A Living Paradox

By Yochanan Gordon

In last week’s column, titled “Sacrosanct and Secular,” I mentioned in passing the book my grandfather, Nison Gordon, wrote after his first trip to Israel in the mid-1960s. The book, chronicling his first trip to the Holy Land was titled Old and New in Israel. It’s clear that the element of paradox that is part and parcel of the culture of Eretz Yisrael weighed heavily on my grandfather’s conscience and compelled the paradoxical title of his book.

It’s been 61 years since that trip but in the three weeks that my family and I were in Israel I felt that sentiment of paradox at the heart of the Jerusalem lifestyle quite acutely. In a characterization of who Israelis are as a people, someone said that Israelis display an obstinate outer persona but internally they are very sensitive and are in need of the world’s love and admiration, again a paradoxical characterization of being obstinate and sensitive at the very same time.

The Torah describes Eretz Yisrael as the place that G-d chose as the residence of His Glory. Deuteronomy attests to Eretz Yisrael as the place where G-d’s eyes are affixed to it from the beginning and end of the year.

G-d in His omniscience and omnipotence supersedes all of the laws of nature. The seforim say that He is the space of the world rather than the world being His space. Therefore, he is both up and down, right, left, back, and front at the very same time. Meaning, what we see as a paradox and beyond the realm of possible is an indication of the presence of G-d. This, I believe, is the meaning of an enigmatic Gemara, which states: “Anyone who dwells in Eretz Yisrael is compared to someone who has a G-d; and anyone who dwells outside of the land of Israel is compared to someone who does not have a G-d.” The air of Eretz Yisrael is suffused with the presence of G-d even when outwardly it may seem like the people there don’t get it.

Speaking about paradox, last week was one of the most historic times to be in Israel. After two years of a war that had no end in sight, the Trump administration, with the help of the neighboring Arab countries, succeeded in brokering a twenty-one point peace treaty that would see to the liberation of all of the remaining hostages both dead and alive. The live ones were all returned and the rest are seemingly in process.

Many of these hostages were not very religious when they were taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, 2023. It was Shemini Atzeres and many were taken from a music festival. After two years of the worst possible treatment at the hands of a ruthless terrorist organization, they are infatuated with G-d, Torah, and mitzvos. It’s like nothing I have seen in my life. Agam Berger riding in a helicopter to freedom, holding a sign that says, “Derech emunah bacharti uv’derech emunah shanti el beisi” is old news now, but is an image that brings tears to my eyes and shivers up and down my spine every time I think of it.

And then we watched as the remainder of the living hostages were set free and all they want is to shake a lulav and they speak about the resolve that they had during their time in those lifeless dungeons.

As such it would dictate that what happens in Eretz Yisrael goes against the norm for anyone living in any other part of the world. Normally, if you want to optimize your time spent in a place you need to devise an itinerary or a plan of what you would accomplish while you are there. And while a lot of planning goes into spending time in Eretz Yisrael the irony is that it is the things that occur haphazardly that end up leaving the biggest impact.

Such is the case with my unexpected private tour of the city with Yaakov Zilberman. It was Friday, prior to my Monday morning flight home, and I hadn’t been to a sefarim store, which was one of my personal agenda items before returning home.

I set out from my Sokolov apartment towards Geulah on foot poised to find the sefarim on my list before returning home, when three blocks into my walk I met a friend from back home who stopped me in my tracks and offered me to follow him to a private tour of the Old City, which he promised to be different than anything else I or anyone else had ever seen. I was really intent on making it to the sefarim store and although he said it would just be an hour, something told me that it was going to have to wait until Sunday.

Rabbi Zilberman, the head of the Old City institute, is the son of the founder of the famous Old City yeshivas whose students learn in a singsong manner and gain a mastery of Torah at a very young age. During our tour we were privileged to see up close a couple of classes in session and the unique pedagogical system that was simply amazing to behold.

We were told at the outset that we’d be seeing the upper Jerusalem and the lower Jerusalem. Paradoxically, the upper Jerusalem was downstairs while the lower Jerusalem was up a set of stairs.

