Rabbi Brad Levenberg’s Rosh Hashanah Message for 2025

To the Families of the Hostages,

The world owes you more than thoughts and prayers. You deserve action, persistence, and an unrelenting demand that your loved ones be returned.
From the first days of our people, the mitzvah of pidyon shvuyim, redeeming captives, has stood as one of Judaism’s highest imperatives. It is not theoretical. It is a command to move heaven and earth until those who are taken are restored. That responsibility belongs to governments and leaders, yes, but also to every community that claims to care about human dignity.

You are living in a nightmare, and yet you’ve carried yourselves with courage that has humbled the rest of us. By speaking, by waiting, by refusing to let the world look away, you’ve taught us what it means to hold hope even when every instinct would give in to despair.

Know this: your loved ones are not forgotten. Their faces are on our walls, their names are in our prayers, and their absence is a wound we feel across oceans. The demand for their return is not going away.

May that day come soon, and may it come because people refused to be silent. Until then, we will not stop saying their names. We will not stop pressing their cause. And we will not let the world grow comfortable while your families remain torn apart.

In solidarity –

Bradley G. Levenberg, PhD, is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Sinai and President of the Atlanta Rabbinical Association.