It’s been almost a year since St.-Sgt. Dvir Emanuelof became the first casualty of Operation Cast Lead, losing his life to Hamas mortar fire just as he entered Gaza early in the offensive. But sitting with his mother, Dalia, in her living room last week, I was struck not by loss, but by life. And not by grief, but by fervent belief. And by a more recent story about Dvir that simply needs to be told, especially now at Hanukka, our season of miracles.

This past summer, Dalia and some friends planned to go to Hutzot Hayotzer, the artists’ colony constructed each summer outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls. But Dalia’s young daughter objected; she wanted to go a week later, so she could hear Meir Banai in concert.

Dalia consented. And so, a week later, she found herself in the bleachers, waiting with her daughter for the performance to begin. Suddenly, Dalia felt someone touch her shoulder. When she turned around, she saw a little boy, handsome, with blond hair and blue eyes. A kindergarten teacher by profession, Dalia was immediately drawn to the boy, and as they began to speak, she asked him if he’d like to sit next to her.

By now, though, the boy’s father had seen what was unfolding, and called over to him, “Eshel, why don’t you come back and sit next to me and Dvir?” Stunned, Dalia turned around and saw the father holding a baby. “What did you say his name is?” she asked the father.

“Dvir,” responded Benny.

“How old is he?” Dalia asked.

“Six months,” was the reply.

“Forgive my asking,” she continued, “was he born after Cast Lead, or before?”

“After.”

Whereupon Dalia continued, “Please forgive my pressing, but can I ask why you named him Dvir?”

“Because,” Benny explained to her, “the first soldier killed in Cast Lead was named Dvir. His story touched us, and we decided to name our son after him.”

Almost unable to speak, Dalia paused, and said, “I’m that Dvir’s mother.”

Shiri, the baby’s mother, had overheard the conversation, and wasn’t certain that she believed her ears. “That can’t be.”

“It’s true.”

“What’s your last name?”

“Emanuelof.”

“Where do you live?”

“Givat Ze’ev.”

“It is you,” Shiri said. “We meant to invite you to the brit, but we couldn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dalia assured her – “You see, I came anyway.”

And then, Dalia told me, Shiri said something to her that she’ll never forget – “Dvir is sending you a hug, through us.”

At that point in our conversation, Shiri told me her story. She’d been pregnant, she said, in her 33rd or 34th week, and during an ultrasound test, a potentially serious problem with the baby was discovered. After consultations with medical experts, she was told that there was nothing to do. The baby would have to be born, and then the doctors would see what they could do. A day or two later, she was at home, alone, anxious and worried. She lit Hanukka candles, and turned on the news. The story was about Dvir Emanuelof, the first soldier killed in the operation. She saw, she said, the extraordinarily handsome young man, with his now famous smile, and she felt as though she were looking at an angel.

A short while later, Benny came home, and Shiri said to him, “Come sit next to me.” When he’d seated himself down next to her, Shiri said to Benny, “A soldier was killed today.”

“I heard,” he said. “What do you say we name our baby after him?” Shiri asked.

“Okay,” was Benny’s reply.

They told no one about the name, and had planned to call Dalia once the baby was born, to invite her to the brit. But when Dvir was born, Shiri and Benny were busy with medical appointments, and it wasn’t even clear when they would be able to have the brit. By the time the doctor gave them the okay to have the brit, it was no longer respectful to invite Dalia on such short notice, Shiri told me. So they didn’t call her. Not then, and not the day after. Life took its course and they told no one about the origin of Dvir’s name, for they hadn’t yet asked Dalia’s permission.

So no one knew, until that moment when a little blond-haired, blue-eyed boy – whom Dalia now calls “the messenger” – decided to tap Dalia on the shoulder. “Someone’s looking out for us up there,” Shiri said quietly, wiping a tear from her eye, “and this no doubt brings Him joy.”

IT WAS now quiet in Dalia’s living room, the three of us pondering this extraordinary sequence of events, wondering what to make of it. I was struck by the extraordinary bond between these two women, one religious and one traditional but not religious in the classic sense, one who’s now lost a husband and a son and one who’s busy raising two sons.

