Rabbi Breit's Blog

We have met with soldiers, survivors, peaceniks, and Israelis who never expected that their full time job would suddenly become coordinating emergency aid, rescues from armed gunmen, camps for displaced persons, or dozens of funerals.

From her Sukkot travel in Portugal, Chen turned her entire apartment into a command center to collect reports of her wounded, killed, abducted, trapped — her sister, nephews, father, and lifelong friends from her kibbutz home in Kfar Aza — that flooded her phone through fragments of whatsapps and voice messages that end suddenly. She sent rescuers to the trapped and warning to Kibbutz Sa’ad across the street which saved them from the same destruction.

Tech CEOS were using their software and data analysis on piecemeal Hamas Telegram and security cam footage to track Israelis as they were kidnapped or missing, to coordinate aid for the flood of internal refugees, and to collect needed personal protection equipment for the front lines.

Gal, who was badly wounded in previous wars and swore not to serve again, went immediately to his base to drive through battlefields to collect the wounded. He trains PTSD support service dogs and visits grievously wounded soldiers to give them hope and direction on how they can return to life.

Elay, who last summer was a camp counselor at Camp Judaea, told us how he ran from gunshots, how a series of chance decisions, hiding for hours silent in a field of avocado trees, meant he survived a rampaging hunt that killed his friends whose choice to hide in a bomb shelter, flee in their car, or run a different direction left them trapped.

It hurt to hear. And at once each of us felt a spark of joy when, after hearing his story, we realized Lisa’s kids had been his campers last summer and his face transformed for a moment from stoic and still from positively illuminated. He wasn’t a story or a statistic, but family -- a loved one.

This is the biggest message I have from our time here so far. The feeling of enormous love, inter-reliance, and interdependence. We are so interwoven. We should not pretend to be far away.

I have always known Israelis to have enormous will and and even bigger hearts, perhaps hidden under a more prickly exterior. And this has been true everywhere we went. On seeing others suffer, this society has risen up in the most powerful way to help and care for each other.

And each one has thanked us. In the most surreal turn of events, each and every Israeli we met has turned and looked me in the eye and thanked us for coming. It is as if, at a shiva, the mourner who’s family has just been stabbed in the heart took your hands in theirs and with tears in their eyes, thanked you with surprise and gratitude for being with them at this time.

They are worried for us. They read about antisemitism and they want to know how to help.

So I hope to give you a sense of the lesson they continue to teach.

Rabbi Heller talked in a sermon about how dire it is in time of disaster not only to hold the people we care for in our hearts, but also to carry them on our shoulders. Nissimi told us how on Sukkot morning a young father came to him and said, “I promised my girls I’d dance with them on my shoulders today, but I just got called to reserves. Can you please dance with them on yours?” “Of course,” he said, without hesitation. Of course he would put his friends’ children on his shoulders, he would take them to dance, there is no question.

Here  there is no question that when your loved ones need you, your society needs you, you pick up what you can. That sense of love, fortitude, and resilience must continue to guide us. And may we hold it for the Israelis, whose arms are so tired, whose burden continues to grow, so when they lose it, or they forget it, we can give it back to them.

Shabbat shalom.