I just visited the scenes of slaughter in Israel.

I came away from this journey through hell with even greater admiration for the remarkable courage and resilience of the people of Israel.

By Sam Hilt, FUTURE OF JEWISH            25 March 2024

The burned-out cars of Israelis who attended the Nova Music Festival on October 7th (photo: Gadi Cabelo)

This is a guest essay written by Sam Hilt, author of the forthcoming book, “Paradigm Wars.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Before my recent departure for Israel, several of my friends who follow the international news tactfully expressed their concerns about my travel plans.

“You’re going where?! Now?! What, are you nuts?!”

Family members were generally more supportive, but also apprehensive. I did not mention to any of them that, although I was determined to model my travel planning largely after “The Fool” in the Tarot deck, I did already have one event scheduled.

I had signed up to participate in a week-long “mission” later in the month that would be visiting the Israeli town of Sderot and the scenes of slaughter along the border with Gaza. Included in the program would be encounters with a selected group of people who had experienced the events of October 7th first-hand in various capacities.

The organization sponsoring the event is known in Hebrew as “Shurat Hadin” and in English goes by the name of “Israel Law Center.” Its founder is Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, a formidable Israeli woman who combines gentle grace and beauty with sufficient determination and spiritual strength to cut off the head of Holofernes.

Although, as I have discovered, they are largely invisible to the Israeli public, Shurat HaDin is well-known to the U.S. Supreme Court and to the higher echelons of government, both in Israel and in the U.S. They are a team of attorneys whose mission is to use the legal system to bankrupt the sponsors of terrorism, and to date they have won several hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments which they distribute entirely to the victims of terror.

In their spare time, and to finance their own operation, they organize several week-long “missions” annually where supporters from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. have an opportunity to get up close and personal with players who live closer to the bleeding edge.

Over the course of the week we met with an extraordinary cast of characters:

1. The government and army spokesmen who face the villainous media hyenas
2. A policeman from Sderot who took bullets fighting pitched battles against heavily armed terrorists
3. A gentle rabbi who supervises the respectful preparation of the bodies of the dead for burial suddenly confronted with refrigerator trucks filled to capacity with stacked corpses
4. Parents whose children went to a music festival and never came home
5. A woman keeping vigil for her husband who is among the hostages being held captive somewhere in the tunnels of Gaza
6. Wounded soldiers in rehab, and
7. Soldiers singing and dancing and repairing their damaged tanks before going back into Gaza to finish the job

A recurring theme in virtually all the first-person accounts of October 7th was the initial bewilderment and disorientation that everyone experienced as they gradually came to understand that something inconceivable was actually happening and that it was a matter of life and death. Their extraordinary responses to the danger they confronted would fill volumes, but I want to share two of the stories which hit me the hardest. Much as the terms are overused, I will not hesitate to call them inspiring and transformative.

There is an organization called “Zaka” which has been around for years but became prominent during the days of the First Intifada, the terror war that was Israel’s reward for making major concessions and signing the Oslo Agreement with Yasser Arafat. People riding on public transportation, returning from work, or shopping would find themselves blown to Kingdom Come when a package that someone had left behind on the bus suddenly exploded.

In the aftermath of such events, it was volunteers from the Zaka organization who would be among the first responders. “Zaka,” in Hebrew, is an acronym for words that mean, “To bring our brothers together.” Zaka volunteers first assist the medics trying to save lives, but their eventual task is to gather up what’s left of those who had been blown to smithereens.

Their dedication to their work derives from their religious conviction that the human body is the work of God and that the respectful burial of the dead is a sacred task. They strive to recover every part of the body for burial which, in scenarios like these, means gathering bones and blood, hair, bits of flesh.

Yossi Landau is the Commander of the Southern Region of Zaka. On the morning of October 7th, he received a call from his superior to head south to Sderot, to arm himself and take lots of ammunition, and to stuff as many body bags as would fit in his car. Arriving in Sderot, he encountered a scene of chaos, with cars burning, bodies lying on the roads and terrorists still roaming the streets.

After tending to the wounded, Yossi and his team continued to the site of the Nova Music Festival where hundreds of young revelers had been raped, mutilated, and slaughtered. They spent the night identifying victims and loading their bodies onto trucks to be taken away.

The next day, they continued on to Kibbutz Be’eri where over 100 members of the community, who had been taken by surprise in the early morning, were murdered in their homes.

