Regards from Heaven 

It is a story of twists and turns, of heartbreak and personal redemption. Now, a year after their son’s murder, as the searing intensity of the pain has morphed into more of a constant, unrelenting ache, Rav Eliyahu Merav — venerated Breslov mashpia and the former mayor of Emanuel — agreed to pull back the curtain and share a bit about his own personal trajectory.

Eliyahu Merav was born in 1950 in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father had a successful textile business. They lived a secular life with minimal tradition, but after the 1952 Egyptian revolution, the family decided to flee to safer shores. They got to Israel via North Africa and Marseilles in 1954, joining two of their children who had already made aliyah and had settled in the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz of Bet Alfa. They had become Israeli, but Judaism didn’t much figure into their lives on the kibbutz. Eliyahu didn’t even celebrate his bar mitzvah.

When draft time came around, Eliyahu joined the Air Force where he initially trained as a fighter pilot and then switched to the engineering corps, where he eventually rose to the rank of captain during the Yom Kippur War. After the army, a strapping six foot two, Merav decided to join El Al’s security staff, to travel the world and taste the “good life” — what he now refers to in chassidic terminology as “a descent for the purpose of ascent.” Actually, he admits, the spark of spirituality was ignited earlier, during the Yom Kippur War, when the country, facing vulnerability after riding high on previous military victories, was thrown into a whirlpool of introspection. At one point during the war, while riding with comrades through the Sinai Desert, the driver had a serious accident, leaving Eliyahu injured and hospitalized.

Eliyahu was lying in hospital, his mind in a whir of the past few weeks. After witnessing the powerlessness of Israel and how it dodged complete collapse by a hair’s breadth, he was hit by the idea that perhaps Israeli victory and success wasn’t kochi ve’otzem yadi after all, but rather, something orchestrated from Above. His first wisp of inspiration was the South African Jewish doctor who attended to him in the hospital. He talked to Eliyahu about the tachlis of life, propelling Eliyahu’s own inner turmoil and instigating him to find out more.