Sergeant Itay Amar was nineteen when he fell in combat in the southern Gaza Strip in June 2024, along with seven of his peers. After receiving his locked iPhone among his belongings, his mother, Lorin, tried to open it, insisting he must have left some kind of message behind. “He left one . . . I know my son. That’s what he was like his whole life, keeping me posted. It couldn’t be that he’d go in and not leave anything behind. It wouldn’t be grandiose, maybe just one sentence, but it would be there.”
Eventually Lorin got into the phone, and found a short last note: “Stay happy for me.” The words comforted her and the rest of Itay’s family and were engraved on his tombstone.
Like most armies, the IDF does not require soldiers to write letters of farewell to their families before entering combat. Still, these letters are written, on scraps of paper, unsent emails, or Google documents.
In 2024, copywriter Shlomo Kavas and journalist Racheli Palant-Rozen decided to collect and preserve these notes, working with researchers to contact each fallen soldier’s family. The result was If You’re Reading These Words, a book of forty-nine letters presented largely unedited, with notes explaining the context of each letter: inside jokes, family legends, quotations from songs, poems, and the Bible. Each letter is introduced with a brief biography of the soldier, a record of how they fell in combat, and an artist’s sketch of their face in blue and white. President Isaac Herzog wrote the Foreword, and interspersed throughout are essays by a wide range of Israeli public figures, from freed hostage Emily Damari and Fauda creator Avi Issacharoff to spiritual influencer Rabbanit Yemima Mizrachi and singer-songwriter Eviatar Banai, offering their own kind of running narrative of tragedy and hope.
The book was first published in Hebrew in 2025 and was an immediate bestseller. Comedian and journalist Hanoch Daum called it “one of the most important war books ever published in Israel.”
Moving from the United States to Israel will inevitably impact your identity in profound ways. You may even find yourself assuming strange roles, like de facto aliyah ambassador or pseudo real estate agent, advising friends and family back in the US who are contemplating their own potential moves in the future. Honestly, it’s all good, I think every place in Israel offers something distinct and wonderful. Sometimes I even wonder what I, a religious mother of 7, who likes to read and talk about ideas, is doing in the overpriced lifestyle mecca of Ra’anana, the “pearl” of the Sharon, Israel’s version of Silicon Valley. But I adore it here, what can I say, and was glad to make my case in the Jewish Link’s recent Israel Real Estate supplement. Posting the full text here as well as a link to the original article (which may or may not also include a picture of Netanya).
General View of Ra’anana (1964)
When we announced that we were making aliyah to Ra’anana with our family seven years ago from Teaneck, we fielded the full gamut of comments and stereotypes. Some people called Ra’anana the “6th Town” (a reference to the Five Towns). Others joked, “it’s a wonderful place, only 5 minutes from Israel.” One acquaintance mused, rather memorably, “It’s just like Tenafly, without all the Israelis.” Upon arrival we were not too surprised to learn that the hype was rather off — we were very much in Israel, with all of the challenges and opportunities this entails.
Ra’anana is a small, diverse city of about 85,000 located in the Sharon region of Israel. It features crisp refreshing winters that never get too cold, when citrus fruits ripen all over the city, and a warm radiant spring season. Summers are hot. It’s about 25 minutes north of Tel Aviv, and a short 15-20 minute drive to the beach in Herziliya. Founded in 1924 by members of the Ahuza A–New York Society, many of them Polish Jews living in New York, it has always had a bit of an international flavor. The original residents were mostly of European origin, soon joined by an influx of Yemenite residents, then later waves from England, France and South Africa, and more recently Brazil and Latin America.
The majority of residents are still native Israelis, including many young families who work in hi-tech. Since olim in Ra’anana come from all over the world and not just English-speaking countries, the lingua franca in school and on the playground is Hebrew. Schools are largely experienced in dealing with the challenges of absorbing new immigrants. The rich variety of food and shopping reflects the diversity of the population. When Shabbat nears, my children ask for special treats like South African biltong, French pastries and Yemenite lachuch bread (with hilbe, a kind of addictive frothy fenugreek dip) in anticipation.
Ra’anana has a wide range of housing options, from large free-standing homes to compact starter apartments, and each year more attractive apartment buildings are built. The strong and ever-growing demand for housing in Ra’anana, both from native Israelis and olim, makes housing notoriously expensive: a 3- or 4-bedroom apartment averages ₪2–4 million (roughly $650,000–$1,300,000), and private homes can range from $2 million toward $4 million or more on the most sought-after streets.
Our home in Israel costs a lot more than our home in Teaneck did (though carrying costs, like property taxes and maintenance, are lower). But we feel we receive many benefits in return, not just from the home itself but from the community and environment. We live in a dynamic, walkable city, with beautiful parks, enriching after-school activities for our kids and stimulating cultural events for our whole family. We have access to an exceptionally well-stocked English language library, world-class tennis, baseball and squash facilities, a superb skate park and “Ninja” style obstacle course, and Israel’s largest municipal music conservatory — all in a small, accessible city, so nothing is ever too packed and attendance always means seeing familiar, friendly faces.
