Today Is an Ancient Holiday of Remembrance and Commtiment to Destroy Evil

The Jewish calendar is filled with holidays that are little known outside the observant Jewish world, yet these dates often have deep significance. Today is one of those days: the holiday of Zayin Adar, the supposed anniversary of both the birth and death of Moses.

It's a kind of “weird” holiday that doesn’t seem important. But this year, its practices may make it one of the most important days in our time.

There are two great legends regarding Moses’ death. The first is that no other living creature died on that day, and the second is that no one knows where he is buried. These two understandings have led to the practice of observance of the holiday. 

Since no other creature died, we traditionally honor the caretakers of the dead today. And because no one knows where Moses was buried, Zayin Adar has been designated in modern Israel as a day of remembrance for those fallen soldiers whose bodies were never recovered nor identified.

Today, this year, and from now on, I believe we need to add a remembrance not only for all those who died in Israel on Oct. 7 but also for all hostages whose whereabouts remain unknown. 

Oct. 7 was the most horrific day since the Holocaust. So many people were massacred; so many depravities were performed on Israeli innocents. We will never know for certain what happened to some victims of that terrible day, some will never be buried properly, and all of them suffered shocking deaths from violence and torture. They need to be remembered today. Like the 588 fallen soldiers’ names on Mount Herzl in the Garden of the Missing Soldiers, we need to honor the souls of those who suffered and died on Oct. 7.

If we are brutally honest, it is doubtful that all the hostages will ever return home. With God’s help, some will return home alive, and at least the bodies of some of those who have died will be retrieved. And some will be lost forever: possibly dead or possibly worse.  

These civilians should never have experienced any of these horrors, and these hostages need to be in our consciousness and prayers. There is no better time than now, today. This ancient Jewish holiday needs to now incorporate their modern suffering into its observance.

Moses went through a journey of forty years of guiding a nation of lost souls to their redemption in the land promised to them. Sustained entirely by faith in the midst of a wilderness and coming from the imprisonment of Egyptian slavery, the ancient Hebrews came through their darkness and ultimately into a land of freedom. We must pray that these hostages too are redeemed from their imprisonment and once again are returned to Israel and freedom.

This is the day to attach our consciousness to theirs. This holiday of Zayin Adar is the time that we must all fervently pray for the release and rescue of the hostages and remember the souls who died on Oct. 7. Zayin Adar has another hidden meaning: it also literally translates as “Sword of the Month of Adar,” and right now, we need the clarity, strength, and power of a finely crafted sword.  

Despite the machinations of Biden, who has now revealed that he has always intended to use the horrors of Oct. 7 as a platform to unilaterally create a Palestinian State, Hamas and all terrorists must be entirely destroyed. This is not a war between Hamas and Israel nor between Arabs and Jews; this is a war between good and evil. Israel is merely the front-line battleground in this war for the very survival of Western culture and the civilized world.

Hamas, Hezbollah, et. al., are the head of the beast that seeks destruction over creation, hate over peace, and death over life. We must fully commit ourselves to embrace the sword of Adar and cut off the head of the beast. God commanded Moses to blot out the remembrance of Amalek from the face of the earth for the depraved evils it had done, and we must do the same to the modern Amalek of Hamas for the survival of Israel and for the survival of the world. 

So let us all take this Jewish holiday of Zayin Adar and commit ourselves today to both honoring the victims of Oct. 7 and destroying the head of the beast. In this way we honor Moses, we honor the victims, and we honor life itself.