How Netanyahu Became the Greatest Jew Alive

(The speech I gave before Prime Minister Netanyahu this past Friday night at Shabbat dinner in New York City just hours after he eliminated Hassan Nasrallah and just as he was about to board his plane to return to Israel.)

I had the great honor and privilege of being asked to introduce the prime minister at a Shabbat dinner in Manhattan before he left for the airport. Netanyahu does not travel on Shabbat, buthad to after the IDF assassinated arch-terrorist Hassan Nasrallah.

Bibi and Sarah were now sitting a few seats away, and I beganmy introduction:

This morning at the UN, Prime Minister, you reminded the world that this Shabbat we are reading from the book of Deuteronomy. I attended your UN speech where you quoted, for the second year running, the most important encapsulation of Judaism: Moses, on the last day of his life, enunciating as a blessing and a curse to the Jewish people. Prime Minister, you repeated that Moses had laid out a choice between a blessing and a curse, between life and death. Like Moses, you said, Jews and the rest of the world must choose life.

Moses was not the leader of the Jewish people because he was the wisest or most charismatic person. He had a speech impediment and was far from eloquent. Rather, like us American Jews who join you tonight, he grew up with a joint identity and was accused of dual loyalties. He was both a Hebrew and an Egyptian. But one day he went out to the fields and saw an Egyptian taskmaster brutalizing a Jewish slave.

At last, he had to choose.

The Torah famously says, “Moses looked this way and that way. And then he saw that there was no man. And he smote the Egyptian.”

He looked this way, Prime Minister, at the UN. He looked the other way at the EU. He looked this way at the New York Times. He looked the other way at CNN and the BBC. What would he choose? He looked left at the ICC and saw they would issue an arrest warrant against him. He looked right at the ICJ and saw they would do the same. But he also saw that if he cared more for public approbation or condemnation, more for international acclaim than righteousness and justice – then, ‘there was no man.’ He would be not even a person. Thus, he chose to showexemplary moral courage. He smote Hamas. He struck at Hezbollah. He punished Iran. He hit back at the Houthis. He told the world to go to hell and rescued the Israelite – and went on tosave his nation.

That man is you, Prime Minister.

The first time we met, I was just 22. It was 1989, and I was an emissary of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the first–ever Rabbi in residence at the University of Oxford. Netanyahu and I rode together in a police car the government assigned to protectIsrael’s young Deputy Foreign Minister. As we drove through Oxford, I pointed it its major landmarks.

Bibi turned to me, steely-eyed, and said, “Shmuley, with all of these dreaming Oxford spires for which this University is world-renowned, I cannot but recall the utter hypocrisy of the British who, after six years of the Holocaust, where 10,000 Jews were murdered every day, they interned the survivors in Cyprus, left them rotting on ships, and barred them from entering their ancestral homeland. They didn’t even allow these emaciated scarecrows, these walking corpses, to come to Israel. The hypocrisy!” 

While Bibi said this, I turned this way and that way, to the two plain-clothes Special Branch detectives sitting in the front seat to protect him. But if there was a single damn to give, Bibi never gave it. He never looked this way or that way but stared straight ahead uncowed and utterly unintimidated. I thought to myself then, ‘This man is Mordechai who ‘would not bow and who will not bend.’’

Prime Minister, you have shown that same moral courage time and time again, but never more so in the decision you made early this morning to destroy the Jewish people’s foremost enemy, Hassan Nasrallah.

After Israel suffered the greatest tragedy since the Holocaust when Hamas massacred 1,200 people on October 7 and kidnapped 251 others – including 12 Americans – you had a choice to make. It was a difficult one that would place thousands of Israeli soldiers, like my two sons, in harm’s way and draw the opprobrium of the UN, the EU, and the New York Times. You did not look for their approval but insisted that Israel woulddestroy the terrorists who orchestrated the massacre.

After nearly a year of criticism from every direction, you did not flinch in the fight against Hamas and Hezbollah. The world that sees Jewish life as cheap said nothing for all those months when terrorists from Lebanon bombarded northern Israel with rockets, forcing nearly 100,000 people to leave their homes.

Ceasefire! ceasefire! demands the UN, and the EU, and even the United States. But it is only Israel that is pressured to surrender to the terrorists. But the prime minister has stood tall and fast against unimaginable pressure. And who knows better than you the need to rescue the hostages while still somehow forging ahead against the murderers who seek the Jewish people’s genocide.

Your beloved brother Yoni paid with his life to free the hostages from Entebbe.

Prime Minister, in your speech today you said that Moses commanded us to choose between life and death. But you, son of the eminent historian Ben-Zion Netanyahu, know full well that we Jews for two thousand years have had no such choice. 

Yes, we could choose. But not between life and death. But only between death and death. The only choice given to us by an inhuman, reptilian, antisemitic world was how we would die.

It was the choice faced even by even great Jewish warriors like Elazar Ben Yair at Massada who, seeing that Roman ramp finally complete, summoned his remaining 700 brave fighterswho had held off the mighty Romans for four years, and told them they could still steal the Roman victory. They committed mass suicide in what was seen as a great act of courage. 

Fast forward 2000 years to May of 1943 and the incomparable Mordechai Anielewicz, who battled Nazi troops to a virtual standstill in the Warsaw Ghetto for three weeks – which was more than the entire French Army could hold out against Hitler.

At Mila 18 he gathers his 700 fighters is forced to make the decision. We can either die as sheep to the slaughter, he tells them, we can be put on trains where they’ll gas us, or we can die and kill as many of these monsters as possible. Nearly all died when, at the last moment, they blew themselves up with their remaining grenades, but not before they sent hundreds of Nazi SS to the nether regions of hell. 

Now Prime Minister, on the same day that you told the UN that the world must choose between life and death, you, guided by God and in command of the bravest Jewish army in history, the IDF, have finally restored the original promise of Moses. Not a choice between death and death, but between life and death.

You have restored life to your people. You have restored dignity to the Jewish person. And you have restored the infinite value of life to an eternal nation that just 70 years ago was turned into smoke and ashes.

By your actions, Prime Minister, you have restored to the Jewish people the choice between life and death that was stolen from us for so long. No longer must we resign ourselves to the choice of “death and death,” as did the brave fighters of Masada and the Warsaw Ghetto. Now, we can choose life, protected by the incomparable bravery of the IDF and the steadfast leadership of a Prime Minister who looks not this way and that way but is rather a man who looks promisingly toward the future, toward apromised land of Jews living in peace in their homeland having vanquished their genocidal enemies once and for all.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi,” whom the Washington Post calls “the most famous Rabbi in America,” is the international best-selling author of the newly published guide to fighting for the Jewish State, “The Israel Warrior.” Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.