The upper Jerusalem was a reference to the yeshivas that the Zilbermans in the Old City are known for. What is initially unique is the fact that the school is in session every day of the week, including Shabbos. By the third grade the students all master, by heart, all of Chamisha Chumshei Torah. By the sixth grade they possess knowledge of the entire Tanach, and by eighth grade Shisha Sidrei Mishnah. We entered a first-grade class that was learning Chumash, belting out verses in a singsong style that warmed the heart. I saw a kid climbing on his desk all the while repeating the verses of Chumash being recited by the rebbe.

I was reminded of a story I read at the beginning of Yair Borochov’s 800-page biography of the Rogatchover gaon when the Rogatchover, Rabbi Yosef Rosen, was a young child in Chester who could not sit still. He wouldn’t just sit on his fidgety hands; he would literally leave the classroom and climb trees in the yard. The rebbe, instead of reprimanding the young student for his inability to sit still, would follow the young Yosef Rosen up the tree while teaching him the day’s lesson. The Rogatchover would go on to say that it’s that rebbewho gets credit for him becoming the insatiable gaon that he became.

The lower Jerusalem consisted of some projects that I was instructed not to divulge so I will not be able to go into that part of the tour. However, an encounter at the end of the tour, prior to us being led out of the Old City, is a story I wanted to recount here.

As we were leaving, Rabbi Zilberman noticed an acquaintance from a distance, one of the Old City regulars whom he greeted and as we crossed paths, he asked him to recount his harrowing tale. Rabbi Shaul Nir and his wife lost a son-in-law to an Arab terrorist in Chevron in 2015. It was Chanukah and they were out doing some errands when the phone rang, and it was their widowed daughter inviting them to light the Chanukah menorah by her and to attend a small festive gathering with her and her children. They took the opportunity to visit Mrs. Nir’s sister and then at some point in the day they received word that a different daughter, whom they were planning on visiting on their way back from Chevron that evening, had given birth in Shaarei Zedek Hospital.

The roads were empty on their way back from Chevron when something had a forceful impact on their car. Mrs. Nir wondered if their car was being pelted with rocks when it became immediately clear that their car was being shot at. Mrs. Nir was only slightly wounded in the attack, in which their car was hit with upwards of forty bullets. However, Rabbi Shaul was struck several times, including in his head and the leg, and lost a finger. Ultimately, he had to undergo a lifesaving fifteen-hour surgery to save his life.

But that’s not the story.

After the gunmen shot at the car and were coming closer to make sure that everyone in the car was killed, a red sports car pulled up to the scene and a middle-aged Arab man in an orange cardigan walked up the driver’s side of the car and began speaking in Hebrew to Mrs. Nir who was shouting verses of Tehillim by heart while her husband was fading in and out of consciousness.

He said, “What is your husband’s name?” She responded, “Shaul.” He spoke softly and he repeated his name, “Shaul, Shaul, Al tidag. Hakol yiheyeh b’seder.” Shaul, Shaul, don’t worry. Everything will be okay. He then left the scene of the terror attack and was never seen or heard from again.

The doctor’s prognosis was that if Rabbi Nir emerged from this attack alive, he would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. In fact, most of the five months that he remained hospitalized was due to the leg injury that he suffered with the bullet to his leg.

However, shortly after being discharged from the hospital Rabbi Shaul Nir was climbing the stairs in his home without aid and was able to dance on Simchas Torah in shul holding the Sefer Torah. 

As he was telling us this story, he added that the Arab man who had approached their car and spoke to them through the blown-out window was standing in the line of fire, keeping the terrorists from continuing their barrage of the car. When he was visited by his brother-in-law in the hospital, he was told that the unexplained visitor was not some random Arab but was Eliyahu HaNavi himself who the Gemara attests appears as a simple, Arab merchant. Rabbi Nir, describing his harrowing tale said that he looked like a man in his 70s but in reality he is a young ten-year-old boy. Talk about paradox. 

Yochanan Gordon can be reached at [email protected]. Read more of Yochanan’s articles at 5TJT.com.