Ra’anana is known as one of the more religiously strong cities in the Sharon area, though the religious population hovers around 30-40% and is not a majority like in cities such as Beit Shemesh or Efrat. Nevertheless, it often feels like one can’t walk half a block without seeing another synagogue. Within two blocks of my house are two Yemenite synagogues, a Moroccan shul, a Chabad shul for the French community, a Hareidi yeshiva hosting the “Leibadik” minyan, a raucous Carlebach shul founded by Australian immigrants, and a joint Sephardi-Ashkenazi “unity” minyan. This is just a random sampling within a five minute walk of my house.
There are several large shuls catering directly to English-speaking olim which include programming for youth and teens. There are vibrant batei midrash, including a community Kollel offering daytime Talmud Torah classes in English, and Matan HaSharon, a wonderful institution for high-level women’s learning. While living in Ra’anana has met our needs as a young, growing family, it’s nice to live in a city that also has extensive opportunities for residents of every age level, especially retirees. A friend in his forties recently built a house in Ra’anana with old age in mind, as he said, “I never plan to move again.” I wish him good health and a long life- a blessing that is sensibly grounded, as many studies cite Ra’anana residents as enjoying the longest average life expectancy in Israel or even the Middle East.
As for education, in addition to secular and pluralistic schools, Ra’anana offers a range of religious options: three “Mamad” style state religious public schools, a “Torani” religious public school called Noam with separation between boys and girls, several Haredi schools, and a new Chabad elementary school popular among olim. There are two religious boys’ high schools, including the massive AMIT boys’ school in its new campus, and a Bnei Akiva yeshiva high school with a rich history; one large dati-leumi girls’ high school, also under AMIT; and a Haredi girls’ high school called Horev. Students seeking more options, especially for girls’ high schools, sometimes travel to neighboring Kfar Saba and Herziliya and even as far as Petach Tikvah and Bnei Brak.
Ra’anana has a reputation as a safe city; crime rates and break-ins are quite low, and, like many places in Israel, it’s not uncommon to see an eight-year-old walking himself home from school or stopping into the makolet on his own for an ice-pop. Terrorism incidents have been few and far-between (with one tragic exception two years ago). The municipal security system is highly responsive and will come almost comically quickly in response to any sort of minor concern or complaint.
Yet, Ra’anana has not been immune to the larger challenges Israeli society has faced since October 7. As would be expected in a community filled with committed Zionists and general high-achievers, many heroic soldiers from Ra’anana have fallen in Israel’s wars. One famous son is Roi Klein HY”D, a talented religious IDF officer who grew up in Ra’anana and was killed during the Second Lebanon War when he famously jumped on a grenade to save his fellow soldiers, the words Shema Yisrael on his lips. Ra’anana suffered its share of losses on October 7th, including Aryeh Ziering HY”D, the son of American olim and an officer in the IDF’s canine unit “Oketz,” who was with his family in Ra’anana for Simchat Torah when he was called up with his unit to the south. The ensuing war brought more tragic news, but also a sense of awe and pride. Shauli Greenglick HY”D, a talented singer who had advanced to the final rounds of Israel’s version of “The Voice,” withdrew from the competition to rejoin his battalion fighting in northern Gaza, and was killed only a few weeks after his audition. Over these past few difficult years, the names of Ra’anana’s fallen heroes — Yaron Chitiz HY”D, Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld HY”D, and others — have become household names. Come Sukkot, sukkot citywide bear posters with their pictures; a charming new neighborhood coffee cart was dedicated in their memory.
In 2024, the newspaper Makor Rishon ran a remarkable piece about eight young fallen soldiers and their families, among them Greenglick, our daughter’s good friend’s brother Dan Wajdenbaum HY”D, and another friend’s brother Daniel Ben Harosh HY”D — all of whom grew up on, or adjacent to, one street (Ravutsky) in the Northeast section of Ra’anana. The boys had crossed into each other’s yards and played ball together, had gone to school together, and their parents were friends and acquaintances — native Israelis and olim alike, stretching from all quarters of the world. The thesis of the article, beyond paying tribute to these young men and their families, was that this one small street in Ra’anana — which has endured so much pain but also exhibited incredible bravery and resilience — is a microcosm of Israel as a whole.
The decision to move to Israel, especially in this current climate, is an admirable one. The choice of community is filled with complicating factors: career opportunities, the type of community one envisions, budget, and more. Some are moved by the sweeping views and sense of pioneerism in a small yishuv in the North or the Shomron; others by a bustling city and its opportunities. Sometimes when I visit Jerusalem I feel a bit of a tug — to live in a place with so much spiritual power, so much intellectual and artistic vitality, has a special appeal to me. Yet in moving our family across the world, from American suburbia, grandparents and cousins, to a great unknown, the strong communities, wide avenues and well-manicured parks of Ra’anana made for an easy and pleasant adjustment. Ra’anana is a great choice for a life that combines cosmopolitanism and community, exposure to different Jewish cultures, and the comfort of being among others who made the same choice you did. As for those people who teased us by saying “Ra’anana is only 5 minutes from Israel” — they are still in New Jersey. We find ourselves in a warm community and growing city, enjoying the benefits of each, at the heart of Israeli life.
Last week, on a beautiful June night, I found myself in the eastern Judean desert, not far from Bethlehem, at the foot of ancient Herodium, a lavish palace built by King Herod between 23 and 15 BCE. Herod was a widely despised, Roman-appointed client king of Israel, Jewish in name only, who displaced the Hasmonean dynasty. The Hasmoneans, descendants of the Maccabees, had won Jewish self-rule a century earlier, a victory still celebrated each year at Chanukah. Herod’s tyrannical, paranoid reign ended in the murder of his own wives and children. He was also an ambitious builder, and many of his grand projects still punctuate the landscape of modern Israel: Masada, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and most prominently his expanded Temple Mount, including the Western Wall.