Unconnected in any way just a year ago, their lives are now inextricably interwoven. And I said to them both, almost whispering, “This is an Israeli story, par excellence.”

As if they’d rehearsed the response, they responded in virtual unison, “No, it’s a Jewish story.”

They’re right, of course. It is the quintessential Jewish story. It is a story of unspoken and inexplicable bonds. It is a story of shared destinies.

And as is true of this little country we call home, it’s often impossible to know which part of the story is the real miracle, and which is the doing of extraordinary people. In the end, though, that doesn’t really matter. When I light Hanukka candles this year, I’m going to be thinking of Dalia. Of Shiri. Of Dvir. And of Dvir.

I’m going to think of their sacrifice. Of their persistent belief. Of their extraordinary decency and goodness.

And as I move that shamash from one candle to the next, I will know that Shiri was right. These are not easy times. These are days when we really could use a miracle or two. So perhaps it really is no accident that now, when we need it most, Dvir is sending us all a hug from heaven above.

‘It never even occurred to me that the Jews were a people.” I had just finished speaking on Shabbat morning at a traditional shul on Long Island. The talk had been about the nation-state and its roots in the Book of Genesis. Along the way, I’d made some comments about the changing nature of American Jewish life today, and the much-reduced role that peoplehood now plays in American Jews’ sense of self.

After services, someone told me that members of the liberal synagogue across the street had come to hear the talk. Ouch. I’d been rather direct about the dangers of liberal American Judaism’s diminishing the role of peoplehood in Jewish life, and worried that I might have offended the visitors.

But it turns out that they were more intrigued than anything else.

One woman said that the idea that the Jews were a people had never occurred to her. Another person remarked that peoplehood was an interesting idea, but warned that if Jews are a people, ” you’re going to cut 40% of my congregation out of the picture.”

Almost without our noticing, American Jewish life is being dramatically redefined. Especially among the young and the liberal, American Judaism is being recreated in the model of American Protestantism.

Christianity is not about peoplehood. “The Christian People” is a meaningless phrase. Judaism, like Protestantism, has become a faith system, a purely personal – and highly individual – means of constructing meaning in our world.

Judaism as a faith system, of course, is nothing new. But from time immemorial, we have also seen ourselves as a people. From the moment that Pharaoh refers to the Jews as “the people, the Children of Israel” (Exodus 1:9), it is clear even to our enemies that Abraham’s clan has morphed into a nation.

FOR MILLENNIA, rank-and-file Jews understood this. We cultivated bonds of mutual obligation, even when we profoundly disagreed, even when our faith wore thin. Kol Yisrael areivim zeh la-zeh, all Jews are responsible one for another, the tradition has long insisted.

And it actually worked. It was peoplehood that got American college students to wage a relentless battle to free Soviet Jews, with whom they had virtually nothing obvious in common.

It was due to peoplehood that IAF pilots flew converted cargo planes into an Ethiopian civil war in order to save people of a different race, a radically different faith system and virtually no shared history, bringing them to Israel in Operation Solomon.

And it is peoplehood that has continually led American Jews – despite their absolute disinterest in making aliya and their profound differences with Israel about conversion policy and the peace process – to support Israel both financially and politically.

This move away from peoplehood will continue as intermarriage becomes more common. Flourishing marriages, after all, are possible even when spouses disagree about important issues. And therefore, in the logic of young American Jews, there’s nothing terribly illogical about my choosing to spend my life with someone who’s not Jewish.

After all, on a host of issues, I have my opinions and she has hers. So, too, in religious life. I have my synagogue, she has her church. I have my holidays and she has hers. I believe my beliefs, and she has hers.

But peoplehood? If I’m a member of a people, then there’s actually a yawning chasm between us. And since she has no interest in becoming Jewish, it’s Judaism – and not she – that must change. Consciously or not, I sense that Judaism must be redefined – as a faith system, a personal odyssey, as “my Judaism,” to use a problematic phrase now popular among American Jews.

As anything but a people.

YET WITHOUT peoplehood at the core of American Jewish life, devotion to Israel becomes a choice, not an instinct, as it used to be. Young American Jews look with horror at the suffering of Palestinians, and decide that this conflict is simply not theirs.

