At 9:40 a.m. on Thursday, May 2, I went to Paresky to get some coffee. I had about an hour to spare before class, and I needed some caffeine.

I was about to go work on a computer science lab, which I was pretty far behind on. I had spent Monday and Tuesday of that week celebrating Passover and not doing work. As I have grown more connected to Judaism over the past year, I’ve seen the beauty in taking time off during holidays and fully enjoying the peace and divine energy of the festivals. 

But as I was leaving Paresky, I saw someone doing something that I had never actually seen in person before: Someone was taking down hostage posters. 

These were around six posters that displayed the names and photos of hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7. If I remember correctly, one of the hostages on these posters was Thai. The others were Israeli. Many of them were likely Jewish. Some of them looked Ashkenazi (of Jewish European descent) while others looked more Mizrahi (of North African or Middle Eastern Jewish descent). On Oct. 6, these people were living normal lives, just like you and I. They were living in a complicated, messed-up world, just like you and I. But to a large degree, the people taken by Hamas on Oct. 7 were Israeli liberals — people committed to peace, committed to ending the conflict and treating Palestinians with dignity and respect.

On Oct. 7, these people  and others experienced something so frightening that it goes beyond comprehension. They were kidnapped, murdered, tortured, and raped. While the geopolitics of the Middle East is certainly an intensely complex arena with many, many years of history, these victims of Oct. 7 were not to blame for the political structure of the Middle East. They were just people. But these victims of the Oct. 7 attacks were the ones who were tortured, maimed, and raped because of the complex historical situation that they happened to be born into. On Oct. 6, these people had lives, they had loves, and they had hopes and dreams. And on Oct. 7, these people were victims of inexplicable terror. The lives they had known slipped away within a day.

For a moment, I just looked at the person taking down the posters. They were taking them down with speed and efficiency, as if this was just another part of their day. They took down the posters in the same way that I had gotten coffee in Paresky: It was just another thing on the to-do list, another task to get through. 

I looked out into the crowd of students rushing past Paresky. I looked around for someone to stand up and ask this person why they were taking the posters down.

But no one did. I made eye contact with a Jewish friend of mine, someone who I know has family members in Israel and is scared about their safety. I mouthed the words “What the f–k” to him. I then realized that maybe I was supposed to be the one to say something to the person taking down the posters.

I asked if they could keep the posters up, saying that they have an email and are allowed to be there. 

The person looked back at me, completely calm. They refused and said that the hanging of the posters tried to justify the genocide of Palestinians. 

I said that I didn’t put the posters up but that these hostages are innocent victims.

They were already nearly done taking the posters down. “They’re settlers,” they said, and walked away, carrying the posters in their hand, presumably to be deposited at the nearest trashcan or paper shredder.

I tried to think of something, anything, to say to express the pain in my heart in that moment. But I couldn’t say anything. I just couldn’t. 

I felt a wave of emptiness rush through my body. This emptiness lodged itself in my heart and told me that I will never understand this person who was removing posters and that they will never understand me. The emptiness told me that we live in fundamentally different worlds with different sets of morality. In their world, they’re a moral person who is doing a moral act by taking down the posters. In my world, their actions have the opposite meaning.

This emptiness laughs at hope. It laughs at the naivete of people who think that there might be a peaceful way out of this mess, who think that the innocent people of the world will be able to see the common good in one another. The emptiness says that disagreements will inevitably lead to fights, and fights will lead to violence, and violence will not stop until the loser submits out of pure physical devastation. The evil people of the world derive their existence from this emptiness.

The emptiness is strong. I feel its power — its distasteful, brutal, yet unceasingly logical argument that the world is destined to solve its issues through war.

But the Torah teaches that there is something just as strong as emptiness, “for love is as strong as death,” (Song of Songs 8:6). It’s love, and it can only be love. I don’t know exactly what that means for the world. I only know what it means for me. For me, it means trying to find some way in which to love, and not hate, the person who was taking down the posters. It’s my only option. And love is our only option if we want to see a world where “they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks,” (Isaiah 2:4), when “they shall dwell each man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them move” (Micah 4:4). 

Joey Kauffman ’27 is from Wayne, Penn.