The fortress looms above the surrounding desert for miles. It was my first time visiting, and while the winding, unfamiliar drive there was a bit stress-inducing, the moment I first glimpsed the site from afar, it took my breath away. Herod demanded a fortress so grand it could be seen from Jerusalem, and the terraformed desert mountain remains a masterful feat of engineering. Efforts are now underway to make the site, located in a politically sensitive area, accessible to the broader public. The evening was the kickoff to an academic conference on Israeli heritage in Judea and Samaria. Present were archaeologists, political figures, and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who was presented with a special award by the Ministry of Heritage. At the entrance, we were greeted by a recreated period marketplace, complete with actors dressed as Roman legionnaires scuffling with Israelite locals, a role which I suppose included the rest of us too. An illuminated theater had been erected inside the massive ancient pool Herod once, inexplicably, managed to fill with water in the middle of the desert. As the stars came out, we sat for an original production titled “Herod vs. Bar Kochba: The Battle for Eternity.”
A sense of the scene (note the looming mound of Herodium on the right)
Bar Kochba was a Jewish guerilla leader who led a three-year revolt against Roman occupation in Judea, seventy years after Rome destroyed the renovated Second Temple, another Herodian project and the catastrophe still mourned each year on the fast of Tisha B’Av. The play follows a young Jewish rebel, his wife, and son, camped out at a Herodium that has by then fallen into disrepair. Recent excavations at the site have in fact uncovered a trove of Bar Kochba-era coins; I was handed a replica of one at the event. As the rebels onstage dig tunnels, ration water, and prepare for battle, they are visited by the ghost of Herod, who still haunts his beloved palace. He mocks their devotion to Jewish sovereignty, a doomed cause, he insists, even a century after his own death, given the strength of Rome. Herod argues for compromise and accommodation – you are all headed towards death (forgive my paraphrase, I didn’t think to record at the time). Herod tells them: “Choose life, choose prosperity.” All that is needed, he suggests, is to submit to Roman rule, pay their taxes, and allow a few of their gods and statues into the Jewish holy places. The rebels are unconvinced. They are willing to die at Roman hands not because they love death, but because they are playing a longer game. “Perhaps it will be a few years, perhaps a thousand,” the mother tells her son, “but one day we will march back into Jerusalem and worship our God.”
Roman Legionary Deigns to Take a Photo With the Israelite Riff-Raff
The play then shifts into an ahistorical debate between Herod and Bar Kochba themselves. Herod, played to perfection by the legendary Israeli actor Shuli Rand, makes the (correct) case that modern Israel is no direct heir to Bar Kochba’s fanatical legacy. “Look around you,” he says. “You’re sitting in a theater. Who brought theater to ancient Israel? Do you love culture? Wine? Good food?” These are not the tastes of single-minded desert warriors. Bar Kochba counters that modern Israelis may indeed enjoy a comfortable life, but when crisis strikes, as it did on October 7th, they will fight to their last breath for their people and their land. Bar Kochba himself left little behind. No children, no followers, nothing approaching the scale of what Herod built. His revolt’s brutal defeat left hundreds of thousands of Jewish civilians dead or enslaved. Rome expelled the Jews from Jerusalem, renamed the city Aelia Capitolina, and rebranded the province itself Syria Palaestina, scrubbing Judaea from the map entirely. But the play’s argument is that the fighting spirit that Bar Kochba drew on persists in the modern state regardless, a key part of its ethos from its founding to today.
Each member of the large audience was given a copy, in Hebrew translation, of Barry Strauss’s excellent new book, Jews vs. Rome. The book supplies more nuance than any play could, making a convincing case that the two-hundred-year Jewish struggle against Rome, a struggle with an outsized influence on both Rabbinic and Christian tradition, cannot be separated from the larger contest between empires playing out at the same time, namely between Rome and Parthia, heir to the Persian empire. No small nation in the Mediterranean basin could survive in that era without aligning with one power or the other, and the Jews knew this as well as anyone. Strauss argues that the revolt against Rome was also a desperate, ultimately futile bid to draw Parthian intervention to the Jewish cause.
The timing felt almost too fitting. That same morning, at the G7 summit in France, Trump had defended a newly signed Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, located more or less where Parthia once stood. The MOU calls for a sixty-day ceasefire, during which the US would release significant funds to Tehran, and involves the Iranians trying to bolt-on an Israeli ceasefire in its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The MOU was met with disappointment, to put it mildly, by many Israelis who had hoped for a more decisive outcome, not to mention concern that it will limit Israel’s existential struggle against Iran’s proxies. President Trump, in an attempt to push the MOU forward, voiced some criticism of recent Israeli military action in Lebanon, adding: “Without the United States there would be no Israel, without me there would be no Israel.” Trump’s claim here is characteristically over-the-top. Yet some 1,900 years after Judea’s doomed insurgencies against Rome, we are reminded once again of the painful necessity, for a small nation, of relying on a great power ally.
