web analytics
May 26, 2013 /17 Sivan, 5773
At a Glance ▼
InDepth
Sponsored Post
The Tosfos Yomtov was convinced that the death of 300,000 –600,000 Jews during the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648-49 were because of improper Tefila. Communicated: Tefilla

Chillul Tefila Bifarhesia, as well as halachicly challenged verbiage and dress, are external manifestations of a critical lack of personal yiras shomayim which has lethal consequences.



This Time It’s Personal

When my daughter first made aliyah she was a student at Hebrew University. After a year she called me and told me she was enlisting.

Latest update: November 27th, 2012
tell a friend
DSC_1300.jpeg

I still remember, when I was a boy of just seven, walking with my father, early on the morning of 6th October, 1973, to synagogue. He had promised me that I could break my fast shortly after arriving. Now, he stopped me en route and told me a war had just broke out in Israel and the small Jewish nation was fighting for its very life. The situation was dire. I should show God added devotion by fasting longer in deference to the life mortal struggle of my fellow Jews. I was upset, I was starving, but I did as he asked and broke my fast after mid-day.

That Yom Kippur was my first memory of an Israeli war. We feverishly watched the news over the next few days until Israel finally began to turn the tide and push its enemies back.

There were moments of elation as well. I remember being in Chabad sleep away camp in Homestead, Florida on 4 July, 1976, American’s Bicentennial, when an excited head counselor started screaming over the loudspeaker that Israel had pulled off a daring rescue of Jewish hostages in some far-off place called Entebbe in Africa.

Fast forward to November, 1982, when I was a student at Chabad High School in Los Angeles. I traveled on a Friday, at the height of Israel’s war in Lebanon, to witness the arrival of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to the Century Plaza hotel before the Sabbath to show my solidarity with the beleaguered leader. I still remember Begin arriving in his dark limousine looking ashen-faced, having just heard the terrible news that tens of soldiers had died in an explosion when a building had collapsed in Lebanon. Still, he nodded his head in his car to me as he passed. Tragically, even more bad news would await him as his wife Aliza would pass away while he was in Los Angeles a few days later.

There were other pressing moments in Israeli history that I remember well. But none comes near the current action against the terrorists of Hamas which has touched deeper than any previous occurrence. This time, we have a daughter in the Israeli army and her base in just a few kilometers outside of Gaza.

She was standing at a ceremony on Thursday morning when Hamas’ murderous rockets began to rain down near her base. The sirens went off and everyone was ordered to a bunker. They watched as Israel’s ingenious Iron Dome went to work. Tragically, it was not enough to stop a rocket from hitting Kiryat Malachi and murdering three Chabad Chassidim, including a pregnant woman. My daughter heard the explosion. She can still see the hole in the roof of the apartment building easily from her base.

The base was evacuated and my daughter moved to the relative safety of Jerusalem on Thursday night. My wife and I breathed a sigh of relief. But then, before the Sabbath came in, we were informed that she and a skeletal crew were ordered back to the base on Saturday night for guard duty. She would have to remain for a few days thereafter. That Sabbath, I was a scholar-in-residence in Palm Beach, Florida and, during one of my speeches, I asked the Synagogue to pray with me for her safety and the safety of all Israel’s soldiers. Never before had the prayer for Israel’s Defense Forces meant so much or been felt so deeply.

Over the next few days when I called my daughter on the base the phone conversations were interrupted many times as the alarm sounded and she had to rush to safety in a nearby bunker. I was amazed at her courage and sense of normalcy. This was her new life and she would get used to it without panic.

Beginning in 1988 at the University of Oxford I made defending the State of Israel against its enemies a central calling in my life. I have given countless lectures on Israel’s safety, security, and right to defend itself and written even more columns on the subject. But it’s different now. It’s gone from the abstract to the very tangible and real.

I have always heard about parents who have children in the military during a war. You try not to think about it. You tell yourself the chances of God forbid anything happening are negligible as to not be worth worrying about. But you are forever aware that you and your child are in God’s hands. You turn to Him for comfort and safety. Your daughter is an adult. She has made their decision to serve. You honor and respect it even as it engenders serious discomfort and leaves a pit in your stomach at all times.

tell a friend

About the Author: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi” whom the Washington Post calls “the most famous Rabbi in America,” is the international best-selling author of 29 books, including The Fed-up Man of Faith: Challenging God in the Face of Tragedy and Suffering. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.


You might also be interested in:


no comments

You must log in to post a comment.

No Responses to “This Time It’s Personal”

  1. Yehuda Cohen says:
    November 26, 2012 at 5:40 PM

    In truth the last sentence should be "our children succeed wherein their parents fail and continue to fail for not moving to and living in Israel.”.

SocialTwist Tell-a-Friend

Current Top Story
Sayed Nasrallah Speech
Nasrallah Vowing to Sustain Assad’s Regime (Dubbed Video)
Latest Indepth Stories
Al-Dura_Postage_Stamp
InDepth → Op-Eds

France 2 and Enderlin must have their press accreditation revoked and be thrown out of Israel.

