When Love of Life Meets the Call to Sacrifice: The Spirit of Israel -Tehila Gimpel: Land of Israel

M so I wanted to share with you guys an experience. I feel like I need to give testimony to what I saw last week to what we experienced last week because it was so powerful. I feel I just need I just need you guys know you guys know me already. I usually come with like my Bible ready to you know say you know this this thing about the Torah portion and that thing about the Torah portion. And this week, I just feel like I need to share my heart and unbburden like this testimony of what I saw and experienced and felt. On Wednesday night, Jeremy and I um went to the funeral of Daniel Perro, who was a tank commander uh whose body was returned uh in this last deal. and he was a tank commander that on October 7th was uh with his team with uh Itai and Tomare and with Matan and they were one tank right in front of that wall of Gaza just standing in front of these hordes of barbarians bursting through and they didn't run away and they just fought till their very very very last strength. um Daniel and it and Tom were killed and Matan was taken captive and Daniel's body and it's body were also taken captive and Daniel's family for more than a 100 days didn't even uh know what happened to him. They thought that he was possibly captive by the kamas and eventually found out that he had been uh that he had been killed because they found a shirt with his blood. And so if you guys can believe such a thing, we actually went to the second funeral of the same person. That's not something that happens to you every day to go to somebody's second funeral because they didn't know if they were ever going to get Daniel's body back. So they buried his shirt with his blood. They did the whole funeral with all the eulogies. Um and then and then they had to open up his grave when they got his body back and do the whole funeral all over again. So that was uh what we were doing on Wednesday night. And we get to this funeral of this just unbelievably heroic boy uh only 22 years old who fought to be a combat soldier because he had an injury and they didn't want to even accept him into combat. He had to fight to be in combat and then just went up against thousands of terrorists that were just bursting through Gaza, killed dozens of terrorists, saved hundreds of lives. and he, you know, so we're at this funeral and Jeremy and I are just packed in there with thousands of people coming to the second funeral and out of nowhere shows up Matan who had just two days ago, two days earlier, been freed from two years in Gaza. And I recognized him because I had seen the video of him being released. And I see him walk up to the front of the funeral and it's like thousands of people there in the cemetery. You just hear this like gasp of so many people at the same time because you can't believe that this person he's so pale and so emaciated that he's standing there to give to give you know honor to his commander and then we were there. Imagine 3 hours of eulogies back to back. We're all just standing in the cemetery in the military cemetery. 3 hours of the most unbelievable eulogies from his from the president and and and you know army generals and his friends and then uh it's 3 hours and it felt almost like nobody wanted it to end. His sister actually said she says I don't want I don't want this funeral to end. Is like if you could say such a thing I don't want a funeral to end. Who wouldn't want a funeral? Was like, I don't want a funeral the funeral to end because then it's like it's over. It's real. And it it was like no one wanted this funeral to end. We're just 3 hours of talking about this unbelievable hero. And then his father gets up. He says, "Listen, it's 11:00 at night. We've been here for 3 hours. I'm going to give the last eulogy and then we're we're going to go home." And out of nowhere, and this was so unexpected, Matan jumps up onto the stage, whispers into Rav Daron, Daniel's father's ear, and takes the microphone and starts speaking, and no one can believe this. We're like, what is happening? Somebody who is 48 hours out of two years in Gaza has the strength to come and speak. So I just I want to share this with you and then and then share with you guys what we what we learned, you know, what we felt after this. I just want to share with you guys the it's it's just a small clip. He he spoke for a while, but just a small clip of uh what he said. What's up? foreign. Daniel, Daniel. So [Music] The villain is [Music] [Applause] Is that unbelievable? And try to imagine that it's a funeral and thousands of people burst into aorious applause in a funeral. And people just could not stop applauding this. And you know, there's a few things there that were so remarkable. There were so I I think I emptied the contents of my face into my sweater at that moment. I was just like holding my I couldn't I was holding my head. I couldn't I didn't feel like I could hold my own head up. I was it was when he says there were when he says to Danielle's family, I'm going to walk with you. I'm going to take care of you for the rest of our lives. Like he's this is a person who should everybody single one of us should be taking care of for the rest of his life. he's not two days out of Gaza and saying that he wants to take care of them. And then when he