“Just” One Person’s Story

Dear Friends.

Dear Family.

Dear any Jew that will listen.

Dear Rebbetzins and Rabbis and all those responsible for leading their flock.

With an open heart. A listening heart.

If even for a few moments …

I am sending you “just one person’s story” because it isn’t just one person’s story at all.

Here is the link to just one story.

I hope you will take a few minutes to read, and then return here and continue …

https://www.timesofisrael.com/uprooted-roei-saban-45-from-sderot-this-is-his-story/

Roei’s story is a small-enormous slice of the new Israel, the new Am-Nation.

There are millions, literally millions of versions of this once unimaginable story-reality that together comprise the pre-formative stages of what will be a very, very different Jewish country in the Jewish months and years ahead.

We know the past will never be restored.

A chapter in our history has concluded.

The final word in a chapter titled The Zachor Tattoo has been read.

WWII didn’t just close a chapter; it incinerated a chapter. That won’t happen this time.

Yet at this point all we see is the blank second side of the last page of the previous chapter. We know there is a next chapter, but its title is still unknown, its text blurry and unreadable. We also know that there are yet more new chapters to be written; glorious, lilting chapters the likes of which can only germinate, sprout, grow, and blossom in the rich soil-soul of the Land of Israel.

In silent tones, those unwritten chapters are now calling to us, like the angels we knew in the womb: Come. Come Home.

Come join this great creative collaborative venture in writing the next chapters in the brilliant emergent real-life tale of the House of Jacob, together with the Children of Israel, here, upon the unfurled parchment of Eretz Hatzvi—the Land of the deer—the dear Land of Israel.

“Come,” whispers the angel.

It’s time.

We need you at our side.

Writing with us. Creating and cultivating with us.

And you as well. Don’t be fooled by yarns spun by fools.

You need you at our side.

For indeed, as we need you, you desperately need us, if any of us is ever to be more than just “one person’s story.”

Dear Friends.

Dear Family.

Dear any Jew that will listen.

Dear Rebbetzins and Rabbis and all those responsible for leading their flock.

Come Home.

It’s time.

In memory of just one story. That of David Yair Shalom Ne’eman Newman, who’s rapturous tefilla in front of the open Aron at the Kotel on Yom Kippur, and cold-blooded murder at Nova, is “just” one intimate-infinite story.

In honor of David’s still and forever recovering fiancé; beautiful, iron-gentle Noam, who is writing “just” one of our new chapters, a chapter titled “We will dance again.”

Dedicated to all the soldiers; young boys and girls, middle-aged women and men, some religious some less so; formerly left, formerly right, all wrong, and each ready to listen to: “just” one story at a time.

And to their spouses, children, and families. For without them, none of this impossible to fathom, intuitively resonant story could ever be written because it would end, as two recently did, in ashes.

Recognizing Soldiers Save Lives, “just” one story whose collaborative crafting began on October 8^th when five guys walked away from jobs and careers to bring plane loads of life-saving gear to chayalim. Because when you rush into a war zone to find your missing friend and his fiancé, and all you find is a dead shirt, that’s when you close one chapter and begin a new one.

Here in the land flowing with stories written with human quills drenched in the dark ohr-ink of softly luminous tears and trauma; of honey, hope, whispers, and heroism.

https://www.soldierssavelives.org