A father stood where his son once stood and sang.
That is the whole story. The rest is commentary.
Last night, on the final evening of Hanukkah, I watched the Greenglick family take the stage. Zvika and Ruti. Their two sons. Their two daughters. The men who were married to their daughters. Eight people, standing where there should have been nine.
Captain Shaul Greenglick was twenty-six years old, an officer in the Nahal Brigade, killed in northern Gaza on December 26, 2023. Two years ago this week. He had dreamed of Eurovision, auditioned for Israel’s “Rising Star,” and loved to sing.
A month before he fell, his father posted a video of the whole family gathered around a piano, performing together, Shaul wrapped in his mother’s arms.
That video is still online. You can watch it. You can watch a mother hold her son and not know she is holding him for almost the last time. You can hear the whole family singing, and you can hear his voice among them.
Last night, I heard them sing again. And where his voice should have been, there was something else. Something fiercer than silence. They were filling the space he left. To honour it.
On the memorial materials for Shaul, a sentence appears: “With his death, he commanded us to make life.”
It is a strong sentence. It could remain a slogan. Words on a sticker.
His family made it a way of life.
Families of fallen soldiers choose a sentence to remember their children
In Israel, families of fallen soldiers choose a sentence that tries to hold something essential about who their child was. These sentences appear on lampposts, cars, and bus stops. Parents claiming, in the only way still available to them, the meaning of their child’s life.
I have written before about these stickers, calling them Pirkei Banim, the Ethics of Our Children. They read like Mishnah: brief teachings, distilled from lives cut short, that somehow carry the weight of entire worldviews. “I go in search of my brothers.” “You can always do more.” “It’s very good to live for our country.”
These are creeds. Beliefs held. Truths a life was built around.
Shaul’s sentence is different. It is not a statement of what he believed. It is a command to those he left behind.
And his family obeyed it.
Music is life being made in real time. Breath becoming sound. Silence becomes song. The fact of presence: I am here, I am alive, making something out of nothing.
This is what I witnessed last night.
A family standing in the darkness of loss, instruments in hand, choosing to make something inside it. Spinning, out of the raw material of grief, something that sounded like hope.
We often say that light was the first thing God created. But look again at the opening of Genesis.
Before “Let there be light,” the text tells us what already existed: tohu vavohu. Chaos and void. And darkness upon the face of the deep.
These came first. The raw materials of all creation. Formlessness. Absence. Night.
Only then does God speak light into being. And only then does the text say: and God saw that it was good.
What is good is the act of spinning light from darkness. The making of form from void. Creation from chaos.
This is what the Greenglick family did.
They stood inside the darkness and sang.
Anyone can print a sentence.
Living it is harder.
But on the last night of Hanukkah, in a country that has buried too many of its children, one family showed us what it looks like to carry a sentence forward. To take the words a son left behind and make them true. To stand where he stood, to sing, and to bring him back into the room.
For a moment, Shaul was with them again.
As presence.
As light.