Va’etchanan opens with one of the most heartbreaking moments in the Torah. Moses, who has led the Israelites for forty years through the wilderness, begs God to let him cross into the Promised Land. God refuses. He will climb a mountain, look out at the land from a distance, and never set foot in it. If you’re new to this portion: Va’etchanan also contains the Ten Commandments, repeated for the generation about to enter the land, and it contains the Shema and the V’ahavta — Judaism’s central declaration of faith, commanding love of God with all your heart, soul, and might. Nestled inside is a phrase every Jewish parent knows: v’shinantam l’vanecha, “you shall teach them thoroughly to your children.” Moses, denied his own entry, spends this portion making certain his people will not forget what they experienced at Sinai — and that they will pass it on, deliberately, to their children and grandchildren.

Yitzhak Arad lived a version of that exact arc. He could never walk again through the Święciany of his childhood. That world — his parents’ home, his synagogue, the roughly 8,000 Jews who made up his community — was destroyed within days of his escape in September 1941, so completely that there was, quite literally, no land left to enter. Arad later said something almost unbearable in its honesty: that if his parents had been with him that night, he never would have left them, and he never would have survived. He carried that truth without flinching for the rest of his life.

What he did with that loss is the heart of this story. He fought as a Soviet partisan, taking part in the destruction of sixteen German trains. He sailed illegally to Eretz Israel in December 1945 aboard a ship named for Hannah Szenes, the martyred Jewish paratrooper. He built a full career in the IDF, eventually serving as the army’s Chief Education Officer before retiring as a Brigadier General. And then, in 1972, he became Chairman of Yad Vashem — a post he held for twenty-one years, longer than anyone else in the institution’s history.

“There were many problems for a Jew to be with the Soviet partisans… So you fought to prove yourself, to say, ‘Anything you can do I can do — if not better at least as well.’”

During those twenty-one years, Arad built the Valley of the Communities at Yad Vashem, a monument carved in stone naming thousands of destroyed Jewish towns — so that places like his own Święciany would never simply vanish from history the way they had vanished from the map. He laid the foundations for the Children’s Memorial. When the Soviet Union collapsed and archives sealed for fifty years suddenly opened, he raced to secure them before they could be lost forever. This is v’shinantam l’vanecha made into architecture and archive: not just a father telling his own children, but a nation building an institution to teach every generation that follows.

“Do not count yourselves among the murderers, and may you never find yourselves among the victims.”

That single sentence, which Arad offered visitors to Yad Vashem, is almost a modern restatement of Moses’s warning in this very portion: guard yourself diligently, lest you forget. Va’etchanan is not only about remembering the past — it is about the discipline of staying alert to how easily evil returns when memory fades.

“I built a physical site for visitors, which tells and presents the history of the Holocaust… and laid the foundations for making the place a world center for commemorating the memory of the Holocaust and its heritage.”

Moses stood at the edge of the land he built his entire life toward and was told he could not enter it. Yitzhak Arad stood at the edge of a world that had already been destroyed, and instead of despairing, he spent seventy-six more years making sure no one would ever be allowed to forget it existed. That is what Proud Defiance looks like. That is what it means to answer catastrophe not with retreat, but with building. Yitzhak Arad belongs in the same company as every hero this series has told: a Jew who was targeted, and who responded by changing the world.

This Shabbat, as you gather at your table, consider passing along one piece of Yitzhak Arad’s story to someone younger than you — that is v’shinantam l’vanecha, in practice, right now. Subscribe to Ziv of Zion for a new hero and a new Torah connection every week, share this with someone who needs a little more light this Shabbat, and if there is a hero whose story belongs in this series, tell us. This series belongs to all of us.

Am Yisrael Chai — and brighter than ever. ✨Picture Yitzhak Arad late in life: a ninety-something-year-old man in a neat blazer, standing at a podium at Yad Vashem, still delivering lectures on the Holocaust with total clarity. What that image cannot show you is the fifteen-year-old boy underneath — the one who smuggled a stolen rifle past a German guard, who ran from a synagogue on Rosh Hashanah while most of his community stayed behind, who spent two months lost in the Belorussian forest before joining the Soviet partisans under the wartime alias “Tolya.” That boy and that old man are the same person, and understanding how one became the other tells you almost everything about this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Va’etchanan.

Va’etchanan opens with one of the most heartbreaking moments in the Torah. Moses, who has led the Israelites for forty years through the wilderness, begs God to let him cross into the Promised Land. God refuses. He will climb a mountain, look out at the land from a distance, and never set foot in it. If you’re new to this portion: Va’etchanan also contains the Ten Commandments, repeated for the generation about to enter the land, and it contains the Shema and the V’ahavta — Judaism’s central declaration of faith, commanding love of God with all your heart, soul, and might. Nestled inside is a phrase every Jewish parent knows: v’shinantam l’vanecha, “you shall teach them thoroughly to your children.” Moses, denied his own entry, spends this portion making certain his people will not forget what they experienced at Sinai — and that they will pass it on, deliberately, to their children and grandchildren.

Yitzhak Arad lived a version of that exact arc. He could never walk again through the Święciany of his childhood. That world — his parents’ home, his synagogue, the roughly 8,000 Jews who made up his community — was destroyed within days of his escape in September 1941, so completely that there was, quite literally, no land left to enter. Arad later said something almost unbearable in its honesty: that if his parents had been with him that night, he never would have left them, and he never would have survived. He carried that truth without flinching for the rest of his life.

What he did with that loss is the heart of this story. He fought as a Soviet partisan, taking part in the destruction of sixteen German trains. He sailed illegally to Eretz Israel in December 1945 aboard a ship named for Hannah Szenes, the martyred Jewish paratrooper. He built a full career in the IDF, eventually serving as the army’s Chief Education Officer before retiring as a Brigadier General. And then, in 1972, he became Chairman of Yad Vashem — a post he held for twenty-one years, longer than anyone else in the institution’s history.

“There were many problems for a Jew to be with the Soviet partisans… So you fought to prove yourself, to say, ‘Anything you can do I can do — if not better at least as well.’”

During those twenty-one years, Arad built the Valley of the Communities at Yad Vashem, a monument carved in stone naming thousands of destroyed Jewish towns — so that places like his own Święciany would never simply vanish from history the way they had vanished from the map. He laid the foundations for the Children’s Memorial. When the Soviet Union collapsed and archives sealed for fifty years suddenly opened, he raced to secure them before they could be lost forever. This is v’shinantam l’vanecha made into architecture and archive: not just a father telling his own children, but a nation building an institution to teach every generation that follows.

“Do not count yourselves among the murderers, and may you never find yourselves among the victims.”

That single sentence, which Arad offered visitors to Yad Vashem, is almost a modern restatement of Moses’s warning in this very portion: guard yourself diligently, lest you forget. Va’etchanan is not only about remembering the past — it is about the discipline of staying alert to how easily evil returns when memory fades.

“I built a physical site for visitors, which tells and presents the history of the Holocaust… and laid the foundations for making the place a world center for commemorating the memory of the Holocaust and its heritage.”

Moses stood at the edge of the land he built his entire life toward and was told he could not enter it. Yitzhak Arad stood at the edge of a world that had already been destroyed, and instead of despairing, he spent seventy-six more years making sure no one would ever be allowed to forget it existed. That is what Proud Defiance looks like. That is what it means to answer catastrophe not with retreat, but with building. Yitzhak Arad belongs in the same company as every hero this series has told: a Jew who was targeted, and who responded by changing the world.

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This Shabbat, as you gather at your table, consider passing along one piece of Yitzhak Arad’s story to someone younger than you — that is v’shinantam l’vanecha, in practice, right now. Subscribe to Ziv of Zion for a new hero and a new Torah connection every week, share this with someone who needs a little more light this Shabbat, and if there is a hero whose story belongs in this series, tell us. This series belongs to all of us.

Am Yisrael Chai — and brighter than ever. ✨

This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Devarim, which opens the book of Deuteronomy with one of the most quietly radical moves in the Torah: Moses stops leading, and starts telling. The Israelites are camped on the plains of Moab, at the edge of the Promised Land, forty years after leaving Egypt. Before they cross the Jordan, Moses gathers them and recounts the failures, the rebellions, the fear of the spies who convinced a whole generation not to trust God’s promise, and the hard-won growth of the generation now ready to enter. The portion’s name, and the whole book’s, comes from its opening words: “Eleh HaDevarim” — these are the words. In Jewish tradition, words are not just description; they are how memory survives and how responsibility passes from one generation to the next.

That is precisely the hinge on which Ada Sereni’s life turns. Born in Rome in 1905 into a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family, she gave up a chemistry degree and a comfortable European life to follow her husband Enzo Sereni to Mandate Palestine in 1927. She found pioneer life in Rehovot almost unbearable at first, then helped found Kibbutz Givat Brenner anyway — carrying water in on donkeys, raising three children, running its pomegranate juice factory. She could have lived out an ordinary, honorable pioneer’s life. History had other plans.

In 1944, Enzo volunteered for a parachute mission behind Nazi lines in occupied Italy. Ada tried to stop him — the only time in their marriage, she later said, that she ever pushed back against one of his choices. He went anyway, and by November 1944 he was dead, executed at Dachau. Most widows would be forgiven for stepping back. Ada instead traveled into the wreckage of postwar Europe to learn the truth herself, and when she found the German transport register confirming his death in Munich, she did not go home to grieve. She stayed in Italy to smuggle Holocaust survivors past the British blockade toward the Land of Israel

This is where Devarim’s themes stop being metaphor and start being literal. The people Ada carried across the Mediterranean were, in the truest sense, a new generation standing at the edge of a land many had never seen — survivors who needed someone with the courage to move them across the threshold, not just mourn what they had lost. Where the spies in this week’s parsha let fear talk a generation out of entering the promised land, Ada modeled the opposite instinct, choosing forward motion, ship after ship, for three straight years.

By April 1947 she commanded the entire Mossad LeAliyah Bet operation in Italy — one of the only women to lead a Haganah underground network. Her method was almost shockingly direct. Rather than deceive Italian officials, she told them exactly who she was and what she needed.

“My name is Ada Sereni, and I am the head of the organization that helps Jewish refugees in Italy clandestinely get to the Land of Israel. They need your help.”

It worked because she understood something Devarim also teaches: words, spoken plainly at the right moment, can move mountains force alone cannot. Between 1945 and 1948, her network organized as many as 38 voyages, carrying an estimated 28,000 refugees home. Before Israel’s War of Independence, she used the same directness to help stop a ship secretly carrying weapons meant for Israel’s enemies — walking up to an Italian naval officer and telling him the truth about the hold’s cargo.

“We wanted to take the refugees out and they wanted them to go.”

In the truest echo of “Eleh HaDevarim” itself, Ada Sereni eventually sat down and told her own story, publishing her memoir I Clandestini del Mare — Ships Without a Flag — so the crossing she organized would not be lost to the generation after her, just as Moses insisted Israel’s story be spoken aloud before, not after, the people crossed into their inheritance.

Despite organizing one of the largest rescue operations of the postwar period, Sereni’s contribution went so under-recognized that historians later wrote an academic article asking, in its own title, whether she deserved to be called an ‘Unforgettable Heroine.’ In 1995, Israel finally answered with its highest civilian honor, the Israel Prize.

