We don’t need their permission, and we aren’t going to ask for it. We aren’t going to let these moral midgets claim the role of moral yardstick against which we must measure our behavior.  We, who gave the Bible to the world, spit on them and their pretensions.

I was at a wedding last night, a beautiful affair by the sea celebrating the longed-for marriage of our dear friends’ eldest son with his lovely bride.  The vows were said under a chuppah, just as the sun set over the blue ocean’s gentle waves behind them.

Another Jewish family beginning, I thought in joy as I watched the beaming bride and groom and their happy families.

We sat down by tables set with fresh, delicious food, my dear friend Esther Wachsman sitting down next to me, leaving room for her husband Yehuda.  She had just put a spoonful or two of food on her plate, when her cell phone rang.  She picked it up, her face undergoing a visible change.

Abruptly, she stood up, pushing her chair back from the table.  “I have to go,” she said.  “Yehuda isn’t feeling well.”

We all commiserated.  “What’s wrong?” I whispered.

She leaned over, putting her mouth next to my ear:  “They’ve found the bodies. The boys are all dead.”

My head spun, bringing me back twenty years to when we had waited outside the Wachsman home  the Friday night following the kidnapping of Nachshon.  How we watched the generals make their way into the home, and how, from the porch next door, I heard the keening of  my dear friend for her son who had taken a ride home and had never arrived.

Soon after, the bride and groom returned, and the room erupted in music.  I lifted myself out of my chair and went to the dance floor.  Holding hands with friends and neighbors, we made joyful circles around the bride.

The news had spread like wildfire. My friend Mirel held my hand.  “This is the only answer.  The best answer,” she  told me. And I nodded in agreement.

“The entire world is a narrow bridge,” we sang, “and the main thing is not to fear; not to fear at all.”

We sang and danced, late into the night, as the sea broke against the shore with inexorable rhythm,  its beauty unmarred by the ugliness of the acts of human beings who are little more than human animals, beings who kill children because they think they can gain some benefit from it.

As our Chief Rabbi David Lau said, Gil-Ad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkel, and Eyal Yifrah “join the chain of martyrs who have been murdered throughout the painful history of the Jewish people.”

The list keeps growing because of the blindness and  complicity of people who think they are civilized, and yet find all kinds of ways to forgive barbarism and brutality, blaming the victims. All of them are responsible for the deaths of our Jewish children, every single one  – Jew or Gentile. Like the New York Times present bureau chief  Jodi Rodoren, who made the despicable comparison between the death of  belligerent, rock throwing Palestinians and the kidnapping of Jewish teenagers waiting quietly for a ride home after exams. All those who make excuses for terrorists, support them, demand leniency for them, and hope to stop them by giving in to their demands, are responsible. All the politicians, and policy makers, and corrupt officials who have something to gain by siding with evil.

Our only comfort is that only a generation ago, it was not three young Jewish boys who were rounded up and murdered with the help of such people, but millions. Now the Jewish people are blessed with their own land, their own army, air force and a unique unity that allows them to mourn as one every, single Jewish life taken by their enemies, and to demand and exact justice for each death whether or not the European Union, or the President of the United States, or the Arab League think our dead deserve justice, and whether or not useful idiot journalists like Rudoren and their lying, corrupt, nearly bankrupt newspapers approve.

We don’t need their permission, and we aren’t going to ask for it. We aren’t going to let these moral midgets claim the role of moral yardstick against which we must measure our behavior. We, who gave the Bible to the world, spit on them and their pretensions.

But we do not fool ourselves.  While justice and, yes, revenge are necessary, they will bring no comfort in the loss of our boys, just as there will never be any comfort for the loss of Nachshon Wachsman.  But just as our prayers for Nachshon did not bring him back to us, they, like the prayers for our three boys, were not wasted. They brought our people closer, and gave us unity and strength. And they were surely heard in heaven.  God will have the final say.  Of this, I have no doubt.

“Thou has destined all the lawless of the earth to vanish like dross, therefore, I have come to love thy testimonies… This is my comfort in my affliction, that thy promise has preserved me in life.”  Psalm 119: 50.