However, the United States is no Roman Empire, and as the evening at Herodium testified, Jewish life is flourishing across the Land of Israel and increasingly taking on a confident, nationalistic character. Three years into a war launched by the October 7th massacre, our strategic position is far stronger, our enemies considerably weakened, and the shekel is soaring (much to the frustration of American expats still earning in dollars). Modern Israeli culture has reclaimed figures like Bar Kochba and Shimon Bar Giora, who led the Zealots in the earlier Great Revolt, despite their crushing defeats at Roman hands. They represent a spirit of Jewish agency and independence that still underlies many of Israel’s great military and cultural achievements. Strauss, in his book, quotes Churchill’s line after a 1940 war cabinet meeting: “Nations that go down fighting rise again, but those who surrender tamely are finished.”
It was against this backdrop, both contemporary and ancient, that I especially appreciated Ambassador Huckabee’s remarks when he accepted his award. He spoke twice that night, once in a smaller, filmed setting that has since been clipped and mocked by Tucker Carlson and others with little sense of the context in which it was deliveed. But in his similar, full remarks before an audience of more than a thousand, Huckabee noted that the United States is approaching the 250th anniversary of its independence this July 4th, a milestone that might seem almost laughable set against 3,800 years of Jewish history in this land. “To you, we’re mere children,” he said. “You’ve been around a lot longer, and your history is not only your history, but I want to say this, and I hope you understand, your history is also our history.” He went on: “Without you and your history, and your preserving God’s purpose and God’s law, there would never be Western civilization. There would never be an America, because America was founded on the principles that were established right here in this land all those many thousands of years ago.” Many read Huckabee’s words as a direct answer to Trump’s comments earlier that day. His message was that Israel owes real gratitude to its current great power patron, the United States. But the United States, rooted as it is in biblical values, is itself a kind of outgrowth of the Jewish struggle against Rome that played out nineteen centuries ago. That struggle was the crucible from which both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity were born.
In making this case, Huckabee charts a third way, distinct from the two offered onstage that night. It is not Herod’s path, accommodation purchased through submission and the gradual erosion of what makes a people distinct. Nor is it pure Bar Kochba – righteous rebellion that goes down fighting, in flames. Huckabee’s third way is partnership felt as kinship, a great power and a small nation bound not merely by shared interest but by shared inheritance. America’s strength flows from values Israel gave the world long before America existed to receive them. It is a relationship that asks Israel to feel gratitude without shame, and asks America to remember that the debt runs both ways. Driving home that night, I watched Herodium recede in the rearview mirror, its massive dome holding the dark a little longer than everything around it before finally sinking under the horizon. Herod built it to be seen from Jerusalem. Two thousand years later, it is still a fixed point in an old argument about what is needed for a nation, and the set of ideas it embodies, to fulfill its destiny.
Also published on Substack, if you’re new to my work please considering subscribing!
One of our family’s favorite songs to play in the car here in Israel is a feel-good anthem called “Al Tira Yisrael,” (“Have No Fear, Israel”). The version we listen to, by Israeli singer Itay Levi, is meant to inspire confidence during the difficult period following October 7. Its refrain includes a quote from the Biblical Book of Amos: “Do not fear Israel, do not be afraid, / For are you not a young lion?/ And if a lion roars—who won’t be afraid?/ Who won’t be afraid?”
The sentiment of Israel roaring like a lion reached its pinnacle during the “Sha’agat HaAri” (“Lion’s Roar”) joint US–Israeli campaign against Iran, which took place between Purim and Pesach this year. This, too, draws on Amos and suggests continuity with the “Rising Lion” campaign that took place against Iran one year ago in June. Yet a closer reading of Amos reveals a more complex context for the line, “If a lion roars, who will not be afraid?” One might even ask whether its fear is meant for our enemies or for our own society.
Amos was a Judean shepherd and farmer living in the eighth century bce in a place called Tekoa, located on the edge of the desert southeast of Jerusalem. Despite living in a time of relative tranquility, he is called upon by G-d to warn the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, largely residing in Samaria, to stop their corrupt behavior or face destruction. Amos prophesies using rich and vivid literary language. The lion is one recurring motif among many that the prophet employs to stunning and devastating effect.
Rabbi Yitzchak Etshalom, a well-known Tanach teacher based in Los Angeles, authored a wonderful volume entitled Amos: The Genius of Prophetic Rhetoric published by Maggid Books, an imprint of Koren Publishers in Jerusalem. The book is part of a series of scholarly volumes that address specific Biblical books. Each book is designed to be read on its own but also serves as a learning supplement. It offers deep, line-by-line analysis of a book’s language that is sensitive to the history of traditional interpretation, as well as to its historical and archaeological context, and to a peshat-based “close reading” of the text itself. In this spirit, Rabbi Etshalom’s Amos marries rabbinic interpretation with scholarly analysis, while demonstrating an unyielding dedication to making sense of Amos’s brilliant but dense and sometimes elusive prophetic rhetoric.
“To be a Zionist in 1944, or indeed at any point before the state of Israel is created, requires tremendous imagination, which is why the movement draws mainly the literary and the desperate.”
