Don’t the Rabbis Know?

Nowadays, even filling up with gas in Israel can feel like an act of homage. That’s because of the proliferation of memorials for fallen soldiers all over the gas pumps. Israelis have long had a mania for bumper stickers, and since the war began, these oblong pieces of paper with the soldiers’ favorite sayings have sprouted everywhere. Many of the epigrams are about purpose in life, and living for others — showcasing the fact that as a society even secular Israel is far more meaning-driven than much of the liberal West.

In fact, there are so many deaths that you need a 9/11 memorial wall — not a gas station forecourt — to do the stickers justice. Think of the numbers: around 2,000 fallen. With a Jewish population of 7 million, Israel’s casualty figures are the per capita equivalent of 85,000 deaths in the US. For perspective, American casualties in the four years in which the US fought during World War II were about 400,000. Which means that a war fought over a tiny strip of land is almost half as deadly as the greatest conflagration known to man.

For many Ramat Beit Shemesh locals like myself, the horrible reality of the grinding Gaza war was brought home again recently, with the death of Moshe Shmuel Noll, one of five soldiers from chareidi homes to lose their lives in an ambush in Gaza. This was a young man from a Chabad home who’d struggled mightily for every single attainment in learning and davening, and had found meaning in protecting his fellow Jew.

Even if you didn’t go into the shivah, the mourning tent set up on one the neighborhood’s main streets was hard to miss.