Ada Sereni belongs squarely in the Ziv of Zion tradition of Jewish heroes: not the loudest person in the room, but the one who quietly makes the impossible logistics of Jewish survival happen. She is a bridge between the generation that endured the wilderness and the generation that stands, today, on the other side of the Jordan. At your own Shabbat table this week, over Parashat Devarim, consider sharing her story: the widow who turned a broken heart into 28,000 homecomings, and who reminds the diaspora that entering the land you were promised takes courage — and the will to tell the truth about how you got there.

Subscribe to Ziv of Zion for a new hero and Torah connection every week, and share this one with someone who needs more light at their Shabbat table tonight.

Shabbat Shalom, and Am Yisrael Chai — brighter than ever.

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This week’s Torah portion — Parashat Matot-Masei — is waiting for you to notice the connection.

Matot-Masei is actually two portions read together, and they close the Book of Numbers. The first, Matot (which means Tribes), opens with a remarkable passage about the power of vows. The Torah is almost obsessive here: when you speak a commitment out loud, it binds you. Words are not decorative. They are contractual. “If a man makes a vow to God,” the Torah says, “he shall not break his word. He shall do according to all that has come out of his mouth” (Numbers 30:3). The portion goes to extraordinary lengths to discuss when a vow can and cannot be annulled — which tells you something important. The rabbis did not want you wriggling out of your commitments. A word given is a word that shapes reality.

The second portion, Masei (Journeys), does something remarkable: it lists, by name, every single place the Israelites camped during their forty years in the wilderness. Forty-two stopping points. Forty-two moments where a people who had been enslaved, liberated, and then left wandering finally came close to home. And then the portion pivots forward: it describes the borders of the Land of Israel, commands the tribes to divide it among themselves, establishes cities of refuge, and lays out the laws for building a just society in a settled place.

The message embedded in Masei is one of the most powerful in all of Torah: the wandering is over. Stop cataloguing where you have been. Start building where you are going.

“If a man makes a vow to God, he shall not break his word. He shall do according to all that has come out of his mouth.” — Numbers 30:3

Meir Dizengoff was born in 1861 in the Russian Empire and spent the first decades of his adult life wandering — through business failures, through grief, through the vast geography of the Zionist idea before it had a physical address. He corresponded with Theodor Herzl. He believed in the vision with the kind of clarity that either makes a person a fool or a founder. He came to Ottoman Palestine and failed at his first venture. He stayed anyway.

In April 1909, he became one of sixty-six founding families who drew lots on sand dunes north of Jaffa. And from that moment, Meir Dizengoff stopped wandering. He did not wander for the remaining twenty-seven years of his life. He built.

He built streets where there had been sand. He built schools where there had been nothing. He paved roads, laid water infrastructure, convinced the Ottoman authorities to grant municipal status to a city that had not existed five years earlier. When Arab riots came in 1921, he rode his white horse through Tel Aviv’s streets — unhurried, visible, unmoved — to tell his residents that this city was real and they were not leaving it. When dignitaries arrived, he hosted them. When funds ran out, he traveled to Europe and America and raised more. When his wife Zina died in 1930, he grieved — and then he converted their private home into the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and gave it to the city she had helped him build.

“We are not refugees seeking shelter. We are a people returning home to build.” — Meir Dizengoff (paraphrase of documented sentiment)

That home — the one he gave away — is now Independence Hall, the room where David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. Dizengoff died twelve years before that declaration. He is buried on the roof of the museum, alongside Zina.

Here is what makes this connection to Matot-Masei so precise it feels almost planned by a divine hand: the Torah’s cities of refuge — the arei miklat established in Masei — were specific places designated for people who needed protection, safety, a place to go when the world had turned against them. Tel Aviv was exactly this for Jewish history. A city of refuge for Jews fleeing pogroms, poverty, and eventually the Holocaust. A place where you could arrive as a displaced person and leave as a citizen of something new.

Dizengoff built that city. He built the refuge. He kept his vow.

“If we fail to build here, we will have nowhere left to build.” — attributed to Dizengoff

For diaspora Jews in 2026, the message of Matot-Masei — and of Meir Dizengoff’s life — is not simply “make aliyah.” It is something both simpler and more demanding: stop cataloguing the places you have wandered. Stop performing displacement as an identity. The portion does not ask the Israelites to mourn the wilderness. It asks them to look at the Land ahead of them and start drawing borders, dividing responsibilities, building institutions, establishing justice. It asks them to become the kind of people who build holy societies — wherever they are planted.

Dizengoff had no surviving children. He left a city of millions. His vow outlasted him by a century and is still growing.

That is the Ziv of Zion tradition in its most complete form: a Jewish man who faced hatred, loss, failure, and death — and responded by building something so beautiful and so permanent that even those who hated him have had to reckon with what he made.

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If this story moved you, share it with someone who needs this light. And if you know a hero whose story deserves to be told — reply to this email and tell us. Every week, Ziv of Zion brings another extraordinary life out of the shadows and into the light where it belongs. Subscribe, and carry that light forward.

With hope and light, Ziv of Zion

She had a civilian pilot’s license — recognized in multiple countries. She had nearly completed a degree in aerospace engineering from the Technion, one of the world’s elite technical institutions. She had dreamed of becoming an astronaut since she was a child growing up in South Africa, and she had worked out, with the precision of someone trained in aerospace, exactly what the path required: the Israeli Air Force pilot course.

The reply came in December 1993. A single letter. Women were not assigned to combat professions. No aptitude test. No consideration of qualifications. Just: no, because you are a woman.

She kept the letter. Then she called a lawyer. And eighteen months later, she stood before Israel’s Supreme Court — and the court told her something that echoes across three thousand years of Jewish history: you speak rightly.

This week we read Parashat Pinchas — one of the most dramatic and wide-ranging portions in the entire Torah. It covers themes of justice and zealotry, the transfer of leadership from Moses to Joshua, the laws of communal offerings, and a landmark census of the Israelite tribes preparing to enter the Promised Land. But buried within all of this — and not buried at all, if you are paying attention — is one of the most remarkable legal moments in all of Scripture.

Five sisters appear before Moses. Their names are Mahlah, Noa, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. They are the daughters of Tzelafchad, who has died leaving no sons. Under the existing rules of inheritance, their father’s portion of the Land would pass to his brothers, and his name would disappear from the record of his clan.

The daughters of Tzelafchad did not accept this. They walked to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting — in front of Moses, in front of Elazar the priest, in front of the chieftains of the entire community — and they made their argument in public. “Why should our father’s name be lost to his clan just because he had no son?” they asked. “Give us a holding among our father’s brothers.” (Numbers 27:4)

“Why should our father’s name be lost to his clan just because he had no son? Give us a holding among our father’s brothers. — The Daughters of Tzelafchad, Numbers 27:4”

Moses brought their case to God.

And God’s response — immediate, unambiguous — was this: “The daughters of Tzelafchad speak rightly.” God then commanded Moses to transfer their father’s inheritance to them, and established a new legal precedent to govern all future cases of inheritance by daughters in Israel.

This is not a minor scene. Five women walked into the most male-dominated space imaginable — the sacred institutional center of an entire people — and made a legal argument based on justice and dignity. They did not apologize. They did not ask permission to make their case. They made it. And the highest authority in creation looked at what they had done and said: they are right. And the law was changed.

Now hold that image. Hold it for three thousand years.

In August 1994, a young South African immigrant named Alice Miller filed a petition to Israel’s Supreme Court. She was 22 years old. She had spent years qualifying herself — the engineering degree, the pilot’s license, the officers’ course she had completed while the case was being heard. The IDF argued that women served shorter terms, that the investment couldn’t be justified, that female prisoners of war faced unique risks. Each argument said, in a different way: this place is not for you.

The court disagreed. Closing the aviation course to women, the justices wrote, “violates their dignity and degrades them.” The ban was declared unconstitutional.

The daughters of Tzelafchad walked into the Tent of Meeting and the law was changed. Alice Miller walked into Israel’s High Court of Justice and the law was changed.

“Closing the aviation course to women violates their dignity and degrades them. — Israeli Supreme Court, Miller v. Minister of Defence, 1995”

The parallel is not accidental. It is, in the deepest sense, what the Torah is doing when it places this scene in Parashat Pinchas — a portion otherwise preoccupied with the machinery of war, the counting of tribes, the transfer of power. Right in the middle of all that institutional weight, five women stand up and make an argument from justice. And the argument wins.

Alice Miller’s story has one more layer that connects to this week’s parasha — and it may be the most powerful one.

Miller failed the medical exam. She would not become a combat pilot. Her personal dream did not come true. And yet her case opened the skies to every woman who came after her. The first female combat navigator, Sheri Rahat, graduated in 1998. The first female combat pilot, Roni Zuckerman — granddaughter of two leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — graduated in 2001. Today, over 90% of IDF positions are open to women.

The daughters of Tzelafchad did not receive the land for themselves alone. They changed the law for every daughter of Israel who would come after them. The covenant of peace that Parashat Pinchas promises — the covenant given to Pinchas at the opening of the portion — is not peace as the absence of conflict. It is peace as the presence of justice. It is the peace of a world where women are told: you speak rightly.

After October 7, 2023, Alice Miller became the CEO of NATAN Worldwide Disaster Relief. Today she leads more than 1,800 Israeli volunteers — doctors, nurses, dentists, therapists — into disaster zones around the world within 24 hours of a crisis. They have operated in Syria, Mexico, Mozambique, Ukraine, and Gaza. Serving enemies’ civilians. Showing the world, in Miller’s own words, “another sign of Judaism, of Israelis.”

This is the Ziv of Zion tradition. Not just the fight for rights, not just the legal victory, but the life that follows — the full life, the one that keeps reaching for something higher.

Alice Miller is this week’s Ziv of Zion hero not because she won a lawsuit. She is our hero because she understood, at 21 years old, that the door being closed to her was not only closing on her — and she refused to let it stay closed for the women who would come after her. She fought for her inheritance, even knowing she might not live to receive it. And then she spent the next thirty years building something even larger than the sky she had tried to enter.

As you sit at your Shabbat table tonight, bring this story with you. Ask the daughters and granddaughters at your table: what door do you see that should be open? And what would it mean to be the one who opens it?

If Alice Miller’s story moves you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe to Ziv of Zion and join a community keeping these stories alive, one extraordinary Jewish life at a time.

Am Yisrael Chai — and brighter than ever. ✨

“We need to help others for only one reason: because we can, and because they need help. — Alice Miller”

“We want to show another sign of Judaism, of Israelis. — Alice Miller”

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If this story moved you, share it with someone who needs this light. And if you know a hero whose story deserves to be told — reply to this email and tell us. Every week, Ziv of Zion brings another extraordinary life out of the shadows and into the light where it belongs. Subscribe, and carry that light forward.

With hope and light, Ziv of Zion

Parashat Balak (Numbers 22:2–25:9) opens with a frightened king, not a hero. Balak rules Moab, and a massive nation of former slaves, the Israelites, has just won two wars on his border. Rather than risk a third, he hires outside help: Balaam, a non-Israelite prophet famous across the region for the accuracy of his blessings and curses, paid to curse the Israelite camp into ruin before it ever reaches Moab.

Balaam takes the job. Three times Balak marches him up a hillside overlooking the Israelite tents and tells him to curse them; three times blessing comes out instead. He warns Balak before he even tries: “the word that God puts in my mouth, that I must speak” (Numbers 22:38) — and answers his protest with a line that has outlasted every empire that ever tried to harm the Jewish people: “How can I curse whom God has not cursed?” (Numbers 23:8).

