In the past, even not so far away, it was almost certain that the war was won by the larger army in quantity. Of warriors, of arrows, of fighting elephants or swords. It depends on what was in the armory back then.
Over the years, the question of quantity has replaced quality in favor of quality. It doesn't matter how many there are, but how high quality what you have. One smart bomb is more useful than tons of primitive weapons. This is true for weapons, and of course it is true for fighters as well. A trained commando fighter is sometimes worth as many as dozens of free men.
But military readiness is only half of the whole. The mental readiness, the one that fills the fighting side with animals for the very thing it is going to defend or for which it sets out to attack, is no less significant than practicing individual and squad training. Morel calls it in the language of the people and the soldiers. The morale of the soldiers, as well as of the home front, is of enormous importance. Because with all due respect to the decisions that are made in the command pits or in cabinet meetings - the contents, the worker, the combatants in the field or the civilians in the homes.
A soldier puts on tefillin and wraps himself in tzitzit on the Gaza border, photo: Ziv Koren
In the three weeks that have passed since the outbreak of the war, Chabad emissaries and Hasidim have been recruited. Some of them – those of the right age – are also recruited by Order 8 to their units, but all of them, without exception, children and the elderly, women and men, are enlisted under the commandment of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in order to raise spiritual and mental morale.
Everywhere they go, there is a long line that seeks to strengthen mental preparedness: to put on tefillin – which have a special virtue thousands of years old, to terrorize enemies and terrorists – to wrap themselves in a green tzitzit under the ceramic vest, to light Shabbat candles or to receive a book of Psalms for protection and rescue.
War in Two Arenas
There are archival videos documenting such activity from before the Six-Day War, and it is both amazing and exciting to see how the fighters, the clothes, the weapons, the quality of the photography have changed – but the tefillin and the Psalms remain exactly the same. Take the emissaries Rabbis Glitzenstein and Greenberg from Mazkeret Batya who come to comfort a family sitting shiva over their daughter who was murdered next to Reim, but while marking a bar mitzvah for her little brother who is just celebrating his 13th birthday. Traditions of thousands of years.
We often hear about fighting in two arenas. On multi-system confrontation. When the two greatest military disasters in Israel's history occurred on Yom Kippur, and fifty years later on Simchat Torah, it is hard not to understand that there is already fighting in another arena. Fighting for the spirit of the people of Israel. It was enough to see our brave soldiers purging terrorist squads during the fighting, and when the besieged want to verify that they were indeed IDF soldiers and not, God forbid, disguised terrorists, they ask them to complete by heart the basic verse of every Jew: "Shema Yisrael, the name of our G-d, the name is one."
Volunteers in Greco. To multiply good deeds, photo: Reuven Philip
The most important thing for us for the success of the fighting on the ground is to maintain the spirit of faith. To keep the joy, the Jewish identity, the home front strong and believing. It also gives each and every one of us "weapons" in hand. Because while you may not be armed or you're an elderly woman who has trouble walking, a good deed you do will have just as much of an impact. When we are strong, when our soldiers will also be charged with spirit, the maneuvers will also be better and more successful in G-d.
And the Torah already promised us in Deuteronomy: "For the name of your G-d is walking among educators - to save you and to give your enemies before you."
Rabbi Yosef Aharonov is the head of Chabad's mission in Israel.
766 Chabad houses in Israel work around the clock to help all populations and Chabad youth in Israel operate a special hotline where they can help and be helped, while at the same time maintaining a good deed for the right and peace of the soldiers and the people of Israel:
https://chabadisrael.co.il/
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