Matan Zangauker and Ilana Gritzewsky, former hostages who survived Hamas captivity, announced their engagement last week. President Isaac Herzog wrote to them: “From unimaginable pain, you chose life, love, and hope. Your decision to build a future together is a moment of profound light for the people of Israel. Let the world see this and understand: the people of Israel choose life. Even after terror, we choose love, renewal, and hope.”
Herzog’s words echo the Torah’s command:
Moses speaks these words at the end of his life, just before the Jewish people enter the Land of Israel. He has just laid out two paths: obedience leading to blessing, disobedience leading to exile and suffering. The command to ‘choose life’ comes with full knowledge of what hangs in the balance—not as a prediction of inevitable tragedy, but as an urgent call to avoid it. It’s a consequential choice with eternal implications.
Rabbi Yossy Goldman asks an obvious question about this directive: “Do we really need the Torah to tell us to choose life? Which person of sound mind would choose death?”
His answer cuts to the heart of the matter: “To ‘choose life’ means to choose to live a meaningful life, a life committed to values and a higher purpose. Did it make any difference at all that I inhabited planet Earth for so many years? Will anyone really know the difference if I’m gone? Is my life productive, worthwhile?”
This is precisely what makes Matan and Ilana’s engagement so meaningful. After captivity in Gaza, Matan and Ilana could have settled for going through the motions, withdrawn from the world, focused only on healing their trauma. No one would have blamed them. Instead, they chose to create meaning: a marriage, a family, a future. They chose to see God’s presence even in the land of their suffering.
The Torah doesn’t simply command us to choose life for ourselves. The verse continues: “so that you and your children may live.” Our choice of life must inspire the next generation to make the same choice.
Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the preeminent Orthodox legal authority of the 20th century, explained: If a father keeps the Torah but complains about how difficult it is, his children will conclude that Jewish life is a burden too heavy to bear. But if he lives Torah with joy, his children will want that same vitality for themselves.
Matan and Ilana’s engagement is not just about them. It’s a message to their future children: Jewish life is worth living. Building a family in Israel is worth the risk. The covenant is worth continuing. Hamas held us captive for hundreds of days, and we emerged choosing to bring Jewish children into the world.
If we approach our lives and our values as a heavy burden, we inadvertently signal to the next generation that life is a struggle to be endured rather than a gift to be cherished. However, when we choose life with joy and pride, as Matan and Ilana are doing by celebrating their love amidst their pain and the pain of a nation, we create a legacy of resilience. Their choice to find joy after terror is what will inspire the next generation of Israelis to believe in the possibility of renewal. They are teaching us that “choosing life” means living in a way that makes life attractive and sacred to those who follow in our footsteps.
This is how the Jewish people have always answered those who sought our destruction. Not with despair, but with weddings. Not with retreat, but with children. Every Jewish child born is a theological defeat for those who seek to erase us.
The biblical phrase “and you shall choose life” uses an active verb. Meaningful life is not something that happens to us passively. It requires a decision, an act of will, especially after trauma.
Joseph named his second son Ephraim, saying, “God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering” (Genesis 41:52). He could have dwelt on his betrayal by his brothers, his years in an Egyptian dungeon. Instead, he chose fruitfulness. He chose to build precisely where he suffered most.
Matan and Ilana are making that same choice. After suffering unimaginable cruelty, they are choosing to be fruitful. They are choosing to build a Jewish home, to raise Jewish children, to continue the story.
President Herzog understood that this engagement carries national significance: “Let the world see this and understand: the people of Israel choose life.”
For seventy-seven years, Israel’s enemies have tried to make Jewish life in the State of Israel unbearable—through war, through terror, through taking our children captive. The strategy has always been the same: make the Jews despair, make them question whether building a future here is worth the cost.
Every time we choose life anyway, that strategy fails.
Matan and Ilana’s engagement is a declaration: You took hundreds of days of our lives. You cannot take our future. You sought to break us. Instead, we are building. The prison in Gaza was meant to be the end of their story. They are making it a new beginning.
This is what it means to choose life in the deepest sense—not just to survive, but to declare that cruelty and captivity do not get the final word. Love does. Hope does. The covenant between God and Israel does.
May their marriage be blessed, and may they merit to raise children who inherit their courage, their faith, and their unshakable commitment to choosing life.