By the third hilltop, Balaam has stopped resisting. Looking down at the Israelite camp, he says: “Mah tovu ohalecha Ya’akov, mishkenotecha Yisrael” — “How fair are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel” (Numbers 24:5). A hired enemy, paid to destroy this nation, instead composed what may be the most recognizable opening line in Jewish prayer — the words Jews worldwide recite the moment they walk into a synagogue, spoken first by the one man on earth who was supposed to wish them harm.

A curse, ordered and paid for, became one of the oldest blessings the Jewish people have ever known. That is not an accident of grammar. That is the whole point of the story.

This is almost exactly the architecture of Alden Solovy’s life. In 2009, his wife Ami died after a fall, at fifty-three, with Solovy and their two daughters at her bedside. In that same stretch of months, he also lost his job and two close friends — and none of it should reasonably have produced anything but silence. Instead, Solovy started writing prayers, not for an audience, just to survive the week. Those private prayers became his first book, and that book became a vocation he has practiced for over a decade, producing more than seven hundred prayers that synagogues, hospitals, and grieving families now use as their own.

It’s worth knowing that this widely admired prayer-writer spent his first career chasing Chicago journalism’s top essay prize, winning it three times, and picked up an MBA in finance along the way, a credential he has joked is useless to his prayer-writing. He also quietly founded ManKind Project Israel, bringing the same conviction, that honestly faced pain can help other people, to Israeli men working through grief of their own.

Solovy doesn’t treat Torah as a closed book to admire from a distance. “Torah has been our single greatest writing prompt,” he has said, and his book These Words takes that claim seriously, sitting with individual Hebrew words from the weekly portions until new poems emerge from them — the same operation Balaam performs in Numbers 24, spending long enough with ancient language that it stops being fixed text and starts becoming blessing again.

Maybe the deepest measure of any person’s words isn’t how carefully they were planned. It’s what they become once they leave your mouth.

That question has only grown heavier since October 7, 2023. Within days of the attack, Solovy was writing prayers for hostages he had never met, work later folded into a Passover Haggadah used at seder tables across the Reform movement. He has admitted, with the same honesty running through everything he writes, that he hasn’t fully moved past that grief — a rare admission from someone whose job is supplying others with words. For Jewish diaspora communities heading into 2026, still being asked in classrooms and online to explain or apologize for who they are, Solovy’s life offers a quiet answer: grief doesn’t have to end in silence, and an enemy’s intended curse doesn’t get the final say over your story.

He did not get to choose what happened to him. He only got to choose what he built out of it. So far, that has been enough.

This is exactly the kind of hero Ziv of Zion exists to introduce you to: not a soldier or head of state, but a Chicago-born widower whose worst year became a body of work strengthening the unbreakable bond between Jews everywhere and Zion. His story belongs beside Sharansky’s and Levi-Montalcini’s: hatred tried to write the ending, and a Jewish life answered with something more radiant instead.

If this is the first you’re hearing of Alden Solovy, restack this for someone who needs a reminder that their story isn’t over either, and tell us in the comments which line of Mah Tovu, or which prayer, has stayed with you the longest.

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With hope and light, Ziv of Zion

This week we read Parshat Chukat — and if you want to understand what it actually means, look no further than Shlomo Ron.

Parshat Chukat opens in the book of Numbers with what the Torah itself calls the chok ha-Torah — the supreme decree, the commandment beyond reason. God instructs Moses to take a perfectly red cow, without blemish, that has never been put to work. This Parah Adumah — the Red Heifer — is burned to ash. The ashes are mixed with spring water to create a purifying solution. If you have come into contact with death, this is how you become pure again, how you are restored enough to re-enter the holy spaces of life.

Here is the paradox that has bewildered scholars for thousands of years: the priest who prepares the purifying mixture becomes impure in the process. The substance that purifies the defiled, defiles those who are pure. Even King Solomon — the wisest man who ever lived — admitted he could not understand it. In Ecclesiastes, confronting the Red Heifer, he writes simply: “I thought I was wise, but wisdom is far from me.”

The Red Heifer purifies the impure and renders the pure impure. It is the most profound paradox in the Torah — and it is the story of every person who has ever sacrificed themselves so that others could be restored to life.

Now consider Shlomo Ron.

On the morning of October 7, Hamas terrorists were moving through Kibbutz Nahal Oz — the kibbutz Shlomo had helped found as a teenager in 1951. His wife Hannah, their two daughters, and their grandson — a lone soldier who had enlisted because of the bond he shared with his grandfather — were all present. The family was there because Shlomo was about to have surgery. They had come to care for him.

When it became clear what was happening, Shlomo sent them into the safe room. They begged him to follow. He refused. He walked to his armchair, sat down, and made himself the scene. Terrorists entered. They found an elderly man, apparently alone, killed him and then they moved on. Behind that closed door, hidden in the room beyond, his family waited — for nearly ten hours. Waves of terrorists continued to enter the house, but assumed that Shlomo lived alone.

“They tried to argue and call him, but he refused. As she closed the safe-room door, she saw through the glass someone shooting my uncle into the living room.” — Irit Shamir-Baratz, Shlomo’s niece

Shlomo became the Red Heifer. He made contact with the forces of death — not reluctantly, not accidentally, but by choice, deliberately, as an act of total devotion. And in doing so, he purified the danger. He restored his family to life. He was consumed by the encounter, exactly as the Parah Adumah is consumed by the fire — and exactly as the Parah Adumah, through that consumption, becomes the instrument of life for others.

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But Parshat Chukat carries more than the Red Heifer. It is also the Torah portion in which Miriam dies, and then Aaron dies — the two pillars who stood beside Moses for forty years. The Israelites are in the wilderness, at the threshold of the Promised Land, and the founding generation is passing away. Moses himself, in his grief, strikes the rock when God told him to speak to it — and is told he will not enter the Land. Chukat is a parsha about the terrible cost of leadership and continuity: the greatest generation must give way, and the weight falls on those who come next.

Shlomo Ron was one of the last of his generation. He had helped plant the first seeds of Nahal Oz in 1951 when he was a teenager. He worked its fields, built its workshop, sang on its stage, raised his children in its shade. For 65 years, he held the living memory of what it meant to build something from nothing, on the border of everything dangerous, out of love for the Jewish people and the Jewish land.

Shlomo was a man of the earth, a Zionist through and through. Nothing could break him.

And now the grandson who enlisted because of him carries that memory forward. The lone soldier whose mother lives in England, who chose to serve in the IDF because of the bond with this grandfather, was was in the safe room that morning. He survived because Shlomo sat down in that armchair. He is the continuity that Chukat demands: the next generation, alive, carrying forward what the founders gave them.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z”l, wrote that the Red Heifer addresses the deepest human fear — not just death itself, but the fear of entropy, the fear that nothing endures, that what we build will not last. Shlomo Ron answered that fear with his life. He turned his own death into the most powerful possible argument that life goes on, that love persists, that the next generation survives.

His death was not a defeat. It was a command performance — the ultimate decree, the act that defies rational explanation and achieves what nothing else could.

At Ziv of Zion, we believe that the Jewish people has always moved forward on the shoulders of people like Shlomo Ron — ordinary people who, at the moment that mattered, made an extraordinary choice. He was a locksmith, a singer, a grandfather, a farmer, a founder.

This Shabbat, as we read Chukat and sit with its paradox, may we be worthy of the purification that came at so great a cost. May we carry the lives that were saved on October 7 with the weight they deserve. And may Shlomo Ron’s memory be not only a blessing — but a call to action, for every one of us still here, still building, still serving the generations that come after. Zecher tzaddik livracha. May the memory of a righteous man be a blessing.

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If this story moved you, share it with someone who needs this light. And if you know a hero whose story deserves to be told — reply to this email and tell us. Every week, Ziv of Zion brings another extraordinary life out of the shadows and into the light where it belongs. Subscribe, and carry that light forward.

With hope and light, Ziv of Zion

First, the Torah portion — because it is one of the most dramatic stories in the entire Bible, and one of the most misunderstood.

Parashat Korach tells the story of a man named Korach, a Levite of intelligence, standing, and influence. He leads a rebellion against Moses and Aaron, and his argument sounds almost reasonable: ‘The entire congregation is holy,’ he declares. ‘Why do you raise yourselves above the assembly of God?’ It sounds like a democratic challenge. It sounds like a call for equality.

But the Torah is not fooled — and neither are the rabbis. The commentaries across the centuries are nearly unanimous: Korach’s rebellion was not about the people. It was about Korach. He wanted the prestige and power that Moses and Aaron held. He used the language of equality to pursue personal ambition. He wrapped self-interest in the language of justice.

The consequences were catastrophic. God caused the ground to open and swallow Korach and his followers. The community fractured. The rebellion cost Israel dearly. And the Mishnah in Pirkei Avot uses Korach’s name as the permanent example of an argument that is not for the sake of heaven — a dispute motivated by ego, not by genuine service to the people.

What does an argument for the sake of heaven look like? It looks like a fifteen-year-old boy in Jerusalem who decides to fight for a homeland that does not yet exist — and who asks nothing in return.

Ezra Yachin was born in 1928 in pre-state Israel, the son of a Syrian father and an Egyptian mother. By fifteen, he had watched Arab pogroms terrorize his neighborhood and British soldiers imprison or execute Jewish fighters. He found his way to the LECHI underground — the clandestine Fighters for the Freedom of Israel. His code name was Elnakam: God Avenges. He used his Arabic fluency as a cover, gathering intelligence while working at a Jerusalem post office.

He did not do this for prestige. He did not do it for power. There was no power to be had — there was only danger, sacrifice, and the small, stubborn hope that the Jewish people might one day live freely in their own land.

During the 1948 War of Independence, fighting to liberate Jerusalem’s Old City, Ezra was struck near the head by a shell. As he lay on a stretcher being rescued, a second explosion drove shrapnel into his skull. He survived, but lost his right eye permanently. According to his memoir ELNAKAM, he whispered a prayer from that stretcher: let me at least hear that Jerusalem is free, even if I die immediately afterward. He did not hear it that day. He waited nineteen years — until June 7, 1967, when Israeli paratroopers broke through the Lions’ Gate and the Western Wall was in Jewish hands again.

“My friends and comrades — had they died in vain? I still lived, but to what purpose? Then we returned to reality: the land was ours, under our own sovereignty.”

Korach wanted authority. He could not bear that Moses had something he did not. Ezra Yachin wanted nothing for himself. He wanted Jerusalem free. He wanted his people safe. And when Jerusalem was finally free, he did not retire. He started teaching.

Beginning in 1973, Ezra began giving lectures to IDF soldiers. He told them about the underground. He told them about Alexander Rubowitz — his best friend, tortured to death by British forces at sixteen years old. He told them about the comrades who went to the gallows singing Hatikvah. He told them that the Jewish people had always faced enemies who believed Jewish sovereignty would not survive — and that it had always survived. He has given over 9,000 such lectures. He has never asked for anything in return

The contrast to Korach is exact and stunning. Korach climbed over others to reach a podium. Ezra Yachin stands at a podium to lift others up. Korach’s rebellion broke the community apart. Ezra’s life’s work is about holding the community together across generations. Korach is swallowed by the earth at the height of his powers. Ezra, just turned 98 and is still standing on it.

“I continue to fight in the Israeli army. Only today my weapons are my words of inspiration and motivation. If we still have an enemy, I have to be a fighter.”

