"If you're reading this, then something happened to me."

Letters left by soldiers reveal a young Israeli generation astounding in the depth of its commitment to the Jewish people. If the West is to survive, its young women and men will need to emulate them.

The letters are found everywhere. In their bedrooms, which their parents go through after the dreaded knock on the door with three uniformed officers outside — a sight that every Israeli both understands and fears. Or the letters are in their pocket, found after they’re wounded, or killed, and their uniforms are removed by the medics, at the hospitals, or worse. ….

The letters are everywhere. Most, thankfully, are never read, because the soldiers come home. But far too often these days, young women and men are not coming home (more than 500 soldiers, women and men, have been killed since the early hours of October 7), and in many of those cases, the letters are found.

Two of them have recently been the subject of a good deal of attention on Israeli Hebrew social media, so we share them with you today to give a sense of the extraordinary commitment to their people these young people exhibit —

— and to remind us all what it is going to take for the Jewish people to survive this almost universal attack. AND to remind us what the West will need to replicate.

Sgt. First Class Ben Zussman z’l (Photo: IDF)

The post above, which went viral a few week ago on X (formerly Twitter), is a letter by Sgt. First Class Ben Zussman, 22 (about whom we wrote in a different context towards the bottom of this post). It reads as follows:

I’m writing you this note on my way to the base. If you’re reading it, then something apparently happened to me. Since you know me well — no one is happier than I am at this moment. For I was able to fulfill my dream in battle. I am happy and grateful for the privilege I will [soon] have of defending our beautiful land and the Jewish people.

And if something happens to me, I do not permit you to sink into sadness. I had the privilege of fulfilling my dream and my life’s purpose, and you can be certain that I am looking at you from above with an enormous smile. I imagine that I’ll sit next to Grandpa and we can fill each other in, on what changed from [his] war to [my] war. Maybe we’ll talk some politics, too, and I’ll ask him what he thinks.

If G-d forbid you are sitting shiva, turn it in to a week with friends. Family and a good time. And there should be food. Meat.

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Sergeant Major Yosef Gitratz, 25-years-old, was killed in battle in Gaza. This is the text of the letter he left behind (covered in many places in the Israeli Hebrew press, including here):

Dear Mom and Dad,

I love you so much.

Everything is as it should be. I chose this. I lived a good and interesting life, yet at the same time, I was never afraid of death. I could have chosen to hide and not to come here. But that would go against everything that I believe in and value, and who I consider myself to be.

So I had no alternative, and I would make the same choice all over again. I would do the same again and again. I made this choice myself and pursued it to the end. I died honorably for my people. I have no regrets. I love you very much and I am proud that you are my parents. You gave me a great deal. I had a very interesting, full, happy, unique life. My death only emphasizes that.

I’m certain that you’re feeling a great deal of pain. But you will overcome it. That’s what I very much want. That’s the main thing that I want. You both have many people close to you who will support you.

Please find something positive in all of this. Be with the grandchildren. Help Israel. I’m fine.

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When this horrible war — which may or may not be winnable according to the definition that Israel initially set (destroying Hamas and getting all the hostages back) and which may or may not be just at its beginning — first broke out, a dear friend (an Orthodox rabbi) wrote me a note from the States which concluded with his prayer that “we would find redemption” in this war. He quite understandably prayed for a world described in the books of prophets like Isaiah, Hosea and Micah. Images of a universal world, a world moving towards peace. A world in which swords were beaten into plowshares, in which the fox and the sheep could lie down next to each other.

That was, I told him, not the redemption we needed. The redemption we needed was not the pastoral vision of those latter prophets. The redemption we needed was to be had in slaughtering and then eradicating Hamas. It would come not from Amos or Hosea, but from the vision of the Israelites as portrayed in the Books of Joshua and Judges, books that I struggled with when I was young. Redemption would come from the Israelites being warriors.

If hatred of the Jew is eternal, which it obviously is, then the survival of the Jewish people demands that our willingness to go to battle be no less everlasting.

There are still parts of the worldview of Joshua and Judges that are challenging for me, but I’ve come to understand them better, I think. Part of their message is that a Jewish people that has any hope of surviving is going to have to be a nation of warriors, a nation of young people who care about their people more than they care about their own lives. It will have to be a nation of young people like those reflected in the letters above.

The tragedies of this war are too numerous to name. There is suffering everywhere one turns, and things are likely to get much worse for everyone, likely including for countries not yet involved.

But here is what we have learned that we might have doubted in “the world that was,” in the world that ended in the early hours of the morning of October 7:

We have learned that our enemies underestimated the Jews’ determination to survive. They underestimated the degree to which “never again” resonates to a young Israeli generation in a way that it no longer does to many young Jews outside of Israel—first and foremost, about Jews.

Our enemies underestimated the degree to which Israeli young people are entirely comfortable with particularism — no matter how alluring the universalist vision that has their many of their Diaspora cousins in its grip. They underestimated the degree to which a generation of Israelis that sometimes quotes Isaiah and Hosea (when it quotes from the Bible, which is not all that often) is actually a generation descended not from Micah, but from Joshua.

The outpouring of support for Israel among American Jews has been nothing less than extraordinary since October 7. But if I had to bet, I’d bet that it’s support that will soon begin to wane. Because the images coming from Gaza are going to get more painful. Because this war may well drag on and on and on, and spread … and as it does, American Jewish passion, I suspect, is going to be difficult to sustain; October 7, instead of healing the gap that so many of us have bemoaned, may ultimately be seen as the day that marked the beginning of its permanence.

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Times of Israel screenshot

No one knows when this will end. No one can know what the outcome will be. No one knows what Israel or the region will look like when this is done, if it is ever “done.”

But this we do know — October 7 was Pearl Harbor for us, and Kristallnacht for Diaspora Jews. It announced to us that we were at war, and it reminded Diaspora Jews that they are still hated and always will be.

So with those two reminders in mind, let us be honest: It was not universalism that defeated Hitler. It was not counting the number of dead Germans that led to the fall of the Third Reich.

It was a love of freedom that won. A determination to survive. A belief that our way of life was better, more moral, more just, more filled with promise for humankind than that of our savage, barbaric enemies (if you have not read yesterday’s NYT article about Hamas’ unthinkable and unimaginable sexual violence during the attack, you need to — it’s not at all for the faint of heart, but we need to know).

What won eighty years ago was the knowledge that if we did not win, the world would not be a place worth living in. That’s still true … Russia, China, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas … that axis is the alternative to the West’s winning. Israel is just the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

Nothing is that different from what it was when we fought the Nazis, except for the (not so) small fact that much of the West, left and right, has lost the will to fight.

What the letters these young men left behind remind us of is the fact that on this score, at least, young Israelis are thankfully nothing like the rest of the West.

Shabbat Shalom.

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Two pieces came out this week that I think are very much worth the read.

See Matti Friedman’s The Wisdom of Hamas in Bari Weiss’ THE FREE PRESS

And see Maxim Shrayer’s Anti-Zionist Committees of the American Public in SAPIR JOURNAL

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If you’re just joining us, Israel from the Inside typically posts a written column on Mondays and a podcast on Wednesdays. That is obviously irrelevant for the time being.

We’ve delayed all the podcasts that were ready to go, because the people whose stories they tell deserve to tell them when we all have the bandwidth to hear. Hopefully, that will return some day.

For the next three weeks, beginning Sunday, December 17th, we will be posting a bit less, as people in the United States will be on vacation, traveling and the like, and here in Israel, as some reservists are being rotated out of units, those of us who could not leave while our kids were/are at the front, will be using the time to visit kids abroad.

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