One morning, when Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Weitzen, the rabbi of Psagot, prayed in the Weiss family shiva house, mourning the death of a local soldier, a neighbor—a war widow herself—approached him and said she had no more strength.
“I told her, ‘I agree that you feel tired and even broken, but I disagree that you feel powerless and the proof is that you are here in this house of mourning, coming to help and lending support,'” said Rabbi Weitzen.
He added, “People ultimately have strength, because within their Divine soul is a great spirit. And while there is definitely shock and pain during bereavement, when there are spiritual foundations, they endure and even manage to grow.”
Rabbi Weitzen knows bereavement firsthand. Amichai Weitzen, the rabbi’s son, fell defending a southern kibbutz from terrorist infiltration on Oct 7, 2023.
Two friends from Psagot, Amichai Weitzen, 33, and Moshe Yedidya Raziel, 31, were fighters in the Kerem Shalom kibbutz readiness squad.
On Oct. 7, they fought for hours in a heroic battle against dozens of Hamas infiltrators, defending the kibbutz with their very bodies. The two young men who grew up together also gave their lives together to protect the State of Israel and its citizens.
Staff Sgt. (res.) Hanan Drori, 26, who was injured by an RPG missile while fighting in the Gaza Strip and later died of his wounds, lived in Psagot until a year and a half ago. His grandparents still live in the community.
Yitzhak Zeiger of Shavei Shomron, who was murdered in a terrorist attack at the Eli gas station, was a founder of Psagot, and his son lives in the settlement.
The latest casualty is Psagot resident Elon Weiss, 49, a reservist tank commander who was killed in the northern Gaza Strip. A beloved Torah teacher in Ma’ale Adumim, Weiss was married and the father of seven. He was also the first grandfather to be killed during active duty.
The Psagot settlement
Psagot is a religious settlement located just north of Jerusalem, high up on a mountain peak, overlooking the Arab city of Ramallah. Founded in 1981, it now has a population of a little more than 2,000 residents. When one resident is killed, the entire community feels the repercussions.
“Each bereavement reopens the wound for many. And after the third, fourth, fifth time in this war, it seems sometimes as if there is no strength left,” said Rabbi Weitzen. “When one goes up to the holy mountain, Mount Herzl (the site of Israel’s main military cemetery), there is a terrible pain that penetrates the soul as well as a great shock, a kind of inner earthquake.”
He added, “Homes that don’t have solid foundations fall. The ones that survive and can later be rebuilt are the houses that were built well and correctly on sound foundations. They may shake in the earthquake, but they do not fall. They remain standing and stable.”
The power of faith
“The foundation of everything is faith in the knowledge that everything that happens to us is precise and unchangeable,” Weitzen said. “We understand that there is something ordered here and that we are part of a definite plan. We are not at the mercy of blind fate. Nothing happens by chance, but there are things hidden from our perspective. We do not know everything and cannot claim to know all of life’s secrets.”
He continued: “The second foundation is that nothing happens to our detriment. God, the source of all life, is good and beneficial, and even difficult events will have beneficial outcomes. Unfortunately, we are very confused between ‘fun for me’ and ‘good for me.’ The Western world places fun and pleasure at the top of its scale of values, and every time we encounter a painful and unpleasant reality, it distances us from the purpose of life.”
According to the rabbi, “we need to prioritize the good, not the pleasant.”
“When everything is good, everything will be pleasant. But first of all, we must work to make things good, and in order for that to happen, we sometimes need to go through trying periods, and at times that hurts. Pain hurts, but it is not bad. Though we are in pain, we don’t run away from it, because this is the experience that God wants from us. It is intended to change something within us and grow something new, so we will experience true goodness.”
Weitzen said he believed Jews today “have the tremendous privilege of living in the time of redemption. In exile, when there was a pogrom, a Jew could not tell himself that there was a chance for salvation.”
He added that “all these great souls who leave us do not cease to be present in our lives, and sometimes they are even felt more strongly.”
Addressing his personal loss, he said, “We lost the earthly Amichai on Simchat Torah. But since his death, Amichai’s strength and power have been much more present among his family, friends, and community.”
He said the same thing applied to the relatives of Elon Weiss, who built his family on solid foundations. “We hope the family will be able to withstand this earthquake, and so will we as a community. Elon will not stop being present; he will be present in a different way, from a much more distant place. The pain is from this distancing.”
The strength of the community
The upheaval that the Psagot community is experiencing engenders great strengths, Rabbi Weitzen argued.
“From a communal point of view, if a person needs to leave the world, it should happen in a communal settlement,” he said. “The community has a very great power to comfort; there is great support for those within it. Every Shabbat feast and every community gathering is an opportunity to strengthen ourselves together, when we sit together and tell stories.”
