“A conversation with Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum,the spiritual leader of Kehilat Zion, a community of Jews of various backgrounds in Jerusalem; co-founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Beit Midrash for Israeli Rabbis, a non-denominational rabbinic seminary; and director of the Rabbanut Yisraelit Network of pluralistic rabbinical leaders.

Rabba Elad-Appelbaum, how do you feel about the psychological campaign being waged by the government against the hostages’ release?

If it turns out that it is indeed occurring, it is inconceivable. Pidyon shvuyim (redemption of hostages) is one of the fundamental elements of Jewish tradition that were laid down generations ago. The patriarch Abraham was willing to endanger his household and himself in order to redeem a captive. The first of the 10 Commandments is: ‘I am the lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.’

Rabbi Bahya (ben Asher, the 13th-century biblical scholar) asks why God does not say that he is the creator of the world, but rather that he brought Israel out of Egypt. Bahya explains that this is the most important thing he says about himself – that he redeems captives and expects the same of us. Pidyon shvuyim did not become an important mitzvah for nothing, and any delay whatsoever in redeeming captives – so we are taught by the author of the Shulhan Arukh, Joseph Karo – is tantamount to spilling blood.

What will be the price for releasing the hostages?

Before we ask what expense will be entailed, let’s be in this for a moment. Citizens were abducted from their beds. This [redeeming them] constitutes the covenant between us as human beings, as Jews and as Israelis, even before the pact between citizens and the state. What are we to save if not each other, and what, God forbid, will we lose if we do not save them? We are Jews who were privileged to return to Zion and we struck a covenant to live here with each other and to protect and preserve each other. It is the duty of Judaism, of sovereignty and of the government to bring them home.

You cannot ignore the question of price.

The crux of the question is a test of our faith – in Zionism, in the state, in the military. If we believe that we can bring them back and emerge victorious, we must commit to passing this test. We must believe and prove that we are worthy of this trust. Don Isaac Abarbanel, the 15th-century Jewish leader, redeemed 250 captives from the town of Arzila in Morocco from the hands of the Portuguese, despite the opinion of the Jewish community in Spain, which believed that the price too steep. This is what we came into this world for – to save our fellow human beings, he said. The Rambam [Maimonides] had spoken of this before Abarbanel, and Joseph ha-Kohen after him.

In 1941, in the Warsaw Ghetto, on the eve of Shabbat Shuva, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and ahead of Simchat Torah, the Esh Kodesh (Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, the Piaseczno rebbe) chose, of all things, to speak about the importance of the mitzvahs of pidyon shvuyim and of saving an individual who is in certain danger, and said that not saving such an individual is tantamount to having removed with our own hand a letter from the Torah – rendering the entire scroll defective.

Even during the Holocaust.

Yes, we come from a tradition that does something that is not survivalist, but rather sublime: It places responsibility for the life of an individual who is in real danger on the public.

So where are those scholars’ successors among the rabbis, your colleagues?

The voice of rabbis is very important, and I know there are rabbis, male and female, of all ideological streams, who speak in a way that is different from how their remarks are conveyed to the public. I am brokenhearted that the media gives its precious time to extremists, it pains me because it is a sin. It is a great failure by whoever has power, to allow extremists to be in the center of the frame and of all our lives.”

Read the full interview in Haaretz.