One of the founders of Fast for Gaza (www.fastforgaza.net) wrote recently that “unlike previous generations, [today's young American Jews] don’t necessarily understand their Judaism in traditionally tribal terms anymore. Rather, they are increasingly viewing their Jewishness against a larger, more universal global reality. In short, to be a Jew and a global citizen is what gives them ‘goose bumps.’”

This writer himself admits – the new, personal, less “tribal” (i.e., less peoplehood-oriented) Judaism is more animated by global citizenship than by a sense of Jewish responsibility. (That’s why they fast for Gazans, and not for Israelis under Gaza rocket fire or for Gilad Schalit, I assume.) From afar, it would seem that there is little that Israel and Israelis can do to influence this seismic shift.

But the dangers to Israel’s security as a result of this change are obvious. Something must be done.

One idea for starters: Recent studies show that a quick trip on Birthright has lasting implications for Jewish identification, and dramatically lowers intermarriage rates, for example. It’s because in Israel, Jews encounter peoplehood, with all its problems, but also with its triumphs.

It’s time to take the Birthright concept and expand it. Two-thirds of Canadian Jews and 75 percent of Australian and French Jews have been to Israel, but about two-thirds of American Jews have never even visited. That has to change.

Even in this economy, there is more than enough American Jewish money to get the vast majority of American Jews to Israel, to witness first-hand the power of peoplehood and, perhaps, to transform the dangerous, emerging American Jewish sense that attachment to other Jews and their state is a relic of the past.

We know what’s at stake. Those people who never even imagined that Jews are a people are the men and women who in a generation will be running the federations, many of America’s synagogues and national organizations. They will be setting communal agendas and disbursing American Jews’ money. Either they will argue our case on Capitol Hill, or no one will.

We would be fools to imagine that we do not need those American Jews at our side. But we’d be equally foolish to believe that they’ll care one whit about us, unless we can restore peoplehood to the central value it used to be.

[Photo credit for "The Secret": Zion Ozeri, at www.zionozeri.com]

Almost ten years ago, shortly after we made aliyah, we were sitting with our three young children having dinner. One of the boys, still getting used to the idea that his life was going to be very different in Israel, looked up from his food, and asked out of nowhere, “Is Israel still going to have an army when I’m eighteen?”

He was scared. But we knew that he had no reason to be. “Yes, there’ll be an army,” we told him. “But there’s going to be peace by then. By the time you’re eighteen, everything’s going to be different. You’ll see.” I still remember how certain we were, and how relieved he looked.

A couple of weeks ago, on the Wednesday of Hanukkah, Hamas fired more than 60 mortars and rockets at Sederot and the western part of the Negev. The number was high, but the situation wasn’t new. The kids of Sederot have been getting shelled for eight years, with a dramatic increase since Israel got out of Gaza in 2005. The next day, Thursday, I was supposed to go to Sederot to visit my friend, Laura, to see some of the work she was doing on a new movie (about the music scene in Sederot, in which her husband is a leading figure). Despite the horrible weather, it was still a (Hanukkah) vacation day of sorts, and I asked the kids if any of them wanted to come with me. Talia, now in law school, had class and a massive amount of work. Micha, the only one still in high school, also had too much studying to do. But Avi, home from the army for a few days, said he’d happily come – he and I don’t get lots of hang-out time together anymore.

My tour-guide wife was out of town, guiding a family in the north. I figured that I should check with her before taking one of her kids and her only car to Sederot on a week like that. But she didn’t hesitate for a second. “Of course you should go,” she said. “Remember how we resented those people who wouldn’t come to Jerusalem when we were the ones under attack. Just drive safely, and be careful out there. I’ll be home for dinner.” I wasn’t quite sure how one was supposed to “be careful” in the car if rockets started falling out of the sky again, but I didn’t press the point.

A couple of hours later, Avi and I were in Sederot, at Laura’s house. The city seemed deserted, but it was hard to tell whether that was because of the previous day’s barrage of rockets, or the drenching rain that fell all day. The skies were quiet. But even on a day when rockets didn’t fall, it didn’t take long to see how utterly surreal life there has become.

