Lyric of the Week: FREEDOM IS PRICELESS (October 13, 2025)

On the occasion of the release of the remaining 20 living hostages from Hamas captivity.

737 days of being held captive

737 days since that brutal attack

737 days, man, it’s all behind us

And there’s no way in hell we’ll ever go back

No more watching from a distance and feeling helpless

No more wondering if this will last forever

No more sitting in the exile and feeling defenseless

The sun is rising and our world is getting better

There ain’t enough money to buy it

Freedom is priceless

Priceless

It means just so much so don’t try it

Freedom is priceless

Priceless

The worst you can do is take it away

It’s worth more than gold, even only a day, it’s

Priceless

Priceless

Priceless …

64 million seconds in tunnels and dungeons

64 million seconds of constant fear and psych

64 million seconds of starvation and torture

You can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like

You don’t know just how much it means

Freedom is priceless

Priceless

Without it we come apart at the seams

Freedom is priceless

Priceless

You can give us the world but we won’t give it up

Never ever ever give it up, ‘cause freedom is

Priceless

Priceless

Priceless …

2 years less one day of just not knowing

2 years less one day of living under the gun

2 years less one day barely hanging on to lifelines

The struggle is over now and we won!

The feeling is so thick you could bite it

Resistance is useless

Useless

So don’t even try to fight it

Resistance is useless

Useless

The feeling of having time on your hands

Of dreaming and scheming big plans

Resistance is useless

Useless

And freedom is priceless …

©2025 The Hesh Inc.

Freedom is priceless, by the side of the highway to Eilat

In May 1985, when I was undergoing basic training at the beginning of my service in the Israel Defense Forces, I stumbled upon the expression "אין מחיר לחופש"—"there is no price for freedom" in Hebrew—scrawled on the inside of a sentry post while I was doing guard duty. The expression rang so true to me that I adopted it as my personal credo, even inscribing it (in English) on the blank green patch above my unit insignia. I also took to scrawling it wherever I had the opportunity during and after my service, going as far as gathering rocks by the roadside during a trip down to Eilat and arranging them to spell the words out on a small rise beyond the shoulder of the road. The expression became the title of a song, one of my dozen or so "basic training anthems" I wrote to help keep myself sane during that grueling period of my life, and later on, once I was back in the USA, it also became the name of one of my first bands (although for some reason we never actually played the song). And sometime after that, the expression came up when congratulating one of my musical friends who had finally quit his job as a prison guard, which he said often felt like being imprisoned himself, and lived to tell the tale.

Fast forward to today. The last of the living Israeli hostages taken by terror group Hamas on October 7, 2023—20 of the original 251—have been freed. I got up early this morning and logged on to my social media, and one of the first posts I saw was the video of the procession of vehicles carrying the newly freed hostages back into Israel, with throngs of cheering, flag-waving well-wishers lining the sides of the road. And quite involuntarily, I found myself crying sweet tears of joy. This was the moment that all who love Israel had been aching for and agonizing over these last two years, and it was happening before our eyes. I then came upon another video, posted by the official IDF channel, of the moment that three of the hostages were welcomed back home into Israel by the IDF, and I thought, we who were following this extended nightmare, as deeply as we cared, expressed how deeply involved we were, and took whatever actions we could to help, cannot begin to fathom what these souls have been going through.

And I thought of my old song, "Freedom Is Priceless," and it almost seemed laughable what I had been feeling when I wrote the song. If anyone can know, on their very skins, in their very bones, what freedom means, it is these freed hostages. Similarly to how concentration-camp inmates at the end of the Holocaust must have felt at the moment of their liberation (which I had some inkling of, as my father had experienced that at the age of fourteen). So I set about the business of rewriting my song from forty years ago. I cannot begin to walk in their shoes—and it is that which I aim to capture, that sense of not being able to walk in those shoes. For the now-former hostages and their families ... I wish a full recovery from their long, treacherous ordeal. For the nation of Israel ... I wish a final resolution of this horrible conflict, in Israel's favor, with the final defeat of the murderous, genocidal adversary, Hamas, and its ilk. For the Jewish people, and freedom-loving people of all faiths, I wish a complete healing from this trauma. Freedom is priceless, indeed.