When Hamas massacred over 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, Ezra did not hesitate. He put on his uniform and went to the soldiers. He distributed ten thousand copies of his seven books — at no cost, to anyone who would read them. At Israel’s Independence Day ceremony in 2024, he was chosen as one of twelve Israelis to light a torch on Mount Herzl. His words were simple and permanent:

Parashat Korach ends with the ground swallowing those who sought power for its own sake. It also ends with something quieter but more lasting: the establishment of the priestly duties, the clear definition of who serves the community and how.

True leadership, the Torah insists, is not about elevation. It is about service. It is about showing up, every week, for the people who need you.

Ezra Yachin has shown up every week for fifty years. He will show up again next week. He is 98 years old, and he is still the most faithful soldier the Jewish people have.

This Shabbat, bring his name to your table. Tell his story. Ask your children: what would it mean to serve something larger than yourself for eighty years, and never stop? What would it mean to be Elnakam — and to let God do the avenging, while you do the loving?

“I love every Jew. Whether he’s left wing or right wing, I love him. I mostly love the children. When I look at them, I know the nation has a future.”

Ezra Yachin is a Ziv of Zion hero in the fullest sense: a man whose radiance has never dimmed, whose love for Israel and the Jewish people has only grown brighter with every decade of service. His story is not only the story of one extraordinary man. It is the story of what Jewish continuity looks like when it is lived rather than merely spoken — when the torch is not just passed, but carried forward by steady, loving, unrelenting hands.

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Shabbat Shalom. May his light be on your table tonight.

Am Yisrael Chai — and brighter than ever. ✨

Three thousand years earlier, twelve men had stood at a similar threshold.

This Shabbat’s Torah portion — Shelach Lecha is one of the most psychologically precise passages in all of Jewish literature. Moses sends twelve spies into the Land of Canaan: one leader from each tribe, the finest men of their generation. Their mission is simply to look and report back. They spend forty days in the land. They return with grapes so large it takes two men to carry a single cluster. They have seen, with their own eyes, that the land flows with milk and honey.

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And then ten of them announce that it is impossible.

“The people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large,” they tell the people. “We looked like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we must have looked to them.” The people weep. They threaten to stone the faithful. They demand to return to Egypt. God, enraged by their despair, decrees that this generation will never enter the land they were so close to claiming.

Only two men — Joshua and Caleb — stand apart. They tear their garments. They cry out: “The land that we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land. Have no fear of the people of the country — God is with us.” They saw the same terrain. They walked the same hills, slept under the same skies, came home with the same grapes. The difference was not in what they observed. The difference was in what they chose to perceive.

The ten spies looked at Canaan and saw their own smallness. Joshua and Caleb looked at the same land and saw God’s promise.

This is the sin the Torah calls the greatest failure of that generation: not rebellion, not immorality — but the inability to see with the eyes of faith.

Yoel Moshe Salomon was born in Jerusalem’s Old City in 1838. His grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Zoref, was a disciple of the Vilna Gaon who had made aliyah in 1811 and was murdered by an Arab when Salomon was thirteen. Salomon did not leave. He stayed. He learned printing in Prussia, came home and launched HaLevanon — the first Hebrew-language newspaper ever printed in the Land of Israel. He co-founded Nahalat Shiva, the first modern Jewish neighborhood outside the Old City walls, sleeping there alone for weeks until his neighbors overcame their fear and followed.

And in 1878, he organized 100 shareholders, led a survey of swampland near the Arab village of Umlabes, and planted the first modern Jewish agricultural colony in Ottoman Palestine.

He called it Petah Tikva. The name comes from Hosea 2:17: “I will make the Valley of Achor a portal of hope.” In the original Hebrew, “Achor” means trouble, difficulty, anguish. God’s promise is that the valley of trouble — the place that looks impossible — is exactly where the door of hope will open.

The Torah’s fearful spies saw the Valley of Achor and declared it unconquerable. Caleb and Joshua saw the Valley of Achor and heard Hosea’s promise. Salomon looked at malarial marshland near Jaffa and heard the same thing.

He didn’t name his city after the swamp. He named it after what God had already promised was inside it.

The malaria came anyway. In 1880, a deadly epidemic swept through Petah Tikva and forced the settlers to abandon the colony. Salomon relocated to Yehud and became a farmer — plowing fields and reviewing Gemara with his children, because for him Torah and action were never separate things. In 1883, new immigrants returned to Petah Tikva and rebuilt it, with Baron Rothschild funding the drainage of the swamps. The name survived everything.

This is also the lesson of Shelach Lecha.

Joshua and Caleb did not deny the giants. They simply refused to believe that the giants were the final word.

In 2026, Jewish communities around the world face their own version of this choice. Rising antisemitism, questions of identity and continuity, the noise of a world that increasingly questions Israel’s legitimacy — it is easy, in such a climate, to see only the valley of trouble. It is easy to feel like grasshoppers.

But Shelach Lecha teaches us — and Yoel Moshe Salomon demonstrated — that what you see depends entirely on what you believe.

Today, Petah Tikva is home to over 270,000 Israelis. It hosts the Israeli headquarters of Intel, IBM, Oracle, and Teva Pharmaceuticals — co-founded by Salomon’s own descendants. A winged statue of him stands in the heart of the city, depicting him on a motorcycle, wings spread, flying into the future that he saw when no one else could.

He died in 1912, buried on the Mount of Olives. He lived long enough to know that what he planted had taken root.

At Ziv of Zion, we believe that Jewish heroes are not just figures from antiquity — they are maps. They show us how to navigate the exact terrain we are walking right now.

Yoel Moshe Salomon is a map for every Jew who has ever stood at the edge of something difficult and felt the pull toward retreat.

He rode into the swamp. He named it hope. He slept alone in the empty house until others found the courage to follow. He closed his magazine with four words — “Go out into action” — and then went and built a city.

This Shabbat, as we read Shelach Lecha and hear the ancient story of men who could not see past their own fear, let us remember the Jewish soul’s deepest capacity: to look at a valley of trouble and see, with the eyes of faith, a portal of hope.

Shabbat Shalom.

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Ziv of Zion is a newsletter about Jewish heroes, Torah wisdom, and Zionist pride — for every Jew who wants to remember what we are made of. If this Shabbat piece moved you, share it, restack it, and subscribe. Your support helps us bring one new hero to the world every week. We’d love to hear in the comments: which valley of trouble in your life is waiting to become a portal of hope?

The Beta Israel had no contact with the wider Jewish world. They did not know if anyone in Jerusalem was praying back. Surrounded by pressure to abandon everything, they held on — to Shabbat, to their prayers, to a dream so fierce it had outlasted empires, wars, and the silence of centuries.

In 1979, a Mossad operative named Daniel Limor stepped off a plane in Khartoum, Sudan — in an Arab country openly hostile to Israel, on his wedding anniversary, alone — and went to find them.

What happened next is one of the most extraordinary acts of Jewish brotherhood in modern history. And this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Beha’alotcha, contains the spiritual blueprint for every moment of it.

Parashat Beha’alotcha opens with God’s instruction to Aaron, Moses’s brother and the High Priest: kindle the Menorah, the great seven-branched lamp that stood at the heart of the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary the Israelites carried through the wilderness. The specific Hebrew verb God uses is beha’alotcha — not simply “when you light,” but when you cause the flame to ascend. Our sages taught that Aaron was required to hold the flame to each lamp until each light could rise and burn on its own. The job of a leader, the Torah is saying, is not to burn forever for others. It is to ignite them — until they shine independently.

Later in the portion comes one of the Torah’s most quietly revolutionary moments. A group of Israelites approach Moses with a heartbreaking problem: they had become ritually impure and could not bring the Passover offering with everyone else. They had missed their moment. They pushed back with a question that carries enormous weight across the centuries: “Why should we be left out?”

God’s response was not to dismiss them. He instituted Pesach Sheni — a Second Passover, one month later — specifically for all who had been excluded from the first. The message encoded in that ruling has never stopped resonating: it is never too late. No Jew is permanently left behind. There is always a second door.

The Man Who Opened the Door

Daniel Limor grew up Jewish in Montevideo, Uruguay, made aliyah alone at sixteen — boarding a plane to Israel with a single suitcase, leaving his parents behind — and eventually became a Mossad officer and a Lieutenant Colonel who fought in four of Israel’s wars.

And yet nothing in his life had prepared him for what he found when he crossed into Ethiopia to meet with Jewish community leaders face to face. He had come to earn their trust, to begin making arrangements for an escape that most people believed was impossible. What he found stopped him cold.

“The Ethiopian Jews were Zionist before Theodor Herzl. They managed to survive for 2,700 years because they believed their dream was to return to Zion. It was their reason for living.” — Daniel Limor

He did not see a rescue target. He saw family.

Back in Sudan, Limor had already conceived one of the most audacious operational ideas in espionage history. He had found an abandoned Italian diving resort on the coast of the Red Sea sitting empty 40 km north of Port Sudan — and he saw not a ruin but a cover. He convinced the Sudanese Ministry of Tourism to let him lease it, printed professional brochures, hired real diving instructors, and opened a hotel so convincing that genuine tourists came, paid real money, and left satisfied — never suspecting that Israeli Navy SEALs were using the beach every night to guide Ethiopian Jewish families onto Zodiac dinghies bound for freedom.

He named the mission Operation Brothers. Not after a tactic. Not after a location. After a relationship.

“We became real brothers.” — Daniel Limor

Operation Brothers brought approximately 8,000 Ethiopian Jews home directly, and laid the groundwork for Operations Moses and Solomon that followed — ultimately bringing over 90,000 Beta Israel to Israel in total.

“The real heroes of the whole story are not the Mossad operatives. The Ethiopian Jews — they are the real heroes.” — Daniel Limor

Limor did not rescue the Beta Israel by imposing an operation on them from the outside. He went to meet their leaders in the dark. He held his flame to theirs, carefully and with profound respect, until the larger light of the operation could rise on its own. Beha’alotcha — he caused the flame to ascend. That is Aaron’s instruction, lived out on a Sudanese coastline two thousand years later.

And the Beta Israel themselves — the community that had been isolated, cut off, excluded from the first Passover of modern Jewish history for over two millennia — they are the living embodiment of Pesach Sheni. They were the Jews who came to Moses and asked the question that this portion answers: Why should we be left out?

God’s answer, given through Daniel Limor and the State of Israel, was the same one He gave in the wilderness: You are not left out. There is a second door. Come home.

“I look at young Jews around the world and I see that we are all brothers. Colour is not an issue.” — Daniel Limor

Why This Story Belongs to All of Us

At Ziv of Zion, we believe that Jewish history is not something that happened to other people in another time. It is a living inheritance — still unfolding, still demanding something from each of us.

Daniel Limor was not a mythological figure. He was a Jewish kid from Uruguay who chose Israel before it was easy, who stepped forward when the mission looked impossible, who crossed enemy lines in the dark because he looked at a community of Jews he had never met and saw brothers. He is the direct descendant — in spirit — of every Jew throughout history who refused to leave another Jew behind.

His story is this week’s Torah portion, breathed into living flesh. It is proof that beha’alotcha — the act of causing the flame of another person to rise — is not an ancient instruction for a High Priest. It is the calling of every generation.

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If their story moves you — and if Daniel Limor’s courage inspires you the way it inspires us — share this post with someone who needs to hear it today. Subscribe to Ziv of Zion and every week we will bring you another extraordinary Jewish hero: the fear alongside the courage, the doubt alongside the triumph, the full human story of a people who have never stopped shining.