Laura had a great, gigantic publicity poster for a classic movie on her living room wall. “Great poster,” I said to her. She told me a bit about the store in Jaffa where she’d bought it. “Is it an original?” I asked her. “They had originals,” she said, “and I was actually tempted to get one. But then I realized that it’s kind of absurd to buy anything of value to put in your house when you live in Sederot.” I tried to imagine what it would be like to live not wanting to have anything of value, knowing that your house could be obliterated almost without warning, because you happen to live within rocket range of a terrorist state that has no territorial dispute with you, but simply doesn’t recognize your right to exist, and never will.

After chatting for a while and seeing some of the movie-in-progress, we decided to go out to grab a bite for lunch. On the way to the café, Laura pointed out the neighbor’s house that’s now deserted because the owner moved away after a rocket hit it. She pointed to the traffic circle where a young boy had his leg blown off a few months ago in a different attack. And so on.

But what struck me more than anything on the way to lunch was the playground. Even in the pouring rain, it looked just like a regular playground, with jungle-gyms, swing sets and the like. There was even a colorful cement caterpillar – for the kids to climb on, I assumed. “See the caterpillar?” Laura asked me. “It’s hollow,” she said. “And see over there? Those are the openings. It’s really a bomb shelter. When the Color Red siren goes off [indicating an incoming kassam], the kids can run from the other parts of the playground into the caterpillar and wait there until the rocket hits.” (I asked Avi, sitting in the back, to take a quick picture, despite the rain.)

On the drive back, Avi and I got a chance to chat. It was absurd, we both knew. What Israel was (not) doing was beyond immoral. States have an obligation to protect their citizens, and we weren’t doing it. That, undoubtedly, was the sentiment behind the graffiti that we saw, claiming that Sederot should “secede” [the actual word, tellingly, was “disengage”] from the “pathetic state.”

Why should children living in uncontested Israeli territory grow up being taught that in the playground, when the siren goes off, you run into the caterpillar, and hope that the rocket doesn’t kill any of your friends who don’t make it in time? For how many years does a State have a right to ignore the citizens whose children, at the ages of eight and nine, are wetting their beds all over again, the sheer terror of the siren reducing their entire childhood to a years-long nightmare? For how many years dare Israel do nothing, as hundreds of families, terrified that the rockets will hit in the middle of the night, all sleep in the same room? What does it do to a family, and to marriages, when elementary and high school age children have been sleeping in their parents’ room on the floor for years?

How do you educate kids, my friend Ahrele (the principle of the high school in that region) once asked me, when the siren goes off (sometimes several times a day), and hundreds upon hundreds of kids cram the high school hallways desperate to get to a protected room but can’t move because all the passageways are jammed with students? And then, minutes later, when it’s over, how are they supposed to sit quietly and start thinking about their history class, or focus on geometry? “We didn’t finish the job,” Ahrele once said to me and Elisheva during a dinner at his home a couple of years ago, the sounds of exploding shells in the distance punctuating our conversation. “We didn’t show them that we intend to live here, no matter what. Really, when you think about it, this is just the latest battle in the War of Independence. It’s the battle for our right to have a place to live.”

He was right, of course. It was absurd for us to tell our kids that they wouldn’t go to war. Because if the War of Independence was about making it clear that we intend to stay and getting our enemies to acknowledge that we, too, have a right to a country and a normal life, then we’ve yet to win it.

So now, we have to try again. Some progress has been made. For thirty five years, Syria, Jordan and Egypt have all refrained from launching military attacks on Israel. Because they love us? Hardly. It’s just because they know that we will obliterate them if they do. Even when Israel bombed a nuclear-reactor deep inside Syria, Syria whined but did nothing. They’ve learned their lesson. Maybe Hezbollah did, too, the disasters of the 2006 Second Lebanon War notwithstanding. At this writing, at least, in the first hours of the ground war, they’re staying out of the present conflict. One hopes that they’re smart enough to keep that up.

But Hamas hasn’t yet learned, and because of that, our citizens have been suffering for years. So there is no choice but to fight this war, and to win it decisively.

