At our Seders, following L'shana Haba'ah B'Yerushalyim, we throw in several songs about goats and cats and angels of death. But for the narrative of Nirtza, that "Chasal" paragraph announces the fulfillment ("elimination") of our ritual and storytelling obligations, to God, tradition and future generations.
Eliminating this most wanted terrorist fulfills an obligation as well, and like the end of the Seder, it produces a small glimmer of hope. This killing will no doubt produce short term chaos, but it is a step toward restoring Israel's precious deterrence and a modicum of pride in its security and intelligence services. It's a start. These new plantings are now popping through the ground in the Gaza Envelope, where ruins have dominated the landscape, and maybe they foretell a rebuilt and renewed State of Israel, not too far off.
One Hamas leader may be gone, but the threat is far from "eliminated." As Churchill said famously after the Battle of El Alamein in 1942, "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
We don't know who caused the mayhem in Iran today, but someone has just taken the fight to them. Is the tide beginning to turn in this global battle against Iran and its axis of evil?
Maybe it's my indefatigable Jewish hope talking rather than my beaten down exile-driven cynicism on the eve of New England's first winter snowstorm in two years.
But this feels like the end of the beginning.
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