuries of slavery in Egypt, the Israelites are finally free. Pharaoh’s army is gathering behind them, the Sea of Reeds stretches before them, and yet before describing any of this drama, the Torah pauses to tell us:
The Midrash describes Moses searching for Joseph’s burial place, finally locating it embedded in the Nile or sealed within a pyramid. Both locations matter. The Nile and the pyramids are Egypt itself, the symbols that define Egyptian power and permanence. By burying Joseph there, the Egyptians were making a claim: You belong to us. Your legacy is ours. You lived as one of us, you ruled as one of us, and here you will remain as one of us.
But Joseph had refused this narrative centuries earlier. Yes, he had an Egyptian name, Tzafenat Paneach. Yes, he wore Egyptian royal garments and governed from Pharaoh’s palace. Yes, he married an Egyptian woman and raised children who looked Egyptian to the outside world. But when his father Jacob died, Joseph insisted his father be buried in the Land of Israel. And when his own time came, Joseph made his brothers swear an oath: “You shall carry up my bones from here.”
Joseph understood something fundamental about identity and belonging. Egypt was never home. It was a temporary station, a necessary exile, a place to survive and even thrive, but never the destination. The promise given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob still held. The land they were promised still waited. And one day, no matter how long it took, the children of Israel would return there.
Rabbi Moshe Lichtenstein points out that Moses identified deeply with Joseph. Both grew up in Pharaoh’s household. Both carried dual identities, Hebrew souls in Egyptian contexts. Both faced the constant question of despair versus hope. But Joseph became the master of hope. Sold into slavery, thrown into prison, forgotten by those he helped, Joseph never stopped believing in a future beyond Egypt. On his deathbed, even knowing he wouldn’t live to see it himself, Joseph declared with absolute certainty: God will remember you. You will leave this place. Take my bones when you go.
For forty years in the wilderness, Rabbi Lichtenstein teaches, Joseph’s coffin traveled alongside the Aron, the Ark of the Covenant containing the Torah. The nations watching the Israelites’ journey would ask: Why is a coffin traveling next to your holiest object? The answer: Because Joseph’s bones represent the beating heart of Jewish history, the refusal to accept exile as final, the insistence that we belong to something greater than the empires that try to claim us, the faith that return is always possible.
When Moses went to retrieve Joseph’s coffin, he wasn’t just fulfilling an ancient oath. He was making a statement about who the Israelites were and would always be. They were not Egyptians. They were not defined by slavery or assimilation or the centuries spent in a foreign land. They were the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and they were going home.
This week, as Ron Gvili’s body came home to Israel, we closed a circle that began on October 7th. We brought our son back from enemy territory, just as Moses brought Joseph back from the depths of Egypt. The Egyptians wanted to claim Joseph’s identity by keeping his bones. Hamas wanted to break Israel’s spirit by holding our dead. Both failed.
Joseph’s message remains the same across millennia: We do not belong to our captors. We do not accept exile as permanent. We come home. Ron Gvili is home now, buried in Israeli earth beside his brothers and sisters who fell defending our ancient homeland. The bones have come home, just as Joseph promised they would. And the hope that sustained Joseph through slavery and Moses through despair sustains us still, because this land was promised to us, and no empire, no enemy, no length of exile can change that truth.