Because the chain has never broken. And it will not break now.

Shabbat Shalom — and Am Yisrael Chai. ✨

With hope and light, Ziv of Zion

Someone offered her a cigarette.

She raised her hand toward it. Then stopped.

It was Shabbat.

She refused the cigarette. She asked for a siddur. She prayed Kabbalat Shabbat — the prayers welcoming the Jewish Sabbath — from the floor of that monastery. And in the early hours of Saturday morning, May 29, 1948, she died.

This week, the Jewish world reads Parashat Naso. And no story in recent Jewish history illuminates its central idea more completely than the life and death of Esther Cailingold.

Parashat Naso is the longest single portion in the entire Torah, and it contains one of the most quietly radical concepts in all of Jewish law: the Nazir.

Here is what the Nazir is, in plain terms. The Torah presents a set of commandments — laws that apply to every Jew. But then, in the middle of Naso, it opens a door that nobody has to walk through. It says: if a person wants to, entirely of their own free will, they can take on an additional vow of consecration. No wine. No cutting their hair. A heightened level of holiness, chosen freely. Not required. Not commanded. Simply available — for those who feel called to give more than the law demands.

The rabbis spent centuries asking why. If God wanted this level of dedication, why not simply require it? The answer they arrive at again and again is that there is something uniquely precious about the offering that nobody demanded. Holiness that is chosen — freely, fully, at personal cost — carries a weight that obligation never can.

The Torah makes room for the person who simply cannot help giving more. Esther Cailingold was that person.

She was born in Whitechapel, London, in 1925, the eldest child of a deeply religious and Zionist family. She won a scholarship to university, graduated with first-class honors in English, and by 1946 had accepted a teaching position in Jerusalem — fulfilling, as she described it, her life’s great ambition. In Jerusalem, she joined the Haganah, trained for combat, broadcast news on the underground radio service, and gathered intelligence on British officers. When the War of Independence began, she fought for months for permission to serve in the most dangerous posting available: the besieged Jewish Quarter of the Old City.

Nobody ordered her there. She was British. She could have gone home.

She entered the Old City on May 7, 1948, one week before Israeli independence, technically disguised as a schoolteacher on the last British convoy. She wrote home: “I am happy to be near the Western Wall!”

When the Arab Legion launched its sustained assault on the Jewish Quarter, Esther was wounded during the fighting. She accepted a field dressing and returned to her post. On May 26, an explosion shattered her spine. She was carried to the Quarter’s clinic — no morphine, no supplies. A witness account published in the Davar newspaper three days after her death recorded what happened next: she disappeared from the clinic. She had taken up a rifle and gone back out to fight. She was shot in the back and carried in a second time.

She went back after her spine was shattered. Nobody asked her to. She simply could not stop giving.

Her final letter to her parents arrived at their London home the morning after the family had already learned of her death. Her brother Asher read it aloud. It said:

“Please, please, do not be sadder than you can help. I have lived my life fully if briefly, and I think this is the best way — ‘short and sweet.’ Very sweet it has been here in our own land.”

And then, at the very end: “Be happy and remember me in happiness.”

She was twenty-two years old. She had no regrets.

The Nazir of the Torah takes on their vow and eventually returns to ordinary life. The hair is cut, the vow is released, and the world continues. But what they offered — that window of complete, voluntary dedication — leaves a mark that cannot be undone.

Esther Cailingold never returned to ordinary life. Her dedication was total and final. But the mark she left is exactly what the Torah describes: something that could only have come from a person who chose it, freely and completely, with no one standing over them and no law compelling them forward.

There is a kind of holiness that cannot be commanded. It can only be chosen. Esther chose it with every breath she had.

This is what Ziv of Zion was built to do — to find the heroes whose names have not traveled far enough, and carry their light to every Jewish community on earth. Esther Cailingold was a Diaspora Jew, born and raised in London, who looked at the land of Israel and decided it was worth everything she had. She was a teacher, a daughter, a fighter, and a woman of profound faith — and she held all of those identities together without contradiction, right up to the moment she asked for a siddur and prayed on a stone floor while she was dying.

Her story belongs to all of us. It belongs to every Jewish parent trying to raise children who are proud of who they are. It belongs to every college student wondering whether their identity is worth defending. It belongs to every grandmother who has carried the memory of what our people have built and paid for. And it belongs to every person sitting at a Shabbat table tonight who wants to feel, deeply and without apology, that being Jewish is something extraordinary.

She rests at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. A forest grows in her memory in the Galilee. Scholars study Torah in her name in the Jewish Quarter she died defending. Her light is still here.

Remember her in happiness. And share her story with someone who needs it tonight.

Am Yisrael Chai — and brighter than ever. ✨

With hope and light, Ziv of Zion

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If this story moved you, share it with someone who needs this light. And if you know a hero whose story deserves to be told — reply to this email and tell us. Every week, Ziv of Zion brings another extraordinary life out of the shadows and into the light where it belongs. Subscribe, and carry that light forward.

With hope and light, Ziv of Zion

By the time he was twenty-seven years old, Yigal Allon commanded the most elite Jewish fighting force assembled in two thousand years of exile. And by the time the dust of Israel’s War of Independence had settled, he had helped give the Jewish state something it had never had before: shape.

This is his story. And this week’s Torah portion was practically written for him.

Parashat Bamidbar opens the Book of Numbers — the fourth book of the Torah — and it begins not with a miracle or a commandment, but with something that might surprise you: a census. God instructs Moses to count the Israelite people, tribe by tribe, family by family, man by man. Every person numbered. Every tribe assigned a banner and a designated position in the camp. The Levites given a separate, sacred role: to surround and protect the Mishkan, the portable Tabernacle at the center of it all.

To a modern reader, this might sound like bureaucracy. But look closer, and you find something profound. The Israelites at this moment in the story are wandering in the wilderness — recently freed from slavery, not yet arrived in their homeland, surrounded by uncertainty and threat. They are a people in between. And what God gives them in this moment is not another miracle. He gives them structure. He gives them order, purpose, roles, and the dignity of being counted as individuals within a larger mission.

The wilderness does not end when you stop wandering. It ends when every person knows their place, their purpose, and what they are walking toward.

That is the gift of Bamidbar. And it is exactly the gift Yigal Allon gave his generation.

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When the Palmach was founded in 1941 as the Haganah’s elite underground strike force, Allon rose through its ranks with striking speed. What made him exceptional was not just physical courage — it was military imagination combined with moral seriousness. He built the Palmach into something more than a fighting unit. He built it into a culture, a community of young Jews who understood not only how to fight, but what they were fighting for.

The Palmach was trying to prove that the Jewish people could produce a new type of person — one who fights for his home and builds it at the same time.

Few people know that Allon later went to Oxford University, sitting in tutorial rooms in England thinking carefully about strategy, history, and the ideas that underlay everything he had fought for. The soldier was also a scholar. The commander was also a builder. Like the Levites of Bamidbar — who were not simply warriors but guardians of something sacred at the center of the camp — Allon understood that protecting Israel was never only about the battlefield. It was about preserving something worth protecting.

In 1948, he commanded some of Israel’s most decisive operations. Operation Yiftach secured the Galilee — the same hills where he had grown up. Operation Yoav broke the Egyptian siege of the Negev. And when the fighting finally slowed, Allon did what great leaders do: he looked past the victory toward the future it had purchased.

Ten days after the Six-Day War ended in 1967, while Israel was still absorbing the staggering scope of what had just happened, Allon presented what became known as the Allon Plan — a structured blueprint for Israel’s future borders. He argued for holding the Jordan Valley as a security buffer while offering the heavily populated Palestinian cities a path toward political autonomy. It was serious, nuanced, and decades ahead of its time.

The plan was never adopted. But it never disappeared either. Its logic echoes through every major negotiation over Israel’s future to this day.

Security and peace are not contradictions. But security without defensible borders is an illusion — and peace without security is a dream.

Bamidbar teaches that the tribes did not camp randomly in the wilderness. Each one had a designated place, facing inward toward what was most sacred, while forming an outward wall of protection. Order was not the opposite of faith — it was an expression of faith. The belief that this people had a future worth organizing for.

Allon believed exactly that. His entire life was an argument that the Jewish people deserved not just survival, but shape — a thoughtful, structured, morally serious future built on both strength and vision.

A nation that does not know its history does not know where it is going. We must teach our children not only what we fought for — but why it was worth fighting for.

At Ziv of Zion, we search for heroes whose stories do more than impress — they illuminate. Yigal Allon is one of those heroes. He was a farmer who became a general, a general who became a scholar, and a scholar who wrote a blueprint for Israel’s future that his country is still unfolding. His life is proof that Jewish strength and Jewish wisdom are not in tension — they are the same flame burning at different temperatures.

This Shabbat, bring his name to your table. Tell your children about the boy from the Galilee who looked at a people wandering in uncertainty and decided to give them shape. Because that is what Jewish leaders have always done — in the wilderness of Sinai, in the hills of the Galilee, and in every generation since.

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Parashat Behar is one of the Torah’s most quietly radical teachings — and here is what you need to know.

God speaks to Moses on Mount Sinai and commands something that would have sounded extraordinary to any farmer in the ancient world: every seventh year, the land of Israel must rest. Completely. No plowing. No sowing. No pruning. No harvest. The earth gets a Sabbath, just as people do. This is called Shemitah — the sabbatical year.

And then God makes a promise that sounds almost impossible to rationalize: if the Jewish people honor the land’s rest, He will bless the sixth year so abundantly that one harvest will carry them through the seventh year and into the eighth, until new crops can grow. In other words: trust the land, give it what it needs — and it will give back more than force ever could.

But Behar doesn’t stop there. It continues with the Yovel — the Jubilee year, every fiftieth year — when debts are forgiven, hereditary lands return to their original families, and the entire economic order is reset.

The Torah’s underlying message is ancient and radical in equal measure: the land does not belong to us. We are stewards, not owners. We are tenants in a sacred partnership with the earth, and our task is to give it exactly what it needs — no more, no less.

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This is not just agricultural law. It is a philosophy of how human beings must relate to the world they inhabit: with restraint, with precision, with humility, and with deep faith that small acts of faithful care yield a harvest that brute force never could.

Behar doesn’t ask us to work harder. It asks us to work more wisely — and then trust the earth to do what earth does.

Simcha Blass lived that philosophy, in the desert, with pipe and plastic and thirty years of patient vision.

Born in Warsaw in 1897, Blass made aliyah in the late 1920s and became known across pre-state Palestine as Ish HaMayim — The Water Man. He built Israel’s early water infrastructure, helped secure the Negev for the Jewish state, and then, at age 68, did something the world had never seen.

He took that leaking pipe — that one faithful, invisible drop — and turned it into the world’s most water-efficient irrigation system.

Instead of flooding entire fields the way farmers had done for millennia, wasting up to 70% of their water through runoff and evaporation, Blass designed a system that delivered a single measured drop directly to each plant’s root. Precisely. Consistently. Without waste. He partnered with Kibbutz Hatzerim — a kibbutz in the Negev founded by Jewish orphans who had survived the Holocaust by escaping through Iran — and in 1965, Netafim was born.

From one desert kibbutz, built by Holocaust survivors, a Jewish invention now helps feed close to a billion people. That is tikkun olam with dirt on its hands.

