The piano had clearly been through hell. It’s just a piano, of course. Except that this instrument once made beautiful music at the hands of Oded Lifshitz, an 83-year-old who spent 503 days in Hamas captivity — or at least his body did. And so it can never be a mere piano again. It is a relic of martyrdom, an artifact of an ongoing war — a hell on earth for hostages and families living a prolonged agony. It can never be forgotten. Oded Lifshitz was from Kibbutz Nir Oz. He was kidnapped alongside his wife, Yocheved Lifshitz, from their home. He was lying at the edge of his property with a gunshot wound the last time she saw him.
The proper response to the confirmed murder of Oded is: May his memory be a blessing. Which requires that we remember him. We must know him and how he lived and how he was murdered. We must speak of him. We must say “Never again” — which, at the very least, means not forgetting. His life. His death. And the morning that his body was returned to Israel.
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