My dear brothers and sisters,

One thing that struck me is how heavily Hashem pointed out to us the concept of achdus, of unity, in how this tragedy unfolded.

First, note the communities each of the boys come from: Eyal Yifrach^Hy”d spoke his Hebrew with a Yemenite accent, Gil-ad Shaar^Hy”d was a Sepharadi whose family was from Morocco, Naftali Fraenkel^Hy”d was an Ashkenazi, the child of Anglos. Three boys, each returned from different centers of the diaspora.

Second, what were these three young men doing? Would anyone here in the US advise their teens to hitchhike? But no, Israel is in general different. After all, you could always count on your sisters and brothers to share an empty seat to help you get to where you’re going. The fact that “taking a tremp” is part of Israeli life is beautiful evidence of our underlying unity.

As was our common hope. And our common mourning. In how many communities, aside from the Jews, do people across the globe stop their lives because three young men they never met had their taken?

I have no problem with our heated disagreements over ideas. And among legitimate ideologies I consider such debate healthy. For individuals, we need a variety of approaches to Torah to aid a variety of personalities. On the national level,  a healthy body needs a variety of organs. And if we are going to be passionate about our beliefs, argument is going to ensue. Even if unproductive, the debate is a sign of health compared to dispassionate silence.

And of course it is nearly impossible to run a country or a community without disagreements over priorities in how we spend our resources, over proper tactics for reaching our aims, and sometimes even over those goals themselves.

But when we make these disagreements personal, it’s frightening.

After all, Hashem wants our unity. And since we do unite in times of trouble, He has a quick way of getting that unity if we’re not going to do it ourselves. I am not saying this is the reason for the current tragedy, or even a reason for the current tragedy. But it is something glaring that can be learned from it, a lesson we cannot afford to ignore.

Now that we are united, we cannot risk letting it go.

המקום ינחם אתנו, אבלי ציון וירושלים, ולא תוסיפו לדאבה עוד!