The parallel to Behar is not poetic decoration. It is exact. The Torah commands: do not flood the land with more than it can hold. Give it rest. Give it space. Give it precisely what it needs. Blass looked at centuries of flood irrigation — the ancient assumption that more water means more growth — and recognized it for what it was: waste, exhaustion, a misunderstanding of how the earth actually works.

His answer was Behar’s answer. Less force. More wisdom. One drop. Delivered faithfully. Again and again.

The Torah knew what took agriculture three thousand years to learn: the earth doesn’t need a flood. It needs one faithful drop, given with care.

Netafim today operates in 110 countries. In Kenya, switching to drip irrigation increased crop yields by 140% while cutting water use in half. In drought-prone regions of India, tens of thousands of families have stabilized their harvests through a technology born in the Jewish desert. In a world where freshwater scarcity is becoming the defining crisis of this century, Israel’s answer — born from a leaking pipe and a Torah principle — is already feeding the world.

Simcha Blass died in 1982, before seeing any of this unfold at scale. He planted trees whose shade he never sat beneath.

That is a deeply Jewish way to live — to build not for recognition, but for generations you will never meet.

Simcha Blass is exactly the kind of hero Ziv of Zion was created to honor. Not a politician. Not a headline. A builder — patient, rooted, and quietly world-changing. A man who read the Negev desert the way a Torah scholar reads a page of Talmud: slowly, carefully, looking for what everyone else had missed. His Ziv — his radiance — flows today through the roots of crops on six continents, nourishing life he never lived to see.

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She went because she could not sit in the safety of her kibbutz while Jews were dying in the country she had left behind. She went because she had spent months fighting British military planners who didn’t believe a woman belonged on the most dangerous Jewish mission of World War II — and she had won that fight, and she was not going to waste the victory. She went because the bond between Diaspora Jews and their homeland, for Haviva Reik, was never a sentiment. It was an obligation you acted on, even when acting cost everything.

On September 21, 1944, she parachuted from a British aircraft into Nazi-occupied Slovakia — one of thirty-seven Jewish volunteers from Palestine, one of only three women ever accepted into the program. She landed in Banská Bystrica, the heart of the Slovak National Uprising, and she immediately got to work.

She built safe houses. She guided Allied airmen through partisan escape routes. She maintained coded communications with the Jewish Agency in pre-state Israel. And she opened a soup kitchen.

That soup kitchen is the part of her story that stops people cold. Here is a Palmach-trained, British-certified intelligence operative — and she is standing in an occupied city, with German forces closing in from every direction, ladling food for Jewish refugees the world had already abandoned. The strategic and the human, completely fused. The mission and the person standing hungry in front of her, inseparable.

She didn’t know she was keeping a commandment that is nearly three thousand years old. But she was.

This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Emor — and if you are not deeply familiar with Torah, here is what you need to know. The word emor simply means “speak.” God instructs Moses to speak to the priests — the Kohanim — and lay out the higher standard their lives must meet. Not because they are better than anyone else. Because they have accepted a greater calling. They have said yes to something that demands more.

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The portion moves through laws of priestly service, through the rhythm of sacred festivals — Passover, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot — building a calendar of holy time for the Jewish people. And then, tucked into the middle of all of it, almost as an interruption, comes a single verse that changes everything.

Leviticus 23:22. “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not completely remove the corner of your field. You shall leave it for the poor and for the stranger.”

This commandment is called pe’ah — the corner. The Torah is saying: in the middle of your sacred time, in the middle of your festivals and your holy days and your appointed moments with God — stop. Remember the person who has nothing. Leave them something. Not as charity. Not as optional generosity. As an obligation woven directly into the fabric of sacred living.

It is a radical interruption. And it is the most Jewish thing in the world.

Pe’ah is the Torah’s insistence that holiness is never complete unless the most vulnerable person in the room has been seen and fed.

Haviva Reik’s soup kitchen in Banská Bystrica was pe’ah made flesh.

She left every corner open. Every corner of her safety — she had given it up when she boarded that British aircraft. Every corner of her expertise — her languages, her Zionist networks, her Palmach training — poured out for people who had nothing left. Every corner of the time she had in that burning city — she spent it making sure that the strangers, the sick, the abandoned, the already-written-off were not alone and were not hungry.

She did not distinguish between the strategic and the human. For Haviva Reik, the person standing hungry at the door was always the mission.

The Slovak National Uprising collapsed on October 27, 1944. German forces retook the city. The networks she had built began to unravel. Her comrades urged her to flee into the mountains — she had the training, the instincts, the physical capability to survive.

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She looked at the sick and the elderly refugees around her — those who could not keep pace with a mountain escape — and she refused to go.

This is where pe’ah ends and Kiddush Hashem begins. The sanctification of God’s name through the most human act possible: staying with those who cannot follow when you run. On November 20, 1944, Haviva Reik was captured and executed at the Kremnička massacre site. She was thirty years old.

Holiness, Parashat Emor teaches us, is not what you feel. It is what you do when leaving would be so much easier than staying.

In 1952, her remains were reinterred with full military honors at Mount Herzl Military Cemetery in Jerusalem — Israel’s most sacred ground, where she rests beside Hannah Szenes and the other fallen Jewish parachutists. Israel named a kibbutz after her. An educational center. A ship. Streets in cities across the country carry her name.

And in 2026, her question still finds us — not in a forest in Slovakia, but in our communities, our families, our choices about what corners we are willing to leave open. For the stranger in our neighborhood. For the Jewish community that needs our time. For the next generation growing up without knowing her name.

At Ziv of Zion, Haviva Reik is everything we believe Jewish heroism looks like. She is the woman who left every corner open — her safety, her comfort, her survival — because she understood, in the deepest possible way, that sacred living is not about what you accumulate. It is about what you give away to the person who has nothing. That is pe’ah. That is Parashat Emor. That is the Jewish people at their most radiant.

Her Ziv — her divine light — never stopped shining. It is our mission to make sure you can see it, and that your children can too.

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Ari Spitz was so still, so catastrophically injured by the explosion that tore through a Gaza building in February 2024, that every soldier around him was certain he was gone. The doctor’s job, in that moment, was simply to confirm it and move on. Instead, he pressed two fingers to Ari’s neck.

He found a pulse. Barely. But it was there.

What happened next — the evacuation, the helicopter, the eight surgeries, the 35 units of blood, the six weeks in a medically induced coma, and the long, extraordinary journey back to life —

And this week, the Torah tells us exactly that.

What Is Parshat Acharei Mot-Kedoshim?

This week’s double Torah portion — Acharei Mot and Kedoshim — sits at the very heart of the Book of Leviticus, which itself sits at the heart of the entire Torah. If you’re not deeply familiar with the weekly parsha, here is what you need to know: these two portions together form what many rabbis consider the moral core of Jewish civilization.

Acharei Mot, meaning “after the death,” opens in the shadow of loss. It sets out the sacred ritual of Yom Kippur — the annual moment when the Jewish people pause, account for themselves, and return to what matters. It is a portion about consequence, about the cost of living without intention.

Then Kedoshim arrives — and everything opens up.

“Kedoshim tihyu,” God commands. “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” (Vayikra 19:2)

This single verse launches one of the most sweeping ethical blueprints ever written. Honor your parents. Care for the poor. Be honest in business. Do not stand by while your neighbor’s blood is shed. And then, at the center of it all, the commandment that Rabbi Akiva called the greatest principle in the entire Torah: “V’ahavta l’reicha kamocha” — love your neighbor as yourself.

What makes Kedoshim radical is this: holiness is not reserved for priests or mystics or perfect people. It is a daily instruction.

A standard for the grocery store and the battlefield and the hospital room and the rehabilitation ward. The Ramban, the great medieval scholar, explained it this way — the Torah is telling us not just what to do, but how to do it. With intention. With awareness. With the understanding that every choice you make either adds light to the world or dims it.

That is precisely what Ari Spitz has done, every day, since the moment he woke up.

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The Letter He Carried Into the Fire

Before Ari entered Gaza, he wrote what became known as his “hundred-word letter” — a brief, personal document in which he named the four reasons he was choosing to fight. As a Jew. As an Israeli. As an American. As a human being who believed in the difference between good and evil.

He did not drift into that building in Zeitoun. He walked in knowing.

“My great-grandparents survived the Holocaust. They could never have imagined that one day, a Jewish soldier like me would stand armed to protect the Jewish people.”

That is Kedoshim. That is holiness as intention — the refusal to let the most important things go unnamed.

When Ari finally woke from his coma and learned what the explosion had taken — both legs, his right hand, the future he had imagined for himself — he did not collapse. He set a new goal. And then another. And then another.

“From the moment I woke up, I was focused on the next step. Every small step was a huge victory.”

His mother Leah, who stood vigil for six weeks and updated a prayer group of hundreds through every terrifying night, said it most simply when asked what she felt on that first drive to the hospital: “We chose life.”

Chose. Not endured. Not accepted. Chose.

That verb is the whole of Kedoshim in one word. Holiness, the Torah tells us, is not something that happens to you. It is something you reach for, deliberately, in the moments when reaching costs the most.

From Gaza to Mount Herzl

In October 2025, Prime Minister Netanyahu stood before the Knesset with President Trump in the chamber, pointed to Ari Spitz in the gallery, and said:

“Ari, you are the spirit of Joshua. You are the spirit of David. You are the spirit of the Maccabees. You are the spirit of Israel. I salute you. We all salute you.”

The room rose. Because everyone in it understood — this young man, who held a faint pulse in Gaza and turned it into a life fully lived — is what holiness in action looks like.

On April 22, 2026, under the theme “Power of Renewal,” Ari Spitz stood on Mount Herzl and lit one of twelve torches at Israel’s 78th Independence Day ceremony. The mountain where Theodor Herzl is buried. The ceremony that closes Yom HaZikaron’s grief and opens Yom Ha’atzmaut’s celebration. The moment, every year, when the Jewish people say: we are still here, and we are not done.

The man once presumed dead carried the flame.

Acharei Mot opens in the shadow of death. Kedoshim answers it with a command to be holy. And Ari Spitz — born, we are told, on the very night of a devastating terror attack in 2002, and wounded in the worst attack since — has lived his entire life in that exact passage. From the shadow into the light. From the depths of gaza into the torch.

The Jewish people do not simply survive. We choose — again and again, in the hardest possible moments — to live, to love, and to carry the flame forward.

This is what Ziv of Zion was built to celebrate. Not just the victories, but the quiet, ferocious act of choosing life when choosing anything at all feels almost impossible. Ari Spitz is this week’s hero not because he is an exception to the Jewish story, but because he is the Jewish story — ancient enough to be in this week’s parsha, alive enough to be dancing at a friend’s wedding in prosthetics and captioning it with a smile. He is the reason this newsletter exists: to make sure that lights like his travel as far as they possibly can.

If Ari’s story moved you, share it with someone who needs this light this Shabbat. Forward it to a parent, a grandchild, a college student, or a friend who needs to be reminded that the Jewish people are not only surviving — we are lighting torches. And if you are not yet a Ziv of Zion subscriber, join us. One extraordinary story, every week, delivered straight to your inbox.

With hope and light, Ziv of Zion

Am Yisrael Chai — and brighter than ever. ✨

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Chaim Sheba had not.

