Well worth your time, from The New York Times:
Each morning, Shelly Shem Tov would enter her son’s empty bedroom and recite Chapter 20 from the biblical Book of Psalms, an ancient plea for deliverance.
All the while she was unaware that her son, Omer Shem Tov, happened to be uttering the very same verses of Psalm 20 — “May the Lord answer you on a day of distress.”
He had adopted the same daily ritual about 130 feet underground, alone, in a Hamas tunnel in Gaza.
Mr. Shem Tov was 20 when gunmen seized him during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel. He had grown up in a largely secular home, and was living a relatively carefree existence after completing his compulsory military service — waiting tables in a steakhouse to earn money for a post-army trip to South America, a popular rite of passage for many Israelis of his age.
He was captured while fleeing the Nova music festival, a rave party attended by thousands near the Gaza border.
A few days into his captivity, he said, he began to speak to God. He made vows. He began to bless whatever food he was given. And he had requests — some of which he believes were answered.
“You are looking for something to lean on, to hold onto,” Mr. Shem Tov said in a recent interview at his family home in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv. “The first place I went to was God. I would feel a power enter me,” he said.
“Faith kept me going,” he said, adding, “I always believed I would get home, though I didn’t know how or when.”
He was eventually released in late February as part of a temporary cease-fire deal after 505 days in Gaza.
Mr. Shem Tov, who turned 22 in captivity, said he had always had faith, but had never been religiously observant.
Many other released hostages have spoken of similar experiences, finding solace and the strength to survive by connecting or reconnecting with God and recalling oft-forgotten Jewish rituals.
Some taken hostage said they found the will to go on in a motto they heard from Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American hostage, before he was killed by his captors. It was a version of a quotation about having purpose in life, from the atheist German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and often echoed by Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor: “He who has a why can bear with any how.”
Read it all (gift article)
