‘I Will Look for the Beauty These Monsters Have Created’

Overture

“You didn’t hear this conversation,” the dashing young IDF officer smiled at me as he was about to ask a friend to supplement standard IDF protective gear.

“Of course not,” I answered, and walked discreetly away.

With my upcoming fourth two-week stretch of volunteering since 10/7 unfortunately postponed, instead of packing I took time to consider a half-dozen extraordinary organizations which I have been privileged to help.

As Super Savta Packers co-creator Chaim Freud proudly says, “a lot of these were created on 10/9.  Every walk of life has come together to help Am Israel.”

Super Savta Packers

The need became obvious: all the little things, the minor privations that accumulate to become intolerable.  For women: nail files, lipsticks, clippers, tweezers.  For children: toys, Purim masks, crayons, coloring books.  For chayalim: socks, gloves, underwear, blankets, beef jerky.

Dividing their time between Efrat and Hewlett, Judy and Chaim Freud looked for opportunities to give – and to inspire others to help.

Seeing so many needs in Israeli hospitals and displaced persons centers, back on Long Island they set up in a former bank building re-imagined as a Chesed Center, put out the word for a Sunday morning mitzvah meet, and expected maybe two people.

When 500 people showed up, they knew they were on to something.

OK, packing 17 duffel bags full of supplies was one thing.  Getting them through notoriously sharp-eyed Israeli customs was something else.

When the agent gave her a quizzical look, Judy Freud returned an imperious glare.  He, well, for 4,000 years, from Sora Emanu on down, Jewish women know how to protect their babies.  Overmatched, he simply waved her through.

Maybe it was more than that.  Maybe it was what she wrote the following Simchat Torah, after creating and volunteering and inspiring and staying strong, as they all have, after a year when so much innocent blood was shed.  When so many sacred lives were lost.

“I will look,” she wrote, “for the beauty these monsters created.  The Beauty of Unity amongst us.”

People for Israel

Things were so quiet for so long that they kidded Dovid Gantshar for packing heat.  Cowboy, they called him on the moshav, Neve Michael, the American toting the Big Iron on his hip, subset Glock 9mm.

They’re not joking anymore.

Spurred to action by 10/7, he put his international business on hold to create People for Israel, his own de facto aid mission, raising money, racing around, supplying – whatever’s needed.

Given Israel’s infamously slow, clotted bureaucracy, suddenly faced with far too many needs over too few resources and too little time, Gantshar used his considerable hondling skills to procure whatever chalayim need – scopes, sweatshirts, socks.  Shabbat cakes, candies, and cookies.

Jouncing over twisting, turning, no-name rocky roads, he makes daytime deliveries to observation posts, checkpoints, pillboxes, junctions.  At one stop, a soldier – call him Avromi — gestures at the next hilltop.  “That’s a hard-core Hamas village over there,” he says.  “And a yishuv over here.”  He pauses.  “We’re here to keep them apart.”

Before the jeeps roll again, though, time for dinner, dvrei Torah, dancing – flute, guitar, keyboard, harmonica – as if it were a chasanah.

Then out again.  By this time, though, Gantshar is already back in his car.  More stops to make before dark.

Just One Chesed

The storage rooms in Efrat are crammed with materiel of every conceivable variety: portable showers.  Blankets.  Tourniquets.  Tactical gloves.  Knee pads.  Tefillin.  Thermals — 50,000 of the latter alone.

Perhaps most important, the Gmach: loans of highly expensive combat vests, helmets, fire-resistant boots and clothing.

With much of the funding from American donors, Just One Chesed concentrates on helping chayalim and miluim with, well, virtually everything.  Aside from support for soldiers and their families, there are Meals for Heroes — free meals for anyone in uniform.  Action Days — children passing street booths are given sweets and encouraged to write letters to soldiers.  And much more.

“The goal,” says coordinator Tuviah Levin, “is to make people into doers.”

Tzitzit for Tzahal

It’s the IDF’s hot fashion statement: tzitzit!

When tzitzit literally saved the lives of chayalim on 10/7, soldiers who could quickly prove that they were true IDF members, thousands of chalayim have adopted wearing them – even, or especially, those who had never previously worn the traditional four-cornered, fringed undershirt.

With initial demand skyrocketing to an unprecedented 100,000 sets – along with a recent order for 100,000 more – traditional lines of supply were simply incapable of meeting demand.

Up stepped Tzitzit for Tzahal, a volunteer organization that began in borrowed quarters on the top floor of Jerusalem’s Eretz Chemdah yeshiva.  Now in seven locations all over Israel, and ably overseen by transplanted Torontonian Eli Poch, all that’s required is patience, focus, and a modicum of fine motor skills.

Of course, I wondered if I could do it.  As a scion of European tailors and watchmakers, and the adult version of the boy who excelled in knot tying, model making, and banjo picking, I quickly discovered that I had the chops, as we put it, plus the patience to put in the time – sometimes as much as eight hours in a row.

Why do it? I was asked.  “Aside from the mitzvah value,” I answered, “soldiers going into combat need every edge, every advantage they can get.  Every feeling of camaraderie, of confidence.  Aside from the spiritual envelope in which they wrap him, If these tzitzit make a single solider feel better, stronger, safer, even for a moment, it’s worth my effort – and the world entire.”

Chabad of Katamon, Part I: Arucha Eser Initiative – Sandwich Making

As a child, Liel Gidoni gave away his lunches to other children who didn’t have enough to eat.  When his mother discovered what he was doing, she packed him extra sandwiches.

A grown man in the IDF, he gave up his life saving someone else.

In his memory, scores of volunteers miraculously appear five days a week to make sandwiches for schoolchildren.

On the days I’ve been there, when we didn’t make 1,600 sandwiches – tuna, chocolate, hummus, cheese – we made 1,800.

One day, when one man complained that I was too efficient, I said, “it’s obvious that you’ve never worked a production line.”

Or tried to teach a hungry child.

Chabad of Katamon, Part II: Hamitbach – Meal Cooking

I peeled carrots and potatoes.  Chopped them.  Ground them.  Made them ready for cold salad and hot kugel.  Washed dishes.  Scrubbed counters.  Mopped floors.

No, none of this was earth-shattering or world-changing.  Will hardly usher in a major policy change or bring world peace.

But for the thousands who are deprived and displaced, in dread or despair, a hot Shabbat meal will bring some measure of relief.

To make food you need a clean kitchen.  As reckoned in the Holy Temple, the first mitzvah of each day is to clean up from yesterday.  The young Kohanim fought for the honor of doing so.

“How important is a hot meal?” someone asked me.  “In Theresienstadt,” I said, “at the risk of their lives, Jewish women wrote and hid a manuscript, later published as In Memory’s Kitchen.  This most important document, their greatest legacy, is a cookbook.  Because they knew that meals bind families – and Am Israel – together.”

Coda

When I returned to America, someone asked, a bit smugly, what bored me the most?

“Nothing,” I said.  “Nothing bored me.  Not once, not for an instant.  I was helping children, families, chayalim.  Every moment mattered.  Every moment had meaning.”

“Well,” he pressed, “weren’t you frightened?”

“No,” I answered.  “Never.”

Reporting that incident to one of my sons, who’s also been to Israel on aid missions since 10/7, he said, “they don’t get it, do they?”

“No,” I said, “sadly, they don’t.  And since they don’t, I’ll go for them, too.”