Hannah Senesh occupies a unique place in Israeli history and memory. Only 19 years old on the eve of World War II, she left her hometown of Budapest to build the land of Israel with her young Zionist peers. At 23, she made the inconceivable choice to parachute back into Nazi-occupied Europe. The mission ultimately failed in its stated purpose and resulted in Senesh’s execution. But it left the fledgling Jewish State with a national hero, whose poetry and diary entries still reverberate today. Senesh wasn’t alone, she was one among a small group of Jewish members of the yishuv who donned British army uniforms in an implausible bid to try to save Jewish lives from the German killing machine, often their own families included. A few of these figures, such as Enzo Sereni and Haviva Reik, also entered the national consciousness, with streets and settlements named in their honor. Others are less well-known. For a story that is this iconic, one would imagine that its details would be more or less widely understood. Yet as Matti Friedman demonstrates in his riveting new book “Out of the Sky,” one of Israel’s greatest legends is also riddled with mysteries and open questions.
The heroic operation was the result of a collaboration between the fledgling Jewish army, the Haganah and British intelligence. The idea, at least as the British understood it, was for a group of Jewish men and women, almost all of them recent refugees from Europe, to join the British army and leverage their skill in their native languages in order to assist British POWs and local resistance fighters behind enemy lines. On the Jewish end, motivations were more multifaceted. The Jewish conscripts sought British military training, which would help them when the time came for their own inevitable war of independence. Even more so, they desperately wanted to try to help the Jewish communities of Europe in some way. A total of 250 men and women were recruited to take part in this unusual mission, but only 37 of them completed the training. Of this number, 12 were captured and seven did not make it home.
Friedman lays out the extent to which this improbable mission, rooted in the loftiest ideals, never really had a chance of succeeding. Firstly, by the time it took place in 1944, most Jews in Europe had already been murdered. No allied powers, including the British commanders overseeing this secret mission, seemed to prioritize saving their lives. Even the safety of the Jewish volunteers was not viewed as urgent. Enzo Sereni, the brilliant Italian Labor Zionist and polymath, who Ben-Gurion tried to prevent from jumping because “there wasn’t another man like him,” was carelessly dropped atop a German army installation in Northern Italy. As Friedman notes in an interesting aside, the Mossad unit operating out of Istanbul at the time had been infiltrated by German double agents, who likely knew about the parachutists’ missions before they even landed.
A visitor could walk through the entire Hannah Senesh House in Sdot Yam — a beautifully renovated museum in the kibbutz where she lived for two years before setting out on her perilous mission — without seeing any mention of a seemingly important fact: that her mission was doomed from the start. Yet Friedman’s aim is not to diminish Senesh’s extraordinary bravery, or that of her fellow operatives. Rather, he seeks to understand their courage in a new light.
In recent years, Friedman has become one of the most compelling English-language chroniclers of Israeli history and society. What distinguishes his work — whether he is examining the brilliant letters of a young Israeli soldier on a Lebanese outpost or recounting Leonard Cohen’s sojourn in Israel after the Yom Kippur War — is his tendency to frame Israel’s turbulent history through a literary lens. While the canon of modern Hebrew wartime literature remains relatively sparse — perhaps because most writers keep their distance from the battlefield — Israel has never lacked for fighters with poetic souls in the state’s early years or today.
Throughout the book, Friedman explores the intellectual worlds of his unusually thoughtful protagonists, suggesting that “if they showed up at a military recruiting office now, they’d probably be turned away.” Senesh, the daughter of a well-known Hungarian-Jewish playwright, dreamed of following in her father’s footsteps and wrote poems of startling quality as early as age 15. Sereni held a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rome. Friedman recounts how, in addition to having already written a novel and novella, he dreamed of writing a great Italian novel which would depict the conflicts and controversies of his time through the lens of his own Jewish family.
In this sense both Senesh and Sereni follow in the path of other great Zionist leaders, like Herzl and Jabotinsky, who began their careers as journalists and writers of fiction, eventually putting aside their universalistic literary ambitions for the more particularistic cause of Jewish sovereignty. Friedman makes the terrific observation that this is no coincidence: “To be a Zionist in 1944, or indeed at any point before the state of Israel is created, requires tremendous imagination, which is why the movement draws mainly the literary and the desperate.”
Part of the book’s premise is that the exquisite literary sensibilities of these proto-Israeli heroes helps explain why they made the jump. Friedman writes: “The parachutists aren’t commandos. They’re storytellers. They’ve been sent to write, with their lives, a Zionist story about the war – a story that will lead others not to despair but to action.” Senesh’s military achievements may have been miniscule – hardly any time passed from the beginning of her mission until her execution in a Hungarian prison, only three months before liberation.
Yet we remember Senesh because of her literary achievements: among them the diary she wrote vividly portraying her transition from a precocious, assimilated 13-year-old girl into a fervent Zionist activist. At every major juncture in her short life Senesh seemed to find the time to quickly craft a phenomenal poem. She handed her fellow fighter “blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame” right before entering occupied Hungary. Shortly before her execution she managed to pen a short lyric poem: “I gambled on what mattered most/The dice were cast. I lost.” While Senesh failed in saving other Jews, and even herself, she succeeded in her larger objective. As Friedman summarizes it: “The mission isn’t military, it’s literary, and she’s the best writer.”
In writing “Out of the Sky” — a book equally about a remarkable episode in history as it is the act of crafting and telling stories — Friedman certainly crafts his own. While many fascinating and heretofore little-known stories about Senesh and her fellow parachuters make it into the book, others do not. Friedman leans toward a portrait of Senesh as a clever, cosmopolitan European. He reminds us of her youth and her theatrical family. In her precocious diary entries, Zionism feels like a role she has chosen to play. He clearly admires her heroism but does not exaggerate it. Yet alternative accounts remain.
