REAL MESSAGE OF THE OLIVE LEAF

In Anthem, a song from his 1992 album The Future, Leonard Cohen sang: “There is a crack, a crack in everything — that’s how the light gets in.” Beautiful words, if somewhat haunting.

They  echo the words uttered decades earlier by another Cohen — the first Chief Rabbi of modern Eretz Yisrael, Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook: “Out of the wreckage of destruction, the light of redemption will shine forth.” Never in recent history has this sentiment felt more piercingly true.

Rom Breslavski, who was on duty as a security guard at the Nova music festival on October 7th and was kidnapped into Gaza by terrorists, spent two years in solitary confinement under Islamic Jihad.

Rom never saw daylight. He was starved, beaten, and terrorized. The guards forced him to sleep beside the bodies of murdered hostages. They tried to force him to convert to Islam. They taunted him with lies — that Israel had been destroyed, that his family was dead, that the war with Iran had wiped out everything he loved. They tried to break him, body and soul, and came close to succeeding.

Now Rom is home. He stands for hours every day by the window, just looking at the sky. His sad eyes betray the broken spirit of someone who has been to hell and back. He doesn’t say much. His freedom is real, yes – but it doesn’t yet feel like freedom.

For now, there is a crack — and we can only hope that through it, the light is beginning to get in. That out of this wreckage of destruction, the light of redemption will, at last, shine forth.

The look in Rom’s eyes is the same exact look you see in those haunting photographs of Holocaust survivors taken in early 1945 – men and women stepping through the gates of Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, technically free but hollow-eyed and gaunt, their spirits shattered.

They are alive, but not yet living. One nightmare has ended, but another is only beginning – the long, slow struggle to feel human again.

Liberation is never a single moment. It’s a process – slow, uneven, and often painfully drawn out. The first breath of freedom is always jagged and uncertain. Trauma doesn’t evaporate when the door opens – it lingers in the air for a long time after, and truthfully, it never entirely disappears.

As Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor, later wrote, liberation was not the euphoric experience he and his fellow prisoners imagined it would be. When the camp gates finally opened, many felt strangely numb, unable to rejoice. They walked out, Frankl said, “like sleepwalkers,” their souls lagging behind their bodies.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl describes how the sudden transition from horror to safety left survivors bewildered, and even depressed. Their horrific experiences under the Nazis had stripped them of their ability to feel. They were conditioned to expect pain or betrayal at every turn. Which meant that freedom was not the end of their suffering — it was the beginning of their healing.

And it’s in exactly this fragile space — the uneasy aftermath of catastrophe — that the Torah offers one of its most poignant symbols. Towards the end of the story of Noah’s flood, after months sealed inside the ark while the world drowned beneath torrential waters, the storms finally subsided.

Hoping their ordeal was over, Noah sent out a dove to see whether the earth had begun to dry. The bird returned with something small and unexpected — “an olive leaf torn off in her mouth” (Gen. 8:11). It was the first sign that the world outside the ark was beginning to heal, that life after the flood might once again be possible. But, as the commentaries note, the olive leaf was hardly a symbol of complete restoration.

The Ramban sees the olive leaf as proof that the world was only beginning to heal, but was not yet fully ready. Some land had reemerged, and hardy trees like the olive had started to sprout leaves – but the earth was still soggy and unstable, not yet ready for cultivation. The message was not “It’s over,” but rather, “It’s time to begin again.”

The Kli Yakar makes a striking observation: Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves after their sin – symbols of shame. But the dove brought Noah an olive leaf, a symbol of light and atonement; olive oil would one day fuel the pure flame of the sacred Menorah. Here was the light shining through the crack – a hopeful beginning, even if the world wasn’t quite ready to be whole.

The Zohar, sourcebook of Jewish mysticism, adds another layer: an olive yields its oil only when it is crushed. So it is with humanity, which often produces its greatest illumination only after being broken. The olive leaf was not meant to be a token of comfort or triumph, but a reminder that most often, it is from brokenness that light will emerge.

Noah’s emergence from the ark wasn’t the end of the story — it was the start of a long, difficult climb. The flood may have symbolically washed the world clean, but it hadn’t cured the human heart. Within the next few chapters, we encounter the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, jealousies and betrayals within families, and eventually Egypt’s enslavement of Jacob’s descendants.

The story of humanity after the flood was a catalogue of all kinds of failure and failings, one generation after another.

The olive leaf that the dove carried to Noah as the trauma of the flood drew to a close was not a declaration of victory. It was a divine whisper: the worst of the nightmare is over, but don’t celebrate just yet — there’s still a long way to go.

It reminded Noah, and every generation after him, that rebuilding the world is never a single act of survival, but a lifelong process of reconstruction. Every step along the way must be seen for what it is — a platform for growth, a chance to reach higher, and an opportunity to shape a better future.

Rom Breslavski, like those Holocaust survivors before him, knows this truth instinctively. Freedom isn’t a doorway you walk through into sunshine — it’s a staircase you ascend, one painful, uncertain step at a time.

The dove’s olive leaf wasn’t telling Noah that the storm was over — Noah already knew that. It was reminding him that the healing had only just begun. That’s how God redeems the world: not in an instant, but through slow, deliberate rebirth. The cracks remain, but through them — as Leonard Cohen says it — the light gets in.

That’s what the dove offered Noah. It’s what God offered the survivors of the Shoah. And it’s what He is offering us today, after two years of trauma following October 7th — a tiny olive leaf, a call to rebuild, and the promise that even through the cracks, His light still finds a way in.