On the Shabbat afternoon after our visit to Sederot, Avi’s girlfriend, who was at our house for lunch, suddenly got called back to her base. That was our first inkling that the war was starting. The next morning, Avi went back to the army, but to a different base. And by Sunday evening (the last night of Hanukkah), Talia, in the first semester of law school, struggling with a massive amount of school work and finally just getting the hang of it all, had been called back to her unit.

Quite frankly, I expected some tears when she told me that she’d been called up. How would she keep up with school? The vast majority of her classmates hadn’t been called up, so it wasn’t as if school would be cancelled. How would she ever catch up? What, I figured she’d want to know, was going to happen to her grades?

But when we called her downstairs to light Hanukkah candles for the final night, there weren’t any tears. What I saw on her face was steely-eyed stoicism. There was work to be done, she knew how to do it, and they needed her. So she was heading back to the army.

Suddenly, I remembered the night, long ago, when we’d told her and her brothers that the wars were all over, that peace was on its way. For a moment, I thought that I should apologize to her, tell her how much we didn’t know back then, that I was really, really sorry that this is how it is. That Elisheva and I didn’t have to go to college like this, and that I hoped that she wasn’t angry with us for having made the decisions that now mean she does.

But by the time I thought of saying something to her, the candles were already lit, and we were up to Maoz Tzur. We got to the last stanza, and I had my arms around her and together, we were all singing:

Chasof zero’a kodshekhah
Bare Your Holy arm and hasten the arrival of some salvation
Avenge the vengeance of your servant’s blood from the wicked nation
Ki archah lanu ha-yeshu’a
For real victory is taking far too long
And there is no end to the days of evil

There’s nothing new in this whole story, I was reminded. It’s what Jews have had to do for generations to stay alive, and it’s what the younger generation now is being asked to do, again.

So I didn’t apologize. When we were done, she went up to her room to look for the uniforms that she’d packed away someplace last year, assuming that after three years in the army, she wouldn’t be needing them anymore. As she climbed the stairs, I thought again of the caterpillar. And of the poster that had to be a replica because the house might come down. And of the kids still wetting their beds. And of towns that have known only terror for years after years.

Our kids don’t want an apology. They’d be appalled if one were forthcoming. Because they understand, perhaps better than we do, that this simply has to be done. What’s at stake is not Sederot. What’s at stake is the question of whether Jewish sovereignty means anything. One can – and should be saddened by the loss of life in Gaza these weeks, on both sides. But we dare not let caring about innocent human life among Palestinians, or even more understandably, our dread of what the casualties among the IDF may be, blur the urgency of what we need to do.

These weeks, with the question of whether or not Jewish sovereignty means anything at all, there is really only one question. As Joshua said to the angel (Joshua 5:13), “are you for us, or for our adversaries?” Do you believe that Jews in Sederot have a right to live without bomb-shelter caterpillars in their playgrounds? Do you think that parents in that whole part of the country have a right to sleep in their own room by themselves, and that nine year olds should no longer wet their beds, night after night, caught in nightmares that will probably hound them for life? Do you understand that the only point of having a Jewish state is that Jews should no longer live – and die – at the whim of those who hate us just because we exist? Do you get that Ahrele was right? That we’re still fighting for the simple right to have the world acknowledge that we have a right to be?

There’s only one question, and it is Joshua’s. Are you for us, or for our adversaries? There is no place for mealy-mouthed equivocation calling for an end to the “violence,” for that is nothing more than a euphemism for more years of Jewish kids living in dread and Jewish sovereignty meaning nothing.

Israel could well become a horribly tear-soaked country this week. But thankfully, we finally have leadership that seems to understand that what is at stake is the question of whether having a state changes anything at all about the existential condition of the Jews. At long last, they get it – if Jews still have to live in dread, for the mere sin of existing, then there’s really no point to any of this.

So pray for them. Whatever you believe, or don’t, pray for the thousands of kids out there doing what the Maccabees did – risking everything so the Jews can survive. And remember, no matter how devastating the pictures that will inevitably emerge from the theater of war, that it’s all about something really simple. We say it, all the time, in our national anthem:

Od lo avedah tikvateinu … liyot am chofshi be-artzeinu
We haven’t yet abandoned our hope … to be a free people in our land.

That’s really all we want.

More than that, we don’t need.
But for less than that, we’ll never, ever settle