By Esther Korson
We lost one of our heroes last week, a man by the name of Meir Har Zion. Whenever that happens, even though I know it is someone who will be remembered, I always feel sad, because the world feels a little emptier somehow. Meir was one of the legendary IDF fighters in the early days of the State and passed away Friday at the age of eighty. He was one of the founders of the historic 101 unit led by former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that conducted innumerable retaliatory raids against terrorists in the mid-1950’s, for which Ben Zion was decorated with the medal of valour. After having been seriously injured while serving as the commander of the paratroopers, he later returned to the army to establish the elite Sayeret Tzanhanim, the famed recon unit. Top military figures past and present attended the funeral. Monday, where Prime Minister Netanyahu praised Meir Har Zion for his legacy of courage.
I read an interesting blog for “The Times of Israel” written by Marc Goldberg called “Burying our Heroes”. He told the story of how Meir Ben Zion changed his life. As Marc explained, “I remember walking through the corridors of a new school, a tiny, newly bar mitzvah’d ‘man’ looking for his place in the world. The school was so big and I was so small. I knew no one and no one knew me. In class I always sat by the window and watched the world outside, wishing that I was out in it instead of stuck in a classroom…in a place instead where I could feel as if my life had meaning. A place beyond the grey clouds of London, a place beyond the uncertainty of being a Jew in a world where a Jew was nothing to be proud of, a guilty secret grudgingly admitted to only when asked….”
It brought me back to my childhood in a second. Even though I have spent more than half of my life in Israel, I grew up in Massachusetts as a Jewish minority in a Gentile country. I was very shy as a child, and therefore hated anything that made me ‘different’. I hated having to wear glasses and I hated being Jewish. Many times I was beaten up on my way to school by children who called themselves Christians and who blamed me as a Jew for the death of Jesus. They would form circles around me and tauntingly call, “Dirty Christ killer! Dirty Christ killer!” I hardly knew what they were talking about, but I hated the way I was treated because I came from a Jewish background! I grew up thinking that being Jewish was something terrible. So in every way I could relate to what Marc was describing!
And then one day, Marc discovered a book in the library in his synagogue that introduced him to some of the heroes of modern day Israel. And it completely changed his life. As he explained, “It was at this time in my life that I met in a dusty old book that I discovered in a corner of my synagogue telling of the heroes of the IDF. The rabbi encouraged me to keep the book and I carried it with me through those long school corridors. I skipped classes to read of the exploits of Unit 101. I knew then I had to be like those Jews, these warriors of Israel. I had a goal and I had a hero to emulate. I came home to Israel.
Meir Har Zion’s name will not be forgotten for his story is woven into the very fabric of the nation of Israel. His legend has spread far and wide, even to a small library in London where it was waiting for a 13 year old to find it and to learn about a different breed of Jews who fought back. He will forever be remembered as a hero at a time when the existence of the Jewish state was so fragile that it was considered to be a momentary mistake soon to be erased. As we bury the man who showed the world that Jews could be warriors once again, we are burying something more than a man; we are burying an age in the history of our people. But the legend of Meir Har Zion will live on…”
My epiphany moment arrived 20 years after my Bat Mitzvah. At that time I didn’t read about the early heroes of modern day Israel. Instead, I met the King. The Bible says, “Before they ask, I will answer them…” and, like many Jewish people in these days, He answered me indeed! In a very short period of time, in 1975, I came to understand that Jesus—or “Yeshua”, His real, Hebrew name—was the Messiah of the nation and of the people of Israel. We had waited for our Messiah for so many hundreds of years and had believed in His coming for what seemed like an eternity. It astonished me beyond belief to discover that He had come—not as King as we expected—but as the fulfillment of the Passover, as the fulfillment of the story of Abraham and Isaac, as the final sacrificial lamb to reconcile us once and for all with the Father again.
After having grown up with the Christian form of anti-Semitism, it was hard to imagine that ‘Jesus’ could truly be ‘our’ Messiah! But the Lord soon helped me to understand that ‘Christianity’ is not a religion—it is a relationship and a friendship with the Lord Himself. And that those who truly come to know Him—the God of Israel—are individually grafted into the promises and the covenants that God made with the Jewish people. And—they will share His burden of love for the people of Israel…It helped me to know in a second that the terrible things done in the name of Jesus to the Jewish people over the centuries—we’ve been hated, killed and persecuted more in His name than any other—had nothing to do with the Lord Himself. Those people may have believed in Him—but they didn’t know Him at all.
So it was in 1975 that I learned the astonishing fact that being Jewish was not terrible like I grew up thinking it was—but rather that the continuance of the Jews as a people until this day is a wonderful sign of the faithfulness of God. In 1976, I came home to live in Jerusalem and have had the privilege of calling Israel ‘home’ since that time. While here, I also learned, as Marc did, of the many legendary figures whose lives, woven into the fabric of Israeli life in recent years, helped to make such a colourful and blessed tapestry…
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