says, you know, his friends, his friend, their other friend, Itai, is still held in Gaza and he says, "I would go in right now. I would go in right now to Gaza to go and get him myself." He actually said to the to the to his commander, the first thing he said when he was released was like, "I want to get better and go right back into combat. Like, I'm ready to keep on fighting." And he was such a remarkable young man. And you know, when we when we left the funeral, Jeremy and I looked at each other and we were just like, "What did what did we just witness? What just happened?" And it took me time. I'm I'm trying to process what did I just see? And then what struck me was that it was as if the concentrate like the most intense essence of the courage of the fallen was being represented in Daniel. like the willingness to run forward to your most certain death to save others and the courage of the living. people who have the unbelievable strength to go on and to cling to life and to love life and hold on to the sanctity of life even in the tunnels of Gaza for two years and hold on to their godly image and not forget who they are and what they are. It was like the concentrate and the essence of that was represented in that moment in Matan. And as Matan is standing over the grave of Daniel, it was like an atomic bomb of the meeting of the essence of the essence of the heroism of the fallen and the heroism of the living of these of our modern heroes of this era that we're living in. And it was like watching this it was I felt as if a portal between this world and the world to come just opened up. something like for a moment I felt like I was in a revelation. I said I have to I I don't know what this is but something opened up. It felt like like heaven opened up and there was this meeting for just a moment of this incredible essence. And then it struck me that really is what makes Israel so unique because you know there there are there are nations there are peoples there are cultures that have tremendous self-sacrifice. We can say a lot of things about kamas and their evil, but what's theirs is theirs. They are willing to sacrifice their lives and give up their lives for what they think is being called of them, what they think is right, what they think is being, you know, told to them by Allah. And there are cultures in the world that love life, that cling to life, that that that want to have the joys of life and the pleasures of life and the consumerism of life. And we'll do, you know, people people will pay a lot of money for, you know, every supplement and every drug just to have one, you know, just to hold on to a bit of life. I think what's so unique about Israel is that Israel loves life. If you come to Israel, even in the worst days of the war, you'll see people getting married and being happy and having children and children running around and there's joy. Even in the darkest darkest days, there's always a love of life, not giving up on the actual goodness of life. But at the same time, a willingness that we've seen to run, not walk, to run towards self-sacrifice, losing limbs, losing life to help others, to save others, to save lives. And we see it again and again and again. And you know, a culture that's willing to of people that are willing to die and sacrifice their lives. Okay. But if you don't really value life, does that really mean anything? Is that really so valuable? Does that is that is that something to, you know, admire? Israel loves life so much. And with all of that love, there are people like Daniel who are willing to run run to give up their life to save others. And it was like this this meeting of that love of life and the courage and self-sacrifice that was so moving. And you know, it it made me think about, you know, we're now starting I can't I can't talk to you guys without going a little bit biblical. We, you know, we just started the book of Genesis and that really is like the essence of the beginning of God's message to us because there's the tree of life, loving life. God makes us in the makes man in the image of God, the sanctity of life, but then there's that knowledge of good and evil. Like once evil comes into the world, you will surely die. Death will come. Once evil comes into the world, death is sure to follow. And it's like this there's this energy of clinging to life and this force of death that come into the world in the beginning of Genesis. And I think that the book of Genesis is that struggle. This book that we're going to now be studying together once again in this season is really about that struggle of when do we cling to life and when do we sacrifice. We're going to see it with Abraham sacrificing, being willing to sacrifice his son, with arguing with God to cling to life even of the Sodommites. Like, that's going to be the struggle of this book. And the book of Genesis eventually culminates in Judah's willing to sacrifice himself to save Benjamin. In Joseph saying to his brothers, "Don't worry. God had a plan. Like, I was I suffered. I was in captivity, but it was all to save lives. It was to prevent a famine. It was all for good. And I think that that's, you know, that is that is the unique strength of Israel that we're seeing come out right now. And, you know, we should just merit to be worthy merit to be worthy of these heroes. Bye, guys. [Music]