January 24, 2025

When I was in university, I took American Sign Language (ASL). As a music major, I reasoned that everything I did had to do with hearing, so this was my way of communicating with the non-hearing world. We learned hand gestures and motions that represented words, and the alphabet for spelling, and we learned that some phrases are combinations of the motions and the spelling. 

One such phrase was an abbreviated form of “I love you”, indicated by a hand gesture combining the first letters of each word “I”, “L”, and “Y”.
Once I knew that, I suddenly became aware of how many of my friends knew this gesture, and we used it regularly whenever we parted. (That was the 1980s.  Nowadays for the same message, people put their two hands together to form the shape of a heart.) 

I hadn’t thought about that I-L-Y hand for many years, until this week when Emily Damari was freed after 471 days in captivity. One of the photos that has been widely circulated all week is of Emily’s bandaged hand, with two missing fingers that had been shot off by the Hamas terrorists on October 7th. Not knowing that her fingers were missing, when I first saw it, I honestly thought that she was making the “I love you” sign to the world.

Since then, the discussion about the image of her hand is everywhere, with numerous interpretations. There are those who say it stands for Victory, that it’s a symbol of Defiance. Many identify it as the “Rock On” symbol, pairing it with the “Rock On” emoji. There was even a ridiculous discussion in one of my social media groups where people attacked each other for “using” the emoji because, they claimed, it is Emily’s, and by using it we are invading her privacy (I told you it was ridiculous). 
Moshe Shapira, an Israeli artist whose son Aner was killed on Oct 7 after saving the lives of many others, created a beautiful illustration of Emily’s hand next to a Kohayn hand doing the Priestly blessing. As if Emily is blessing us.

My take-away? This girl, who endured Gd-knows-what for 471 days and is finally reunited with her loving family, is indeed Victorious. Defiant. Rocking On. Blessing Us All. Her hand is her hand. But her happiness at her freedom is so overwhelmingly infectious that we can not help but join her and share a heart that is simply overflowing with love. May she, along with Romi Gonen and Doron Steinbrecher, continue to heal. May all of the hostages come home safely. We don’t know what is in store — we can only pray for peace — but for now, let us celebrate this beautiful feeling of love, no matter what our hands are saying.

Am Yisrael Chai!