He walked through that gate with no government mandate, no political power, and no weapons. What he carried was a doctor’s mind, a Jewish soul, and a relationship with a British officer built during his years serving in the British Army. Inside, he organized care for infants through the brutal winter. He arranged for cigarettes to be smuggled in and traded for bread to feed the hungry. He helped individual refugees escape by boat under cover of darkness. And when he needed the British to act, he told them something they could not ignore: the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions were creating a typhoid risk that could spread beyond the wire and endanger the entire island.

He didn’t fight his way in. He thought his way in. He healed his way in.

The British listened. He walked out having secured 750 immigration certificates per month for his people. One Jewish doctor had outmaneuvered an empire — with medicine as his argument and compassion as his strategy.

This week, as we read Parashat Tazria-Metzora, the story of Chaim Sheba feels more relevant than ever. Because this ancient, often misunderstood Torah portion turns out to be his life’s mission — written three thousand years before he was born.

What Is Tazria-Metzora?

If the Torah is not your daily companion, this is one of those portions that can feel distant at first glance. Tazria-Metzora describes a mysterious skin condition called tzara’at — often translated as leprosy, though scholars believe it carried a spiritual dimension far deeper than any physical illness. The Torah details how a person who develops this condition must be examined by a priest and, if confirmed, must dwell outside the camp — separated from the community — for a defined period of time.

It can sound, on the surface, like ancient medical regulation. But the rabbis saw something far more profound underneath.

They taught that tzara’at was connected to lashon hara — harmful speech, words used to wound or isolate others. The afflicted person was not removed as punishment but as an invitation: to stillness, to reflection, to inner repair. And crucially, the process always ended with return. With healing. With reintegration. The priest’s role was never to condemn. It was to examine closely, to accompany honestly, and ultimately to bring the person home.

The Torah’s deepest insight about illness and isolation is this: no one heals alone. And no one should ever have to.

This is the soul of Tazria-Metzora. Suffering is not a verdict. Isolation is not the destination. The healer — the priest — exists to close the distance between the person in pain and the community waiting to receive them. From isolation to healing. That movement, that arc, is the entire portion in four words.

It is also the entire life of Chaim Sheba.

He was born in 1908 in a tiny Chasidic village in what is now Romania, a descendant of the revered Ruzhin dynasty. He earned his medical degree in Vienna, made aliyah at just 24 years old — in the very year Hitler rose to power — and spent his early years as a village doctor in the Hula Valley, treating Jewish pioneers in the mud, delivering babies in tents, driving through the dark to reach someone in pain. He never once treated medicine as a transaction. He understood it as a covenant — the ancient, unbreakable promise of the healer to draw near.

When Israel declared independence in 1948 and came under fire from every direction, Sheba built the IDF Medical Corps from almost nothing — 15 military hospitals, no budget, no template, war on every border. He insisted from the very first days that psychiatric care be woven into military medicine, at a time when mental suffering in wartime was expected to be silently endured. He refused that cruelty. A wounded mind, he believed, deserved the same sacred attention as a wounded body.

He believed that healing a soldier meant healing the whole person. Body, mind, and soul — together. Always together.

And then, in 1953, he made the decision that would define his entire legacy. He resigned from his powerful post as Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Health to take over a converted military barracks on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. To the world, it looked like a retreat. It was the opposite. It was his life’s defining forward step.

What he built there — the institution now known as the Chaim Sheba Medical Center — is today ranked one of the top 10 hospitals in the entire world by Newsweek, the highest honor earned by any hospital in the Middle East. It treats nearly 2 million patients every year. Its emergency teams deploy to disaster zones across the globe — to Rwanda, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, and beyond. Its motto is Hope Without Boundaries.

He died on July 10, 1971, of a heart attack — in the very hospital he had given his life to build. Israel renamed it in his honor.

The priest in Tazria-Metzora does not stand at a distance and pass judgment. He draws near. He examines with care. He declares healing when healing has come. He opens the gate and walks the person home.

That is the arc of Chaim Sheba’s entire life. In Cyprus, he drew near to 6,000 people the world had forgotten and opened their gate. In the Hula Valley, he drew near to pioneers living at the edge of survival. In the IDF, he drew near to soldiers whose wounds no one else was willing to see. And in the hospital he built from a military barracks, he created a place where drawing near — to every patient, regardless of nationality, religion, or origin — became an institutional promise kept every single day.

From isolation to healing. The Torah named it. Chaim Sheba lived it.

At Ziv of Zion, we exist for exactly this reason — to shine the light of heroes like Chaim Sheba onto the path ahead of us. His life is not a museum piece. It is a living instruction. He shows us that the most powerful response to a world that isolates, excludes, and forgets is not anger — it is the quiet, relentless, deeply Jewish act of drawing near. Of healing. Of bringing people home.

This Shabbat, say his name at your table. Tell your children what one Jewish doctor built from a converted military barracks and an unshakeable belief that every human life is a world worth saving. Let his Ziv — his radiance — travel a little further from Zion this week.

If this story moved you, share it with someone who needs this light. And if you haven’t yet joined our growing community of Jews who believe these stories matter more than ever — subscribe below. Every week, one hero. One story. Closer to Zion. ✨

Am Yisrael Chai — and brighter than ever.

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After months of building and seven days of preparation, Aaron the High Priest steps forward to serve at the Tabernacle for the very first time. Fire descends from Heaven and consumes the offering on the altar. The people see it. They shout. They fall on their faces in awe and joy.

Then Aaron watches as his two sons die. Nadav and Avihu, young and full of fire, brought an unauthorized offering before God and were consumed by a divine flame. The text then records one of the most haunting verses in all of Torah: “And Aaron was silent.”

Not broken. Not absent. Silent. Present with everything that had just happened, in full acceptance of something he could not fully understand.

We will return to that silence. Because it is the key to everything.

Parshat Shmini — Hebrew for “eighth” — picks up at the climax of the Tabernacle’s inauguration. For seven days, Moses has prepared the priests. On the eighth day, Aaron and his sons finally begin their service. The divine presence descends. Fire comes from God and consumes the offering. The people shout and fall on their faces.

And then Nadav and Avihu offer “strange fire” — an act the Torah describes as something God had not commanded. They die instantly.

The portion moves forward from there, delivering the foundational laws of kashrut: which animals are permitted to eat, which are not, and why. But the emotional center of Shmini is that moment of Aaron’s silence — and the question it quietly asks every reader across every generation: What do you do when life demands a complete reckoning with what truly matters?

Uri Zohar knew that moment.

He didn’t face tragedy the way Aaron did. He faced something arguably harder for a man of his temperament: he had everything, and it wasn’t enough. Israel’s most celebrated entertainer — director, comedian, television host, the face and voice of a generation — was living in a mansion on the Mediterranean, invited to every party, beloved by an entire nation, when a rabbi at one of those parties looked him in the eye and said: “I can prove to you there is a Creator — but first you have to accept that such a fact would obligate you to change how you live.”

Most people laugh at that kind of challenge. Zohar, trained in philosophy at Hebrew University, accepted it. He showed up at the rabbi’s home. He listened.

He was given a precise, verifiable claim from the book of Leviticus: that exactly four land animals in the entire world possess only one of the two signs of a kosher animal — not both. Zohar picked up the phone and called Israel’s leading zoology professor. He needed it to be wrong. He needed an exit. The professor confirmed every word.

He didn’t drift into faith. He was dragged toward it by his own relentless mind — a philosopher who demanded proof, and had the courage to act when he received it.

There is a direct line from that moment to Aaron’s silence in Parshat Shmini. Both men encountered something that exceeded their prior framework. Aaron could not explain the death of his sons through the logic of grief alone — the Torah records that he received the moment in silence, which the rabbis understand as an acceptance of divine truth even in pain. Zohar could not explain away the precision of the Torah’s zoological claim through the logic of secular science alone. Both men, in their own way, went quiet inside. And both men let what they found there change everything.

Zohar left his career. He enrolled in yeshiva — Israel’s most famous entertainer sitting beside teenagers, starting Torah study from scratch. His wife followed. His seven children followed. For the next four decades, he devoted himself to bringing other Jews home through kiruv work with Lev L’Achim.

He proved that the most radical act of courage is not performing on the world’s biggest stage — it is walking off it when you discover something truer than applause.

Parshat Shmini’s kashrut laws, often taught as dietary rules, carry a deeper teaching: that holiness lives in the details of daily life. What you eat. What you choose. What you permit to enter and what you keep out. Uri Zohar came to understand this not as restriction but as architecture — a sacred structure for a life that actually means something.

He was forty years old when that journey began. He would later say, “I was really born when I was 40” — echoing Rabbi Akiva, who also began as an adult and became one of Israel’s greatest sages.

It is never too late to return. That is the promise of teshuvah — and Uri Zohar lived it more completely than almost anyone in modern Jewish history.

The heroes of Israel are not only found on battlefields. Some of them are found at parties in Tel Aviv, picking up a phone to call a zoology professor, listening for something they did not expect to hear — and then having the courage to let it change them completely.

Uri Zohar heard the fire. He went silent. And then he spent forty years helping others hear it too.

Parshat Shmini asks us what we do in the moment that demands everything. Aaron answered with silence and continued service. Zohar answered with a kippah, a yeshiva, and a life rebuilt from the ground up.

Both answers are, in their own way, the same answer: I will not look away from what is true.

Am Yisrael Chai — and brighter than ever. ✨

Uri Zohar is our hero this week — not despite the world he left behind, but because of the courage it took to leave it. His story is the story of every Jew who has ever stood at a distance from their heritage and wondered if the way home still exists. It does. It always has. And Ziv of Zion exists to remind you of that — one extraordinary story at a time.

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If this story moved you, share it with someone who needs this light. And if you know a hero whose story deserves to be told — reply to this email and tell us. Every week, Ziv of Zion brings another extraordinary life out of the shadows and into the light where it belongs. Subscribe, and carry that light forward.

With hope and light, Ziv of Zion

Moses has just held his people together through their worst failure. The Golden Calf. The shattered tablets. Forty days of intercession. And after all of it, after pleading and bargaining and breaking himself open on behalf of a nation that didn’t deserve it, Moses makes one final request.

“Show me Your glory.”

He doesn’t ask for victory. He doesn’t ask for rest. He asks to see the face of the One he has given everything to serve.

And God says no.

Not harshly. Not as a rejection. God wraps Moses in the cleft of a rock, passes His glory by, and allows Moses to see only His back.

“You cannot see My face,” God tells him, “for no person can see Me and live.”

It is one of the most quietly devastating moments in all of Torah. The greatest leader in Jewish history — the man who split the sea, who stood before Pharaoh, who carried an entire people on his shoulders — never gets to see the face of what he served. He gives everything. He receives presence, protection, purpose. But never the full picture. Never the open face.

Some forms of devotion require that kind of darkness.

Eli Cohen spent four years at the center of the Syrian government, sending intelligence back to Israel, living under a name that wasn’t his, building a life he would never be allowed to keep. He never got to see what his sacrifice made possible. He was executed in Damascus on May 18, 1965 — before the war his intelligence helped win had even begun.

This is what makes Eli Cohen’s story so devastating, and so sacred, to read during Passover.

We know the broad strokes. The Mossad. The alias. The eucalyptus trees planted at Syrian military positions on the Golan Heights — his idea, sold to Syrian officers as shade, used by Israeli pilots as targeting markers in the Six-Day War two years after his death. We know he rose to the inner circle of Syrian power. We know he was caught. We know he was hanged in a public square in Damascus while the world watched.

What we think about less is what it actually cost him to do it.