In his introduction to the first edition of Senesh’s collected writings, Abba Eban wrote, “all the definitions of giant courage come together in Senesh’s life.” Joel Palgi, another parachutist who followed a similar path to Senesh but inexplicably managed to survive, wrote about her in his memoirs as a force of nature, the undisputed leader of their group, fiercely admired by fellow resistance comrades as she transformed from a poet into a fighter. Even the Gestapo, in Palgi’s telling, were in awe of Senesh. He describes the sadistic prison warden who used to visit Senesh’s cell every day to argue about politics. Senesh’s mother Katherine, in her own memoir, describes the mesmerizing power Senesh held over guards and fellow prisoners alike. Children gravitated toward her, fellow prisoners drew strength from Senesh’s whispered encouragement, her Zionist education campaign, and her ingenious secret broadcasts from the window of her cell. One SS guard told Senesh, “I’ve never known a woman as brave as you.”
“Out of the Sky” does not contradict these remarkable testimonies, which contain a whiff of hagiography, though surely have some grounding in truth. It’s not really a book about superheroes, unusual people with uniquely phenomenal qualities who changed the course of history. Rather, it’s a book about regular people, highly intelligent and talented to be sure, who met the challenges of their age with bravery and foresight. What distinguished them as heroes was that they understood, both in their lives and their deaths, they could contribute to the writing of a story much larger than themselves.
On the seventh morning of this past holiday of Passover in Israel I walked gingerly to synagogue, still groggy from a 3:00 am siren, wondering what had come of President Trump’s ultimatum to Iran issued before I turned off my phone for the final day of the holiday. When I arrived, I saw a friend sitting outside with a weary look – common among parents of five young kids who have been jumping off the walls for nearly six weeks at home during a war. Her youngest lay at her feet on his belly whacking a stick into a muddy puddle leftover from the previous day’s rainstorm. “How are you?” I asked, “actually now I’m great!” she smiled, “did you hear the news? There’s been a ceasefire. They opened the Straits of Hormuz.”
I hadn’t heard, but as I entered the synagogue, the congregation had just risen to hear the Song of the Sea, the chapter of Exodus depicting the splitting of the Red Sea, which is read on the final day of Passover each year when our tradition believes the event took place. Of course, I thought, Trump’s warning had to be issued on the eve of this miraculous commemoration, of course it involved another body of water being opened up to free passage. Of course, if the ceasefire holds, this would mean that the war had run for a course of 40 days more or less, a time period associated with transformation in the Bible. The Hebrew word for Egypt is “Mitzrayim,” which in Jewish thought is often read as “meitzarim,” or “narrow straits.” Could it just be a coincidence that a Strait is at the center of the current conflict? Even my friend’s toddler with his grubby stick started to take on cosmic significance – a mini Moses raising his staff before the splitting of the sea.
Pharaoh and His Army Drown in the Sea. Isfahan, Iran. 19th Century. Property of the Israel Museum
Personally, I have never been one for modern miracle stories, for Bible codes or hidden predictions embedded in numerical patterns in the Torah. I teach literature, so naturally I love stories and myths. But I understand them as just that, human attempts to find patterns in the world in which we live and imbue it with meaning and significance. Yet, at some point since I moved to Israel, my mindset has begun to shift. There is something about being in a land with so much Biblical significance that makes a person start to feel like she is living in the Bible herself.
Take the start of this recent conflagration with Iran, on the morning of the Shabbat before Purim commonly known as “Shabbat Zachor,” “the Sabbath of Remembering.” On this Shabbat we are required to “remember what Amalek did to you on your journey after you left Egypt” (Deut. 25:17). Amalek has been having a bit of a moment lately in the American anti-semite camp. Despite the fact that the injunction to remember Amalek is mentioned in the same Bible that both Jews and Christians cherish, Tucker Carlson and others have been latching onto it as yet another example of Israeli and Jewish treachery. This despite the straightforward nature of the commandment – to destroy an evil nation that, if given the chance, would gladly murder us first, with a particularly malicious focus on abusing the weak, elderly, infirm, etc. In truth, the commandment to “blot out the memory of Amalek” has never really made it to the rotation of practical commandments for religious Jews. We recall it every year as a kind of symbolic reminder of the limits of moral relativism – that we are commanded to wipe out evil as best as we can.
This past Shabbat Zachor was the most memorable one of my life. Synagogues all around the country closed early as sirens rang out, and it was clear that most Israeli Jews would not be able to hear the biblically mandated passage read aloud from a Torah scroll in its proper context. In my case, word got out that it was going to be read on a nearby street corner, and at noon sharp dozens of neighbors emerged from their homes and safe rooms as if out of nowhere. Just as the Torah reader unfurled his scroll and began to chant, an early missile warning rang out. I assumed everyone would run home but one older man shouted “just keep going,” and the biblical verses were read out in a clear and precise fashion. Upon completion, the actual oncoming missile siren blared and everyone listening disappeared almost as suddenly as they had emerged. Later that evening we would discover the improbable news that the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his senior leadership had been killed that same morning by an Israeli strike. Of course, this occurred right around the same time Zachor is normally read in synagogue.
