A new Israeli nation is arising from the smoke of battle

Living a meaningful life is a challenge. In Israel, we are now being taught what it is to have a meaningful death.

In the space of seven terrible days last month, 17 Israeli soldiers were killed in Lebanon and nine fell in Gaza.

The ever-deepening fury over Charedi men evading the draft obscures the fact that the modern orthodox display conspicuous courage in military service. While secular soldiers are also performing acts of supreme heroism, the eagerness of the modern orthodox to put themselves on the dangerous front lines means they are suffering a disproportionate toll of those killed or injured.

One of the very best of the best fell in the carnage in Lebanon during that dreadful week. Rabbi Captain Avi Goldberg, the father of eight children and a teacher at a Jerusalem high school, was killed alongside three other members of his unit when it was ambushed while clearing an area of terrorists.

Goldberg was a military rabbi, but that doesn’t convey his true role. A former officer in the Golani brigade, at 43 he wasn’t just the rabbi of his brigade but fought alongside frontline troops. He was killed in battle.

A man with a dazzling smile, he was said to have exuded optimism and confidence in the face of danger and hardship, embodying moral and spiritual integrity and with an overwhelming love for the Jewish people.

At his shiva in Jerusalem, hundreds of people turned up every night to sing with unbridled emotion the ancient refrains of Jewish faith, hope and togetherness alongside the shattered Goldberg family.

People spoke of the way Avi had quietly changed their lives with quiet acts of lovingkindness. Soldiers from his unit who made it out of Lebanon to the shiva were barely able to speak through the grief they felt over the lifeforce that had been taken from them.

The shiva was an unbearably tragic, moving and yet inspirational experience.

Inspirational because here in microcosm was something of unexpected and priceless value that has emerged in Israel during this terrible year. It is no reflection on the grit and valour of those who fought in Israel’s previous wars to say that what’s now taking place is seen by many as a spiritual rebirth of the Jewish nation.

At the funeral and shiva, Avi’s widow Rachel showed the inner strength of this couple when she spoke up for three principles dear to her husband and demanded by his ultimate sacrifice.

The first was the need for unity, demonstrated by the family’s request that any politician who paid a shiva visit should be accompanied by someone with a different perspective.

The second was that Charedim should enlist in the IDF, a demand she made in public to a prominent rabbinic opponent of the Charedi draft when he visited the mourners.

The third, which encompassed the first two, was that the cause for which her husband had given his life was a war of good against evil.

This understanding lies at the core of the astounding spirit shown by countless IDF soldiers, secular as well as believers, over the past year.

These soldiers — many of them achingly young — have shown they aren’t fighting merely to defeat an enemy bent on their nation’s destruction and to recover the remaining Israeli hostages.

They understand they are up against an existential evil, the same barbaric depravity that has claimed millions of Jewish lives over the centuries.

This conscript army accordingly feels accompanied on the battlefield by the ghosts of those who were slaughtered in previous generations. These soldiers know they’re fighting for the moral and spiritual principles that have kept the Jewish people alive throughout unparalleled persecution.

It’s why they believe they will win this war, whatever the cost.

It’s why so many of them, secular as well as religious, have gone to war wearing tzitzit, the fringed garment intended to remind them of the Jews’ religious calling. They wear this Jewish identity like armour next to their hearts.

Avi Goldberg was a warrior rabbi fighting for the nation, the first for centuries to have taken this dual role so familiar to us from the Hebrew bible. He had the aura of a biblical figure fighting in what many have come to view as a biblical war. For it feels like a momentous new chapter is being written in Jewish history.

No-one is under any illusion that, after the war ends, Israel’s profound political dysfunctionality and social divisions will magically melt away. But a great new generation is arising from the smoke of the battlefield who will never again put up with the doublethink and confusion of a society that lost its ancient clarity of vision and paid a terrible price.

A spark has been rekindled by this war to forge the nation anew. The people of Israel are being bound together in fire, a nation fighting for civilisation against barbarism, for light against darkness, for life against death.

May the memory of all who have fallen in this seismic war be a blessing.

Melanie Phillips is a Times columnist