Cohen operated in complete hiddenness. His wife Nadia raised their children in Tel Aviv largely alone, knowing only that her husband worked abroad. The people whose lives he was protecting had no idea he existed. The generals he befriended, the politicians he charmed, the country he was dismantling from the inside — none of them saw his real face. And Israel, the nation he loved enough to die for, couldn’t claim him publicly until it was too late.

Moses asked to see God’s face. Eli Cohen never got to show his own.

The Torah doesn’t reward Moses’s request with a vision. It rewards him with presence. God tells him: I will make My goodness pass before you. I will be with you, even when you cannot see Me fully. That promise — presence without full visibility — is the covenant that sustains every person who has ever served something larger than themselves in the dark.

The Haftarah this Shabbat makes the parallel even sharper. Ezekiel stands in a valley of dry bones — a scattered, broken, seemingly dead people — and God asks him: “Can these bones live?”

Ezekiel’s honest answer is almost a non-answer: “Lord God, only You know.”

But then God breathes into them. Sinew by sinew. Flesh by flesh. Breath by breath. A nation that looked finished rises as a living army.

This is the vision we read on the Shabbat of Passover — a holiday that is itself about resurrection. A people dead in slavery, brought back to life through the desert. And Ezekiel’s valley is a reminder that revival rarely announces itself. It happens quietly, invisibly, one act of faithfulness at a time.

Eli Cohen was one breath in that valley.

The soldiers who fought on the Golan Heights in 1967 didn’t know why certain targets were marked. They didn’t know whose sacrifice had prepared the ground beneath their boots. They just knew they were alive.

This is the hidden miracle of Passover. Not just the plagues or the parted sea — but the invisible web of faithful people who made the Exodus possible. The midwives who refused Pharaoh’s order. The mother who built a basket and trusted the river. The sister who watched from the reeds. Every generation has its hidden servants. Eli Cohen was ours.

His body has never come home. After sixty years, repeated requests to recover his remains from Syria have been refused. There is no grave to visit, no marker to stand beside. Even in death, he remains hidden.

But his eucalyptus trees may still be standing on the Golan.

Moses never saw God’s face. But the Jewish people made it to the Promised Land. Eli Cohen never made it home. But the Jewish people kept their home.

That is the covenant of the hidden servant. Not recognition. Not the full picture. Just the knowledge — held quietly, in the cleft of the rock — that your faithfulness mattered. That your sacrifice was not wasted. That somewhere, someone is alive because you chose the darkness so they could live in the light.

This Shabbat, at your Passover table, consider asking: Who has served quietly on your behalf — in ways you will never fully see? And how do you honor a sacrifice that was never meant to be known?

Am Yisrael Chai — and its hidden heroes shine brighter than ever.

With hope and light, Ziv of Zion

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Parshat Tzav opens with God giving Moses a specific command for the priests. Not a dramatic one. A quiet, daily one:

“A continuous fire shall burn upon the altar; it shall not go out.”

Leviticus 6:6

If you sit with it for a second, you realize how radical that is. The fire doesn’t burn on its own. Someone has to tend it. Every. Single. Day. No matter what.

That’s what Parshat Tzav — whose very name means “command” — is really about. Not just sacrifices and priestly rituals. It’s about showing up. Doing the work. Keeping the sacred flame alive even when no one is watching and nothing feels dramatic or heroic.

The Rabbis weren't just talking about a literal fire. The altar flame represented the Jewish people's connection to God — their covenant, their purpose, their identity. Let it go out, and something sacred is lost. Something that isn’t easy to rekindle.

Tzav also describes the ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests. Moses literally dresses them, anoints them with oil, and consecrates them to their mission. Then he tells them something striking — stay in the Tabernacle for seven days and nights. Don’t leave. Be present. Be committed. Ordination wasn’t a ceremony. It was a test of devotion. Could you stay? Could you keep showing up even when nothing dramatic was happening?

This week’s living Torah

Yosef Trumpeldor never read Tzav and thought, “this is my parsha.” But he lived it. Completely.

Trumpeldor was a Russian-Jewish soldier who lost his arm in battle — and refused to go home. He made aliyah, worked the land, and co-founded the first all-Jewish fighting unit in 2,000 years. When tiny Jewish farming villages in the Upper Galilee were under threat, he went north to defend them. Not because anyone forced him. Because someone had to tend the fire.

On March 1, 1920, Trumpeldor was shot defending the settlement of Tel Hai. As he lay dying, he said:

“Never mind. It is good to die for our country.”

Yosef Trumpeldor · Tel Hai, 1920

The town built near that site is named Kiryat Shmona — “City of Eight” — after Trumpeldor and the seven others who died with him. Their fire did not go out. It became a city.

The connection

The priests in Tzav weren’t heroes in the Hollywood sense. They were servants. Faithful, disciplined, daily servants. They showed up before sunrise to tend an altar most people never saw. What made them holy wasn’t talent or status. It was consistency.

Even the High Priest brought a daily offering. Even Aaron. No one was above the daily work.

Trumpeldor understood this instinctively. He didn’t wait for the perfect moment or the perfect conditions to serve the Jewish people. He showed up — with one arm, in a dangerous land, far from home — and tended the flame. Again and again. Until the very end.

“But I still have another arm to give.”

Yosef Trumpeldor · after losing his arm at Port Arthur, 1905

That’s Tzav. That’s the whole portion in one sentence.

At Ziv of Zion, we believe the stories of Israel’s heroes aren’t just history. They’re a living Torah — a guide for how we, as Diaspora Jews, can keep our own flame burning. Trumpeldor’s fire became Kiryat Shmona. What can yours become?

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Then you hear the story of Zvi Reder — and suddenly, Vayikra comes alive.

What Is Parashat Vayikra Really About?

Parashat Vayikra opens the Book of Leviticus with God calling out to Moses from the Tent of Meeting. The word Vayikra means “And He called” — it’s an intimate summons, a personal invitation. God then lays out the laws of sacrifice: burnt offerings, peace offerings, sin offerings, and more.

But here’s what most people miss:

the Hebrew word for “sacrifice” is not about giving something up. The word is korban, and it comes from the root karav — meaning to draw close.

A korban was never meant to be a transaction, something you hand over to God to make a problem go away. It was an act of coming near. Of closing the distance between yourself and the Divine. Of saying, with everything you have: I am here. I give myself fully to something greater than me.

The rabbis teach that when the Torah introduces the sacrificial offering, it says: “Adam ki yakriv mikem korban” — “When a person among you brings an offering.” The word mikem, meaning “from you,” tells us something important: the offering had to come from within the person. It had to cost them something real. It had to be personal.

That is exactly what Zvi Reder gave on October 7th, 2023.

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October 7th: The Day That Demanded Everything

On that terrible Shabbat morning, when Hamas launched its massacre against communities in southern Israel, Zvi Reder did what he had trained his whole life to do. He was a paramedic — and there were wounded people who needed him. He ran toward the chaos, toward the screaming, toward the blood. He went to save lives.

And then, in the middle of that nightmare, he received the news that no parent should ever have to receive: his son had been killed by terrorists.

Imagine that moment. The grief of a parent losing a child is one of the heaviest burdens a human being can carry. In that moment, Zvi had every reason in the world to stop — to collapse, to grieve, to do nothing but feel the weight of what he had lost. No one would have blamed him.

He kept working.

He stayed at his post. He kept treating the wounded. He kept giving of himself, even as the worst possible news tore through him. He offered himself — his hands, his skills, his very presence — to people who needed him, at the moment when he needed the most himself.

The Offering That Costs You Something

The Torah teaches that the most meaningful offering is the one that costs you something real.

In fact, the Talmud points out that when describing the mincha — a simple meal offering brought by the poor — the Torah uses the word nefesh, meaning “soul.” Why? Because for someone who has very little, giving even a handful of flour is giving a piece of themselves.

On October 7th, Zvi Reder didn’t bring flour or livestock to an altar. But he brought something far more costly: he brought his broken heart, his trained hands, and his unwavering sense of duty to the altar of human life. He gave from his nefesh — from his very soul — on the worst day of his life.

That is the essence of korban. That is the living meaning of Vayikra.

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What Zvi Teaches Us

We live in a world where sacrifice is often spoken about but rarely practiced at this level. It’s easy to talk about giving. It’s much harder to give when you have already lost so much.

Zvi Reder showed us what that looks like. He showed us that the spirit of Vayikra is not found in an ancient Temple — it is found in every person who, in the face of devastating loss, chooses service over suffering alone. Who chooses to draw close to others, even when they are breaking inside.

Vayikra — And He called. On October 7th, the call came. And Zvi Reder answered.

May his son’s memory be a blessing. May Zvi’s courage be an example. And may we all find the strength to answer when we are called.

What follows is a story of overflowing generosity, where hearts stirred by “nadiv lev” (willing spirit) donate materials in such abundance that Moses must call a halt. Skilled artisans like Bezalel, endowed with divine wisdom, craft every detail with precision—walls, altars, coverings—all accounted for transparently in Pekudei to ensure trust and holiness. Ultimately, the Cloud of Glory descends, symbolizing reconciliation and divine indwelling.

This narrative isn’t just ancient history; it’s a blueprint for nation-building. And few Israelis embody it more vividly than Arieh Sharon, the Bauhaus-trained architect who helped forge the physical foundation of the modern State of Israel.

As a young Zionist, he immigrated to pre-state Israel in 1920, joining the Hashomer Hatzair movement and helping establish Kibbutz Gan Shmuel. Sharon’s “divine spark” ignited when he traveled to Germany in 1926 to study at the legendary Bauhaus school under masters Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer.

There, he absorbed principles of functionalism, simplicity, and innovation—skills that paralleled Bezalel’s “ruach Elohim” in wisdom, understanding, and craftsmanship. Returning to the land of Israel in 1931, Sharon became a pioneer of the International Style, designing homes, cinemas, and early hospitals in Tel Aviv’s White City, now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

His work wasn’t mere aesthetics; it was about creating efficient, egalitarian spaces for a burgeoning society, much like the Tabernacle’s vessels served the community’s spiritual needs.

But Sharon’s heroism truly shone in the crucible of statehood. In 1948, as Israel declared independence amid war and mass immigration, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion appointed him head of the Government Planning Department. Tasked with shaping a nation from scratch, Sharon led the creation of the “Sharon Plan”—Israel’s first national master plan, unveiled in 1951.

This visionary blueprint divided the land into regions, integrating urban centers, agricultural zones, industry, and infrastructure to accommodate hundreds of thousands of newcomers. It was an act of precise accountability, much like Pekudei’s inventory of gold, silver, and copper, ensuring resources were used wisely amid scarcity.

Just as the Israelites’ generous donations overflowed for the Mishkan, Sharon rallied teams of planners, engineers, and policymakers in a collective effort—vayakhel in modern form. His designs for hospitals like Rambam in Haifa and Soroka in Beersheba became lifelines, blending functionality with hope, sustaining the body as the Tabernacle sustained the soul.

Arieh Sharon teaches us that architecture is more than structures; it’s about crafting dwellings for the divine spark within us all. In a land reborn from exile, he turned desert sands into a sanctuary of innovation and unity.

Sharon’s legacy endures in Israel’s skyline and spirit, a testament to heroes who build not just with hands, but with unwavering faith in our people’s destiny. As we face today’s challenges, may we draw from his example: assemble, create, account, and invite the Shechinah to dwell among us once more.