Gilad Shalit is home today, after five years and four months as a captive of Hamas. My initial reaction, as an Israeli, reflecting on these developments in Berlin, looking mostly at Israeli written press online: I think it is wonderful that Shalit’s mental and physical condition is good enough for him to be able to appreciate his return.

As for the “home” he will find, others have written about the Israeli society he left in contrast with the one to which he returns. I wish instead to comment on two significant symbolic questions: Was the “price” paid for his return justified? And, the more difficult question which requires the help of a philosopher to address: what is the nature and meaning of his homecoming?

The first issue concerning the “price” paid for the safe return of a soldier seems to me and to most of the Israeli public as a no- brainer: one has to save the life of a soldier sent in one’s name.  This issue has been covered in the German press I follow in Berlin, praising the commitment of the Israelis to their own people. However, the Israeli press’ apparent need to declare Hamas inhuman concerns me.

I am happy that Shalit is healthy, and recognize that the call in the Palestinian street today to capture other “Shalits” so that other prisoners will be released is obviously morally wrong. Yet, the parallel Israeli use of “price tag” to refer to the urge to hurt Palestinians, as well as the attacks upon what is conceived as the memory of left wing and secular Israel, specifically focused upon the Rabin Assassination, are no less morally wrong.

The attacks, about which Vered Vinitzky Seroussi has extensively written, seem to appear at moments of peaceful interaction and are deeply problematic. Last week, graffiti on the memorial site read: “free Yigal Amir” [Rabin’s assassin]. Perhaps the positive lesson from the discourse on “prices” is that it cannot be read in a vacuum: talking about costs involves agents, past and present, besides its seemingly benign metaphoric suggestion of the economy of life and death.

On the nature of the homecoming and its meaning: the first thing to note is the orchestrated take-over of Shalit by the state of Israel, which manifested itself, as was expected, in the swap of Shalit from the Hamas to the hands of the Egyptian state, and from Egypt to the Israeli state (the army was the first to greet him and dress him in uniform) and only then back to his family. It was significant that Shalit, the 25-year old captive soldier, wore his uniform and saluted Prime Minister Netanyahu, Security Minister Ehud Barak and the Chief of Staff upon his return, as he did. The Israeli collective partook in the state ceremony, in consuming the constant news reporting: flying flags and slogans greeting the returning soldier, and playing songs on radio, some were written for the occasion. Motti Neiger in a short Facebook status update suggested all this is proof that the Israeli media is used first and foremost for maintaining the cohesion of the Israeli collective. It was a classic media event in the sense of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz. It made things expected, almost already rehearsed and habituated, like any other ritual, combining a memorial ceremony with holiday festivities.

But the return of specific young man, Gilad Shalit’s homecoming, his return to his family, reveals complexity and perhaps hope, beyond the meaning of the official ceremony.

In a short article published in March of 1945 in the American Journal of Sociology entitled “The Homecomer,” the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz wrote that the homecomer differs from the stranger in that he returns to a place that used to be his home, yet, it cannot be the home he left. Schutz reflected on returning veterans of WWII, but one cannot help but think of the relevance to his personal history, a German émigré scholar in America, who was forced to leave home in Europe for political and ethnic reasons and could never find the home he left behind.  Merging dimensions of time and space, Schutz writes: “home is a starting point as well as a terminus.”

Two year ago, Shalit’s father, Noam, took the Israeli flag off the roof of his house, demonstrating against what he saw as the lack of action to return his son. A few days ago, he was photographed flying the flag again, after the decision to return his son home in a swap for 1027 Palestinians accused in terrorist action and kept in Israeli jails. Shalit, the father, signified the key symbol of the starting point and terminus of home: the flag on the roof. More, we learned that its mere existence is not enough—it had to be removed and re-placed.

Life at home means intimacy and familiarity. Upon his return, PM Netanyahu greeted Shalit with a citation from an old, well known song: it is so good to have you back home.  To his parents he said: I returned the boy back home. This tension between the public homecoming (the song refers to a traveler returning home) and the homecoming of the child to his parents was no small part of the discussions of whether to “pay the price” for Shalit’s return. The other part, the national commitment to do everything to return prisoners home, played a large role in the public pressure to release Shalit, as it is one of the premises of obligatory conscription.

Yet about the young man, the homecomer himself: upon his release, Shalit told the Egyptian Press: “I am happy for the Palestinian prisoners to be released, hope that they won’t return to fight Israel. I hope that this deal will help advance peace.”

May the home he comes to find make his hope realizable.