Burnt Soldier - A Mother’s Love

 A Mother’s Love

During the YK War, Chief rabbi of Israel, Israel Meir Lau, became the rabbi of the Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, which turned into a military hospital. The hospital took in 475 wounded soldiers, all of them from the Suez Canal, all of them in critical condition.

(One of the wounded, whose right arm had been crushed, was a young medical student, a religious boy named Naftali Rubinstein who wanted to be an orthopedist. He said to me, “My career is over. If I am ever able to lift a spoon to my mouth, it will be a miracle. I don’t dream of ever being able to perform surgery.” Today, Naftali Rubinstein is the head of the orthopedic department at Ichilov.)

One boy, Rabbi Lau shared, was stuck in a tank that the Egyptians burnt. The soldier was brought into the hospital, burned from head to toe and could not stop screaming in pain. All the morphine in the world could not calm him. With his crying from pain, none of the other patients could sleep. The nurses begged him to calm down, his roommates nudged him, I tried to speak to him, but nothing helped. The pain was harrowing. His body was all charred, so if you tried to touch him, he would yell. One day, his mother came to the ward, sat down beside him, and found a tiny patch of natural skin on one of his legs. It was, sadly, the only natural skin he had left on his poor body. She placed her finger on that pot, and stroked it slowly, lovingly, and murmured, “Calm down, my sweetheart. Rest, my love, you need to sleep so that you’ll have the strength to become healthy. It’s Ima speaking to you; sleep, my child. You’re not alone. I am here with you,” a whole time caressing that single tiny patch of natural skin.

Three minutes later, the boy fell asleep for the first time since the war, and there was silence in the ward. All of us were in tears.

Rabbi Lau said: I then understood the verse in Isaiah (66:13), “Like a man whose mother comforts him, so I will comfort you.” We marveled at the instinct of a mom to tune-in to that single spot in his charred body that she could hold and caress.

What a profound lesson. You sometimes encounter someone who may be emotionally forlorn, burnt by life, by the system. But there is always one spot, maybe tiny spot, in the soul that remains uncharred. Caress it, and he will return to life.

And it’s so true about our nation. People are sometimes pessimistic about our future. They say that Jews are too indifferent. The truth is: In every Jew there is a patch of holiness and passion that no fire and no water can ever destroy. Every Jew is sacred, every Jew is eternally connected. Our job is to “caress” that spot—and help every one of our brothers and sisters rediscover their truest and deepest self.