As I looked upon the images of the four soldier women released this week, Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy and Liri Albag, I thought “we have already won.” When the hostages were paraded, before their release, coached to smile and wave brightly, clear faces to the sun, surrounded by an armed, masked, brutal, dark multitude, I thought “we have already won.” Were these four women not like Jewish princesses or priestesses before an agglomeration of a mediocre multitude? Are the facts not clearly written in the exchange terms? 50 Hamas sympathizers for 4 Jewesses? Do not the facts once again show us the true spiritual reality? Shimona Tzukernik, founder and director of the Omek foundation, in describing the divine potential of the month of Shevat, which we will enter into in the next few days, represents its energy as a line of holiness coming down into the world. She contrasts our rich and deep spiritual inheritance from our forefathers and our connection to them, with the role of the tribes. While the forefathers were self-generating suns before whom darkness disappeared, the tribes had the mission of bringing down the light to its most physical manifestations. Gaza turned into a vortex of evil when all Jewish presence was withdrawn. While October 7th highlighted the mind frame of its population, there are countless examples of unbearable brutality that was in existence amongst the Palestinian Arabs themselves. Public beheadings, executions of rape victims, torture for whomever did not cooperate with local forces, honor killings of young women at the hands of their brothers and fathers, cutting open the stomachs of pregnant women in acts of rage or revenge. Within this alternate reality, divorced from human decency, beautiful rays of Jewish souls were literally brought into the darkest crevices of the land that is part of our biblical inheritance. Who can deny that their prayers, their blood, their consciousness, their compassion for one another, their martyrdom shook the skies so that the nation of Israel proceeded to have swift and sweeping victory over a seven front war? While the psychopath Yahya Sinwar wrote proudly in his will of “every drop of bloodshed on this land’s soil,” I would argue that the Jewish blood, screaming from the depths of the earth for the return of the nation of Israel to its land after 3,000 years of exile has greater power than that of the Palestinian Arabs whose claim never existed until 1948. I would also argue that the blood of the 14-year-old shepherd who was brutally murdered while roaming with his sheep, Benjamin Achimeir, Hy"d has great divinity as opposed to the hellish blood of Sinwar who orchestrated rape, dismemberment, necrophilia, pedophilia and torture upon children, women, and the elderly. There have been innumerable Achimeirs in the Holy Land in the brief history of the modern State of Israel, although there were many more from the beginning of time. Binyamin Achimeir Hy"d/courtesy I do not know what the calculations of Hamas were in parading the women and having them shine so brightly, beautifully and elegantly before their barbaric, hollering, beastly captors and before the world at large, but I know the lesson I absorbed through it. If these women after over a year of brutal captivity with the worst forms of torture andmistreatment can show such heavenly grace to the world, there is nothing that can break our nation. Jewish mysticism speaks about the process of making olive oil and compares it to the make up of the Jewish soul. In order to release the oil, the olives must be completely crushed. The oil can then be used to burn a light. This is our soul. This is what makes us indestructible. When crushed, we become beacons of light.