The Purim which followed was a constrained one as the war with Iran increased in intensity and rockets rained down all across Israel. Celebrations were cancelled, public readings of the Scroll of Esther were curtailed, children across the country were devastated that they would not be able to show off their costumes to their teachers and friends. Purim in the Bible takes place not in the Land of Israel but in Persia, the ancient forerunner of Iran. Purim celebrates the improbable overturning of the plot of Haman, the evil advisor to the Persian King Ahashverosh, to destroy the Jewish people. The catchphrase of the holiday is “v’nahafoch hu,” “and it was reversed.” And indeed, what we experienced was the great reversal of a terrible lot that had been cast against the Jews by the neo-Persian Islamist empire. Decades of Iranian sponsored terrorism, money and training funneled to Hamas and Hezbollah and other terror groups, all for the purpose of strangling Israel and murdering its Jews. Finally, our fortunes were reversed, thanks in significant part to the assistance of a great world power and friend (Esther and Mordechai didn’t do it alone either). Now, the sovereign Jewish state directed and influenced the sort of situation in which we previously found ourselves the victim.
One Funny Meme Among Many
Since we were stuck inside for a great deal of that Purim, humorous memes circulated like wildfire. Khamenei contains the same letters as Haman, Trump likened to Ahashverosh (in addition to his relative Cyrus the Great), Benjamin Netanyahu to the righteous Mordechai (who the Bible says is from the tribe of Benjamin). Who then is Esther? Ivanka Trump? Miriam Adelson? At a certain point the analogies turned into Purim parody but no one could doubt that something remarkable was happening. Legends of the past were turning into reality, past and present mingling. One friend said “Purim may have been cancelled but this was the truest Purim we’ve ever had.”
For many of us, these feelings have been gestating since the breakout of October 7th, for some of us even longer. While Hamas chose the timing of their assault to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, it was left to us to parse the significance of it occurring at the climax of the Jewish holiday and yearly Torah reading cycle. Precisely two years later, the anticipation toward the freeing of the final batch of hostages during Sukkot, also known by its Rabbinic name “the time of our joy,” made for one of the most joyous Sukkot celebrations many of us have ever experienced. This idea isn’t a new one in Judaism. The requirement to remember the Exodus from Egypt is a case in point. We don’t only remember the details of the story, or relay the miracles wrought by God. At the Passover seder we say, “in every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he has personally left Egypt.” Jewish tradition supposes a kind of reliving, not only a remembering, of the events of the Bible in every subsequent generation.
This past year I bought my myth and fantasy loving son a beautiful book called The Mythmakers, a graphic novel by John Hendrix which depicts the famed literary friendship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The book aims, among other things, to get to the heart of what myth is – stories for which the category of “fact” or “fiction” is irrelevant because they explore the way a culture understands itself and its history. A true myth, the book’s wise Gandalf-line narrator explains, “takes place in a ‘time out of time’ and a ‘place out of place’ – separated from our reachable world.” This is part of the magic of myth, that something so completely distant and foreign can also feel so incredibly familiar. The book contains an entertaining visual romp through examples of ancient myths that include among them the book of Genesis and Jonath and the Whale.
What I’ve realized, I suppose, after the events of the last few years, is that moving to Israel means that the events of the Bible stop being myths and start to be something else, maybe something closer to prophecy – or a blueprint, a pattern, for the world we live in. This is different from the relationship that Jews outside of Israel have to the weekly Torah portion, which they read, find personal connections in, or use to generate a wise insight that connects to life in some meaningful way. That sort of reading treats the text essentially as myth, even if you happen to believe the myth is true even on a literal level. What’s going on now in Israel is actually a bit more prosaic than myth, maybe even less intellectually exciting. We don’t need to perform convoluted hermeneutic somersaults to see the connections between the Jewish story here in Israel and our foundational texts – rather the connection is simple and palpable. As sophisticated readers, we shouldn’t need the current war against Iran to be completely geographically aligned with our ancient Persian struggle in order to draw parallels (though it happens to be). The terrorists of Hamas don’t have to be actually located in ancient Philistine territory in order to be associated with those enemies (though they are). They don’t have to voluntarily call themselves Palestinians in order to recall those bloodthirsty adversaries of the biblical Israelites (though they do). We know how to read texts and draw subtle inferences, create complicated analogies, and find meaning where it isn’t obvious. But what is there to say when the parallels are so simple and present?
Another Biblical text we read over the Passover holiday is Ezekiel 37, the vision of the dry bones. The vision takes place after the first destruction of the Jewish temple, when the Jewish people are in the Babylonian exile. God places the prophet Ezekiel in a valley full of bones and asks him “O human being, can these bones live again.” We all know the answer, on a symbolic level. Old ideas can be refreshed; a once vanquished people can be reborn. Ezekiel probably has a sense of where God is going with this and starts prophesying. In the midst of his prophecy he is startled by a strange sound, “suddenly there was a sound of rattling, and the bones came together, bone to matching bone.” To Ezekiel’s surprise this rich and literary parable has taken a literal turn: the breath of God enters the bones and they actually come to life. God does not say “as if.” He tells the people of Israel: “I will put my breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil.”