Palestinian kindergarten children enacting a military operation.
InDepth → Op-Eds

Slaughter is a routine, widespread practice among many Moslem families.

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has said he will never recognize a Jewish state and there will be no Jews allowed in a Palestinian State.
InDepth → Op-Eds

parently an affront to J Street’s worldview, the focus of which appears to be the creation of a Palestinian State, whether or not that will bring peace.

Member of Knesset Moshe Feiglin (Likud).
InDepth → Columns → Moshe Feiglin

The importance of the caucus on organ harvesting in China, sponsored recently by the Liberal Lobby in the Knesset, cannot be exaggerated.

InDepth → Columns → Dov Shurin

My mother, the eldest daughter of Reb Yaakov Kamenetsky, zt”l, was niftar last month at the age of 92. She took her last breath in her home in Efrat, Israel, next door to the shul that was my father’s for 24 years before his passing in 2007.

InDepth → Columns → Louis Rene Beres

Following the Boston Marathon bombing, one crucial point will likely remain overlooked. The most loathsome aspect of this or any other terror bombing attack on civilians will always lie in the inexpressibility of physical pain. While all decent people will abhor the idea of bombs expressly directed at the innocent, whether here or in other countries, none will ever be able to process the very deepest horrors of what has been inflicted.

InDepth → Columns → Keeping Jerusalem

It’s only natural to see increasing evidence of Jerusalem’s glorious Jewish past being unearthed, quite literally, under modern Israeli sovereignty. The new archaeological finds are also very timely – as the Arab onslaught attempting to detach Jerusalem from its Jewish roots gains steam, the facts on the ground, or “under” the ground, show quite otherwise.

InDepth → Op-Eds

The Talmud (Berachot 26b) says, “tefillot avot tiknum” – “prayer was established by the avot.” The Talmud then uses the following verse (Bereshit 19:27) to prove how Avraham established prayer: “Vayaskem Avraham baboker el hamakom asher amad sham et pnei Hashem” – “And Avraham got up early in the morning to the place where he had stood before God.”

InDepth → Op-Eds

Nearly 13 years ago, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak journeyed to Camp David to end the conflict with the Palestinians. With the approval of President Clinton, he offered Yasir Arafat an independent Palestinian state in almost all of the West Bank, Gaza and in part of Jerusalem. Arafat said no.

InDepth → Op-Eds

The news that the Internal Revenue Service unfairly targeted conservative groups has brought renewed spotlight on a 2010 lawsuit filed by the pro-Israel group Z Street, which alleges it was also singled out by the IRS when applying for tax-exempt status.

InDepth → Editorial

In an editorial last week (“Circling the Wagons”) we noted the efforts by the administration and its supporters to dismiss allegations that the government’s spin on the Benghazi attack was designed to shield the president and that the IRS was improperly used to stifle opposition to Mr. Obama’s reelection.

InDepth → Editorial

As the controversies besetting the Obama administration continue to grow in number and intensity, the prospect that President Obama would seriously consider military action against Iran, should that country continue its drive to become a nuclear power, becomes more and more remote. So we welcome the current enhancement of sanctions against Iran on the federal and New York State levels.

InDepth → Interviews and Profiles

To his parents’ friends, he was “Mrs. Greenberg’s disgrace,” but to sports fans he is one of the greatest – if not the greatest – Jewish baseball players of all time. Long before Sandy Koufax, Hank Greenberg excited Jewish sports fans with his prowess on the baseball diamond.

More Articles from Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
Holocaust
InDepth → Columns → America's Rabbi / Shmuley Boteach

Are we to believe that these Jews who were devout and pious were being punished?

William Dodd, the United States ambassador to Germany, in 1934.
InDepth → Columns → America's Rabbi / Shmuley Boteach

The growing revelations that the Obama State Department watered down public statements on the attack in order to cleanse them of any mention of al Qaeda and terrorism is a travesty.

InDepth → Columns → America's Rabbi / Shmuley Boteach

When in 1948 President Harry Truman recognized the new Jewish State of Israel, Einstein declared it ‘the fulfillment of our dream.’

InDepth → Columns → America's Rabbi / Shmuley Boteach

In the Hebrew Bible everyone is flawed and everyone makes mistakes.

InDepth → Columns → America's Rabbi / Shmuley Boteach

Forgetting how to hate can be just as damaging as forgetting how to love.

InDepth → Columns → America's Rabbi / Shmuley Boteach

Let us also not forget that Adelson criticized many of the social values of the Republican Party before it became fashionable to do so.

InDepth → Op-Eds

Whatever your feelings about how permissive or repressed our society is, certainly not in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s ,or 90’s was the sexualization of women this young.

InDepth → Columns → America's Rabbi / Shmuley Boteach

Through the process of the ten plagues, the Jews saw the Egyptians for what they were, just another group of petrified humans.

    Latest Poll

    If you could only choose one of the following scenarios regarding Chareidi IDF service, which would you choose?





    View Results

    Loading ... Loading ...

Printed from: http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/america-rabbi-shmuley-boteach/this-time-its-personal/2012/11/26/

Scan this QR code to visit this page online:

No related posts.

Close