Last night, the Remembrance Day film on Channel 11, Haben Yakir Li (My Beloved Son), followed two yeshiva leaders since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks. It was riveting to watch Rabbi Yaakov Medan and Rabbi Tamir Granot as they comforted, inspired, and even buried students – while struggling with their own doubts, traumas, and devastating family losses.
Medan’s son Elisha lost both legs in the war, while Granot’s newly engaged 24-year-old son Amitay lost his life. Anyone who cannot see past their big kippot and bigger beards to feel the human heartbreak, confusion, wonder, and heroism that the film conveys has no heart. But anyone who also cannot see how rooted this universal story is in the particular strengths of Israel, Zionism, and the Religious Zionist movement – at their best – has no brain.
If you only define Israel through the headlines, it was an odd choice for Channel 11, Israel’s town square. If you consider Israel hopelessly divided, it wouldn’t make sense to burrow into one faction. If you spit out the words “the religious” like a curse, denounce “them” for not serving, you won’t want to acknowledge these young soldiers’ piety, patriotism, and self-sacrifice.
The film’s opening last week in Jerusalem’s Cinematheque was subdued, given the subject. The cut shown there started with the statistics detailing the disproportionately high percentage of fallen soldiers from the National Religious camp since October 7, constituting barely 10% of Israelis.
Following the movie, the documentary’s award-winning director, Noam Demski, explained that he initially planned to track three generations of rabbis from Yeshivat Har Etzion, a flagship National Religious seminary, over the 50 years since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The yeshiva’s founding rabbi, Rabbi Yehudah Amital, a Holocaust survivor who fought in 1948, lost eight students in that war. Medan, today the yeshiva’s leader, fought in the bloody Golan Heights tank battles that saved Israel. One of Medan’s students, Tamir Granot, born in 1970, leads Yeshivat Orot Shaul in Tel Aviv, a different planet, eons away from Yeshivat Har Etzion’s home in Alon Shvut.
The October 7 bloodbath shifted the focus away from Amital. The film crew follows Medan and his wife Ruti to the hospital, as they pray over their wounded son, who lost four comrades in a catastrophic explosion.
We watch the Granot family mourning at Amitay’s funeral – then, weeks later, bravely celebrating Hanukkah, bringing light into their lives. Lean into your sorrow, Granot tells his kids. Be willing to cry, but remember: Israel is still fighting a war for survival, making national morale a weapon we cannot fritter away either.
Both rabbis visit their students in the field, hugging them, dancing with them, and encouraging them. They sit with students struggling, willing to fight, but wondering why one person dies and another, millimeters away, survives, or even becomes that existential oxymoron, a war hero. Throughout, you see both teachers trying to answer, reassuring their young disciples, while wondering themselves.
Suffering, sacrifice, and war clarify community, meaning, and mission
At a moment when divisive demagogues – pro and con – have shrunk the term “Religious Zionist” into a narrow, often mean-spirited, partisan identity, not an expansive, values-based movement, this movie taps Religious Zionism’s spiritual and national potential.
These people talk about “love” so often, you’d think the movie was tracking some New Age conference in California. These rabbis love their families, their students, their country, their army, their Torah, their God, intimately, passionately. They’re neither angry nor bitter. They articulate the movie’s and Israel’s central contradiction. We’ve learned that suffering, sacrifice, war, clarify your sense of community, meaning, and mission – three keys to happiness.
Both Medan and Granot addressed Hostage Square at different times. This subtle film doesn’t overplay it. But their commitment to healing Israel is clear. By showing up, the rabbis forded one of Israeli society’s most painful fissures – the false choice between the “pro-war” and “pro-hostage” camps. They convey the moral clarity we all need. Medan and Granot hate war, love the hostages, and blame Hamas.
Bypassing extremists, the movie speaks to Israel’s Silenced Majority. Most understand that before we start fighting each other, we must fight together, on the front lines, to defeat barbaric enemies.
Following the movie, director Noam Demski told the audience that the movie’s working title was “Lifnei Hamachaneh,” (Leading the Camp). The idea was to remind leaders to look back for followers, too. But the Hebrew word “machaneh,” camp, stirs unpleasant factional passions. Haben Yakir Li – My Beloved Son – is a traditional, well-known song, taken from the book of Jeremiah. It conveys the healing love Israelis share for all our kids, individually and collectively.
Granot doesn’t want to attract “viewers” but rather mobilize “participants” to help Israel win, while making Israel better. Medan brushed aside the percentage of Religious Zionists killed – a number that doesn’t appear in the final cut of the Channel 11 broadcast. “Forget that number!” he insisted. “We didn’t count in Yom Kippur who wore a kippah and who didn’t – and we dare not do it today.”
Medan reinforced the film’s lesson, which is Remembrance Day’s lasting message: “One” is the only number that’s relevant. The number one embodies that sense of unity we felt on October 7, against Iranian missiles, against Hezbollah’s rockets. “The power of one” inspires many young heroes to take personal responsibility for this state. In return, we mourn and remember each holy one who fell protecting this embattled but wondrous country.
The writer is an American presidential historian and Zionist activist born in Queens, living in Jerusalem. Last year, he published To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and Its Aftermath.
His latest e-book, The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred, was published recently; it can be downloaded from the Jewish People Policy Institute’s website.
Source:
www.jpost.com