Yossi shared with us how one of his volunteers, a big burly guy who had been doing this work for years, came out of a house weeping and told Yossi that he could not go back in. Yossi comforted him and then picked a group of Zaka volunteers to accompany him into the house.

Inside they found a couple and their two children, hands bound, in a lake of blood. Both the man and the woman were, as Yossi tactfully expressed it, “missing body parts.” And, as they observed the scene, it became clear that it had been arranged to force the children to watch as their parents were mutilated and the parents to watch as their children were being tortured.

Yossi’s team fled the house, forced to admit that this was more than they could bear. Somehow, Yossi found the strength to rally them and to remind them that this was their work. That no one else would do this. He walked back into the house, and his team followed him.

He took a knife and cut the plastic handcuffs off of the victims, and he urged his group to each take the hand of one of the dead and to form a circle. Then they all sat down, in the blood. They began to sing, and they sang a song, “V’he She’Amda” based on a verse from the Passover Haggadah:

“In every generation they rise up to destroy us.
But the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.”

And then they sang another song, and they continued singing until eventually they were able to stand up and complete their work.

Kibbutz Kfar Aza in Israel (photo: Sam Hilt)

This second tale of bravery will be short and sweet and much easier to take.  It concerns a farmer named Rami Davidian who received a phone call from a friend of his on the morning of October 7th.

The friend explained that his daughter had gone down to the Nova Music Festival and that he was hearing confused stories of violence and shootings. He urged Rami to go see if he could find her and bring her to safety.

Rami jumped in his truck and headed to the music festival. As he drew closer, he knew immediately from the bodies and the burned-out cars that the reality of the situation was far worse than the rumors. He turned off the main road and proceeded on dirt roads and overland.

Having grown up and farmed the land in this area all his life, he knew every inch of the countryside. At some point, he received a cellphone message: “Please save us! We’re hiding in the bushes.” The message included GPS coordinates. Rami located them, monitored the timing of the Hamas patrols, and helped three girls to make their escape.

These first three girls shared Rami’s number with their friends and parents, and Rami’s phone now began buzzing non-stop with desperate pleas for help accompanied by precise locations. Rami went from place to place, hour after hour, avoiding Hamas murder squads, finding those in hiding and delivering them to safety.

At some point he received a message from a girl who sent him her coordinates, said she was alone, and then fell silent. He followed her coordinates, parked his vehicle and proceeded on foot. As Rami drew close, he discovered that she was no longer alone; she was being held captive by six Hamas terrorists.

As Rami told the story, he joked that at that moment he received a bit of divine inspiration. As a Mizrachi Jew whose family came originally from an Arab country, he grew up speaking both Arabic and Hebrew fluently. So, he turned on a dime, removed his kippah (a Jewish head covering), and greeted his Muslim brothers in Arabic.

And he told them that he came to warn them: “The Israeli army was on its way and will arrive in less than five minutes and kill us all if they find us. Go, go while you can. Leave the girl; she will slow you down. I will get rid of her.”

And, so, a young woman named Amit is alive today to tell her story. She became one of several hundred Israelis who owe their lives to Rami Davidian, a gentle farmer and an observant Jew, who went back into lion’s den time and time again, risking his life with each sortie, and telling the story as if it was just something that any decent person in his situation would have done.

I had the privilege of listening to Rami’s stories, which Nitsana translated to English for us, as we stood on the periphery of the memorial that has been created on the site of the Nova Music Festival where so many were brutally slaughtered. A circle of wooden posts stands among the trees.

Each post features a photo of one of the young revelers who came to dance and sing and celebrate life on a morning when the music suddenly stopped. You walk slowly among the smiling and joyful faces that look back at you, and you see those in the flower of their youth whose lives were stolen from them. The experience is, quite simply, unbearable.

The site of the Nova Music Festival will be a “Ground Zero” for the current generation of Israeli youth. Unlike the stories they heard from grandparents about gas chambers and death marches in distant lands, this was an event that hit them right where they live.

It will not soon be forgotten. Soldiers on their way to Gaza stop here to honor those who died, and they go into battle with an unshakable understanding of what they are fighting for, and what they are fighting against.

I came away from this journey through hell with even greater admiration for the remarkable courage and resilience of the people of Israel. And, unexpectedly, I also came away with a newfound appreciation for the role that Jewish ritual and faith play in enabling my more pious, observant brethren to confront life’s hardest challenges.

I see us now, secular and religious Jews, no longer as adversaries, but as two powerful wings, now beating together, of the great Lion of Judea.