Ezekiel Sees the Dry Bones (Dura Europos Synagogue, 244 CE)
The nice thing about myth is that, with enough exposure, you learn to read between the lines- to recognize where a narrative is heading and what it asks of us. Living the story in medias res (in the middle of things) is never as clear. Does this current ceasefire spell some kind of meaningful turning point for the Jewish people or is it just one pause in a long grind of missiles and war? Which of today’s leaders, like an aging and delusional Saul, is nearing his end—and who, if anyone, might emerge as a Davidic alternative? Living the Bible in real time doesn’t give us unique prophetic access to what the future holds. It doesn’t immunize us from mistakes, nor does it make our pain or grief over loss any less acute. But it assures us that what’s taking place now is far from random: that God’s magnificent plan for the Jewish people is still unfolding, and that the center of the Jewish story remains where it’s always been, here in the Land of Israel.
“My teacher used to say that we must learn to stay with a difficult question for forty years. Not to let up, and not to despair. Then there is a chance that we will reach the truth.”
Amid the chaos and trauma of October 7, 2023, one of the innumerable cultural events deferred was the release of a unique documentary about the elusive Monsieur Shoshani. Shoshani’s mysterious persona, brilliance, and iconoclastic disposition have been the stuff of legend since he emerged from Europe after the Holocaust (he is depicted on the movie poster as a hunched-over figure carrying a suitcase). Shoshani was purportedly a master of Jewish tradition, Western philosophy, mathematics, science, and as many as thirty languages. He taught Torah everywhere he went—France, Morocco, Israel, and Uruguay—though what, exactly, he taught and where he came from remain a mystery. His students ranged from scholars and physicists to farmers and Holocaust orphans.
After he met Shoshani, the great French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas famously said, “I cannot tell what he knows; all I can say is that all that I know, he knows.” His gravestone in Montevideo, Uruguay, reportedly paid for by Elie Wiesel, reads, “His birth and life were sealed in a riddle.”
Although Shoshani’s life remains shrouded in mystery, the curtain seems to be drawing back, at least a bit.In 2021, the National Library of Israel announced Shoshani, whom Levinas once called “the Oral Torah in his entirety,” had left dozens of notebooks behind. Some of these cryptic notes…had been preserved in a secretive trust by four of his students since 1969. Another trove was donated to the National Library by Professor Shalom Rosenberg, an Argentinian-born scholar of Jewish thought at Hebrew University who became close with Shoshani toward the end of his life. For the last fifteen years, French Israeli director Michael Grynszpan has toiled and puzzled over the notebooks and the life of their author. His result is The Shoshani Riddle, which chronicles Grynszpan’s hunt for Shoshani and his attempts to piece together the master’s life story.
In the early hours of June 13 my family and I, like all Israelis, were awakened by the shrill sound of a phone alert. Israel had preemptively attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities. Momentous news, but I promptly put my pillow over my head and went back to sleep. Only when we woke up again later that morning did we realize that something historic had occurred. We also understood that a challenging period lay ahead.
We had only recently moved into a new home and, despite Houthis sporadically firing missiles in our direction, we had grown lax about running to our safe room, what Israelis call a mamad. Ours was filled with dust and leftover construction material. But on the day of the phone alerts—once we’d grasped the gravity of what was happening—we got to work. We spread a plastic mat over the floor, brought in a spare mattress, and set up a pack-and-play crib. The missile fire from Iran began in earnest that evening.
As the days wore on, we adjusted to the confines of this small space where emotions vacillated between fear, comfort from the presence of those we loved, and occasional irritation by those very same people. One mattress turned into four—each of our seven children laid claim to their own little spot. The more time we spent in our safe room, sometimes joined by friends or near strangers who needed a place to shelter, the more we acclimated ourselves to its deprivations and, occasionally, to its surreal benefits. Sociologists talk about the “third place,” which is an additional living space beyond home or work, like a synagogue, for example. These places expose us to people, ideas, and experiences beyond our immediate family and daily routines. During Israel’s twelve-day war with Iran our safe rooms also became a third place, introducing a new mentality and way of being that removed us from our day-to-day lives.
The Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem is known for its collection of Near Eastern antiquities from the Biblical period. Yet amidst its galleries stands a startling cultural artifact of far more recent origin.
Kuma—meaning “Rise”—is a nearly ten-foot-long scroll depicting a dense, vivid, intellectually rich, and aesthetically stunning account of Jewish history. Its full title, “Kuma, Mei Afatzim ve-Kankantum,” refers to the materials used to prepare ink for Torah scrolls and other sacred texts. Evoking an unfurled Torah scroll, Kuma is the high-school senior project of a brilliant young yeshiva student, artist and poet named Eitan Rosenzweig הי”ד. Staff Sgt. Rosenzweig, an Alon Shvut native and student in the Yerucham Yeshivat Hesder, served in the Givati brigade and was killed in Gaza in November 2023, at the age of 21.
Kuma weaves together Jungian theories of the unconscious, the mythologist Joseph Campbell’s concept of the heroic journey, and imagery drawn from Western art and Jewish history—some of which appear elsewhere in the Bible Lands Museum. Kuma also incorporates literary allusions to the Bible, Talmud, modern Hebrew literature, Eastern and Western general philosophy, and more. It is a work of art that one must study rather than merely observe.
“Books, even works of genius, are not incandescent orbs that exist independently in some kind of ether. For books to have enduring value, they must be read by people. For those readers to exist, they must be born and raised.”
Was a pleasure to review Ilana Kurshan’s fantastic new book for the Summer issue of Tradition, now available online.