Private bereavement that is intertwined with national mourning comforts both those close to us and those far away, the rabbi said. “It is part of our comfort that we know that we are not private individuals and that there is a huge stream of life called the Israeli nation, which gives meaning to each and every one who belongs to this great thing called Israel.”
Reaching the innermost point
Elon Weiss had long passed the age when he needed to do reserve duty. But he insisted on continuing his annual service and even fighting in the current war, even though he was exempt and had seven children and a wife waiting for him back home.
Eliyahu Nazlovin, a graduate of the Amit Eitan School in Ma’ale Adumim, studied under Weiss some seven years ago, when he was a new teacher at the school.
“When Rabbi Elon entered his class as a new teacher, many years older than the students, looking a bit like a nerd, in a buttoned-up shirt and his tzitzit hanging out, I doubted his ability to take control of his class,” the student said of his teacher. “But within a few days, the students became his admirers. He was a master, simply a master, of human relations.”
He said that Weiss’s ability “to reach each and every one of his students and touch on their most significant point and strengthen was extraordinary.”
Nazlovin continued: “What was special about him, and I have not seen this anywhere else, was that he never raised his voice at a student. He also did not humiliate, tease, insult, or speak in a negative tone. He was always positive and joyful in a pure way, even in very challenging situations. He managed to lift the students up and help them succeed without instilling fear, but with a hug and love.”
Weiss, he said, would sit outside in the school yard with every student who was having problems with his studies, for a personal talk, until they solved the difficulty together, and the student began to improve.
“Although he began teaching here when he was already in his forties, he was the teacher with the most youthful spirit, enthusiastic about doing everything the students liked, including Purim plays, games during breaks, and more,” Nazlovin said.
“When I enlisted in the army, I went to a paramedic course on a Negev military base. One day, I saw Rabbi Elon at the base,” he recalled. “He was walking around there, smiling from ear to ear. When he noticed me, he came over and hugged me. It turns out that he had traveled to the base, four hours each way, to attend the graduation ceremony of a student of his, who later became an officer and was even wounded in the fighting in Gaza. That’s how it is: A heroic teacher raises heroic students.”
Turning the bitter into sweet
“According to Rav Kook (the first Chief Rabbi of Israel), redemption includes both concealment and revelation,” Rabbi Weitzen noted. “The greater the concealment, the deeper the revelation. We are currently in a period of concealment, but I believe there will soon be a very great revelation. The belief that good will come from all this is important. This is the sweetening of bitterness.”
He added, “It is written in the Zohar that he who sits in the study house of the Messiah is he who knows how to turn the bitter into sweet. The Messiah will have an acceptance test for his yeshiva, in which he looks at the person’s character, and the measure he is looking for is whether he knows how to turn bitter into sweet. To succeed in this, we must also have the ability to taste the bitter, not to run away from the pain. The second thing is to believe that it things can be sweet and do the work of turning the bitter into sweet.”
“Every day for the last year, I have been trying to do this with my fallen son Amichai,” he said. “I feel bitter that someone who was close to me and whom I could hug and laugh with cannot be here with me. In the first stage, these are huge longings, and every day I meet, as it were, with what is not there.
“The sweetening happens by releasing Amichai as he was in this world, with his laughter and smile. I no longer have him here, but by virtue of what I am experiencing now and what he was, a new Amichai is born to me, who is in the heavens, a pure soul that gives me a lot of inspiration and a lot of strength. This is what it means to sweeten. To accept reality but not to be enslaved to it. Not to stay in the past and get stuck, but to move forward. This is the ability that the Messiah wants. People who are from the world of correction and change and know how to grow from their current predicament.”
In recent months, Weitzen said he had visited many families of fallen heroes and has tried to find a common denominator amongst them all. “Many of those who were killed were very humble in their lives, not well known. Now, suddenly, the entire country becomes aware of the great light that they and their families possess. God is very precise when He chooses people who will serve as an example for others. Some will be inspired from afar, and others from close by.
“Elon’s father told me, ‘Important people will come today to comfort us. What should I say to them? I answered him that Simchat Torah of 5744 (Oct. 7, 2023) shows us that many things can suddenly collapse. The security cameras can collapse, military intelligence can collapse, American aid can collapse; the belief that Arabs have limits to evil can collapse.”
“The one thing that does not collapse is the Israeli spirit, which is eternal,” he concluded.”The families of the fallen soldiers need to reveal this light, that there is an eternal spirit here that cannot be broken. This is our strength.”
This article was first published in Hebrew by Olam Katan.