A father-son reunion, and lessons of light shining out of the darkest places
Anyone who watched the now-famous clip of the first embrace between freed captive Yosef Chaim Ohana (Yosef Chaim ben Miriam) and his father Avi was surely brought to tears, as the words Shema Yisrael — the same words Yaakov Avinu shouted when he finally saw Yosef — spontaneously burst forth from deep in Avi’s soul.
“Every day there were miracles of salvation,” says Avi Ohana in a conversation with Mishpacha together with his son Yosef Chaim, days after his release from Hamas captivity. “Hearing all the horror-filled stories over these last days, there was just no way in the natural order of things that a person could have gotten out of there alive.”
But Rav David Abuchatzeira, the famed mekubal from Nahariya, knew differently. He told Avi from the very beginning that Yosef Chaim was protected, guarded, watched over with special care — “like an etrog,” Rav David would say over and over — and that no harm would befall him; that tens of thousands of angels were watching over him and all the hostages in Gaza.
“Even when we had no sign of life from Yosef Chaim, I received signs of life through Rav David,” Reb Avi says. And everything Rav David told me came true. He told me that my job in this story was to sanctify Hashem’s Name, and when I told him I had never spoken publicly before, his response was, ‘Don’t worry, Hashem will open your mouth.’”
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