They’re everywhere.
Small stickers on lampposts and bus stops, petrol stations and kitchen fridges, plastered on the walls of army bases and in bus depots. Walk through any Israeli city and you will find them. Final words. Distilled beliefs. Fragments of philosophy left by young soldiers who died defending this country. Brief sayings that carry the weight of a life.
Some have become songs. All have become sacred.
Today the country stands still for the siren. When it ends, the stickers remain.
The stickers remain
Love your neighbor as yourself.
He fought out of love for those behind him rather than hatred for those in front of him.
You can always do more.
It’s very good to live for our country.
I go in search of my brothers.
There are seven on my fridge. Close friends of my children who fell in this war. Three of my sons served in it. I did not go looking for these stickers. They found me.
And something emerged that I had not expected. When you read through hundreds of these voices — from every corner of Israeli society, religious and secular, left and right, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, from settlements and cities alike — they converge. On love over hatred. On life over death. On the insistence that meaning is possible and that you can always do more.
I started to hear something ancient in them. A rhythm. A structure. In Pirkei Avot we find the phrase: hu haya omer. He used to say. A sentence so lived, so embodied, that it became indistinguishable from the person himself. Hillel hu haya omer: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? Ben Zoma hu haya omer: Who is wise? One who learns from everyone.
Now look at these stickers. David Meir hu haya omer: You can always do more than you believe you can. His family chose that line because it was how he lived. The structure is identical. The form is the same. The only difference is two thousand years.
That is when I understood what I had been looking at all along. It was Torah.
Torah does not begin with command. It begins with a life.
With a man told to leave his land. With a woman who laughs at the promise of a child. With brothers who betray and must learn to forgive. With a man who wrestles a stranger through the night and will not let go until he is blessed.
The whole of Genesis is story. No code. No legal system. Just human beings standing before truth and discovering who they are.
Only later does command appear.
Some months ago, a father came to see me. His son was twenty-two when he was killed at Kfar Aza on October 7th.
We sat for a long time. He spoke about his son. And at some point I asked him the question that a father with three sons in this war has no right to ask a father who has lost one, and every reason to.
How do you get up in the morning? I don’t understand how you get up in the morning.
He was quiet. Then he said: It’s a Gemara.
Which Gemara?
The four who entered Pardes.
Four sages entered the orchard — the place of ultimate metaphysical encounter. Ben Azai entered and died. Ben Zoma entered and lost his mind. Acher entered and became a heretic. Rabbi Akiva alone entered in peace and left in peace.
He was not giving me a shiur. He was giving me his life.
For me, he said, the Pardes is Kfar Aza. Where my son fell.
I am all four, he said. On some days I am Ben Azai. All I want is to die and be in heaven with my son. On some days I am Ben Zoma. The world has gone insane. I have gone insane. I don’t understand anything anymore. On some days I am Acher. Where is God? There is no God. And there are only some days — only some — when I enter the day in peace and leave it in peace.
There it was. A grieving father had taken one of the most ancient and impenetrable texts in the Talmud and made it the truest description of human suffering I have ever heard. He was living inside it.
The soldiers whose words line our lampposts lived forward into Torah. He reached back into it.
Our children wrote something holy. They wrote it with their lives. They wrote it on stickers and lampposts, on the broken ground where they fell.
The Torah of our people is not finished. It never was. Wisdom is still being revealed. Our children, in their finest and most terrible hours, wrote a new chapter in the oldest book we know.