On May 2, 1980, Arab terrorists ambushed Jewish worshippers returning from the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, murdering six innocent people and wounding twenty others. In the wake of this attack and other provocations, a group of Jews from nearby Kiryat Arba made the bold decision to return to the heart of Hebron, reestablishing a Jewish presence that had been violently erased during the massacre of 1929.
Among them was a 21-year-old man named Yechiel Leiter – today serving as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States. He played a critical role in reviving the ancient Jewish community on land known as Admot Yishai, “The Land of Jesse,” named for the father of King David, who is buried in Hebron. Leiter later recalled spending several days on the hilltop with friends, standing on the very ground where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob once lived, and where David established his throne. After visiting Jesse’s tomb, they explored the archaeological excavations nearby.
There, they encountered an Arab man who was puzzled by their interest. “What’s so important to you here?” he asked. With a shrug, he waved his hand over the ancient ruins and muttered dismissively: “These are just holes.”
Ambassador Leiter explains that in Hebrew, there is a word for this attitude: stam. It means “just,” “nothing special,” “it doesn’t matter.” To call something stam is to strip it of meaning, to treat it as empty, irrelevant, or random.
But how wrong this Arab was! Stam? Just the place where the nation of Israel was born? Just the place where the Patriarchs called upon the name of God, teaching the world that it is God who created man, and not man who created God? Just the place where King David established the Kingdom of Israel? Just the place where Jews lived and flourished for centuries, until they were slaughtered in 1929? Stam?
The world keeps treating Israel’s claim to the land, and our mission itself, as if it were “just” politics, “just” coincidence, “just” history. The Bible shows us that this attitude, this dismissal of what is sacred, is nothing new.
What are these wells? On the surface, they are physical wells – holes in the ground to access water. But the truth is that these wells also represent something far greater. The Kotzker Rebbe explained that water symbolizes Torah, divine teaching. Abraham’s wells were not only for water; they symbolized new paths of serving God, new revelations of holiness in the world. Abraham dug deep and uncovered treasures of faith and truth.
But after Abraham’s death, the Philistines stopped up the wells. In Hebrew, the verse says “vayisatmum Plishtim” – literally, “the Philistines made them stam.” The very word for closing up the wells is from the same root as stam. They didn’t just fill them with dirt; they branded them as stam, as meaningless. They dismissed Abraham’s discoveries as irrelevant, reducing them to “just holes.” To the Philistines, Abraham’s teachings were “just” words, “just” ideas, “just” the eccentricities of a man now dead.
Isaac, however, would not allow his father’s legacy to be buried under this attitude of stam. He re-dug the wells, showing that what others dismissed as ordinary or irrelevant could, in truth, be reopened and revealed as eternal truths. Each generation, Isaac taught, must uncover the wells anew.
And this is our struggle too. The struggle of Isaac is the struggle of his descendants, the people of Israel. Time and again, we are told that our story is stam. Our land? Stam politics. Our survival? Stam coincidence. Our faith? Stam superstition. Our return to Zion? Stam colonialism.
Western leaders like Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer tell us we must give away the “West Bank” for a “two-state solution” as if it were just another piece of land. But this land is not stam! It is Judea and Samaria – the cradle of our people, the stage of our Bible, the heart of our identity.
There is no such thing as stam. The Bible insists that nothing in this world is empty or random. Every detail, large or small, flows from the will of God, who sustains all existence with divine purpose. What the world dismisses as stam is, in fact, filled with divine meaning.
This is why we exist. God charged us with the task of teaching the nations that life is not meaningless, that behind every event – whether in nature, politics, or history – there is a divine plan. We are here to proclaim that nothing is stam. As Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explained, “The people of Israel serve as a living testimony before all nations against the Greek heresy, which claimed that everything in the world happens by chance, with no guiding hand evident in it.”
If the world wants proof that there is no such thing as stam, it need look no further than us. No rational explanation exists for our continued existence as a people. No nation has ever been exiled from its land, dispersed across the entire globe, and yet survived and somehow thrived for millennia.
Is this stam? Is this “just” another episode of history? No. It is the clearest demonstration that the God of Israel rules history.
The task before us is the same as it was in the days of Isaac. The Philistines of old filled the wells and called them stam. Today, new Philistines – political, cultural, and ideological – try to do the same. They dismiss Israel’s existence as chance, or worse, as illegitimate. They insist our faith is outdated, our survival accidental, our land stolen.
Our answer must be the same as Isaac’s: to dig again. We must dig physical wells – reviving the land of Israel, bringing life to the wilderness, restoring its fields, cities, and homes. And we must dig spiritual wells – drawing forth the waters of Torah, teaching the nations that what they see as stam is in fact holy. God is in every nook and cranny of this world, if only we are willing to open our eyes.
The Arab in Hebron looked at the excavations and said: “These are just holes.” He saw stam. But we know better. Those “holes” are the wells of Abraham and Isaac, the foundations of David’s throne, the heartbeat of Israel’s eternity. The nations of the world may continue to see our story as stam – but we will not. We know there is no such thing as “just.” There is no stam in history, no stam in creation, no stam in the survival and rebirth of Israel.
We have come home, and we are here to dig again, to restore the land and faith our enemies try so hard to erase. Most of all, we are here to declare that nothing is stam – that every stone, every story, every miracle is shaped by the hand of the living God.
