A couple of weeks ago I noted how young Emily Hand created her own words to use while she was in captivity:
Blood – Watermelon
Gaza – A box
We had the good fortune to fly to Israel last week with her father, Thomas Hand. He’d been lobbying Congress along with other hostage families, with a return connection through Boston.
He was happy to chat. I told him how impressed I was by his daughter’s emotional intelligence.
“Yes she is quite smart” he said. “But it was also about her stubbornness. She refused to let them to control any of her headspace. She refused to use their words.”
Then he asked if he could tell me a story.
“She was in her pajamas the morning she was taken hostage. 50 days later, she was still wearing the same pajamas without a shower. But that’s not the point of the story.
They gave her a shirt and pants to put on over her pajamas the day she was released. As soon as we went into the hospital exam room, the first thing she did was to rip them off and throw them so hard into the trash, that she knocked over the trash basket. So fierce was her contempt for anything to do with them.”
Knowing when to resist and how to insist, can be a source of immense dignity.
Am Yisrael Chai
Rabbi Bill Hamilton
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