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Good Morning, After an explosion, there is a time of total deafening, when a person can’t hear anything. They might be able to see people speaking, but they can’t hear the words. Or the words are distorted and their meaning rendered incomprehensible. And then, into the deafening silence, comes a ringing that for some never goes away. The explosion of violence that began in Southern Israel on October 7th caused a deafening, stunned silence; but it wasn’t long before sound returned and you could hear a ringing of anguish and pain – followed by the strident noises of opinion and moral outrage – a sort of tinnitus of rage. Much of the loudest outrage seemed to come from people far away from this conflict. Indeed, it is noticeable how some the angriest people condemn the very idea of trying to understand this region’s history and its context. As though to contextualise were some kind of moral and spiritual failure. Which is why, yesterday it was so welcome to hear, on this programme, a different sound; not the noise of disembodied, abstract opinion, but the sound of gentle, peaceful voices. What is astonishing is that the voices were being broadcast from the epicentre of this tragedy: Sharon Lifshitz, whose mother Yocheved had been taken hostage and was released yesterday, but whose father Oded remains missing; and Noam Sagi, whose mother Arda is still being held. The context only made what they were saying more extraordinary. Words of peace were coming from the frontline of pain. Noam’s mother, the daughter of holocaust survivors, learned Arabic because she saw language as a bridge to better relationships. Sharon’s father had campaigned all his life to serve his Palestinian neighbours in Gaza. Yesterday, her mother was pictured reaching out a hand and offering a shalom to her captor as she was being released. To try and maintain this attitude in the face of such horror takes a tremendous act of will. But Sharon and Noam were harmonious in this commitment. Sharon said, ‘The way just got longer but we have to understand what has happened to us.’ ‘You can’t open an old door with a new key,’ Noam said, adding that ‘when voices of love are silenced, the voices of hate become louder.’ He described love as an echo. A Jewish prophet once said, ‘How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace,’. And how sweet it was to hear the sound of those peacemakers coming down the airwaves yesterday – in the after blast of tragedy. For many this land is Holy precisely because they don’t see their God as an abstraction, but as a knowable presence. A God revealed in a particular place and at a particular time in history. Who out of the noise of the whirlwind, speaks in the still, small voice of shalom and salaam.