On the morning of October 7, 2023, Elchanan Kalmanson was home in Otniel, a small town in the hills south of Hebron. When the first reports came in, he turned to his parents and his wife: “It doesn’t look good, and I need to go and help.” Nobody called him up for reserve duty. He grabbed his brother Menachem and his nephew Itiel, and the three of them drove south toward Gaza while thousands of Israelis fled north.
At Kibbutz Be’eri, they went from house to house for fourteen hours, pulling families out of their safe rooms while terrorists held the homes around them. The residents were terrified to open their doors, afraid that terrorists dressed as Israeli soldiers were trying to lure them out. So Elchanan stood outside each door and recited the Shema, the Jewish declaration of faith: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). The doors opened. The three men rescued more than one hundred people. On October 8, in the last house, a terrorist hiding in a corner shot Elchanan. He died before the helicopter could evacuate him.
I first read Elchanan’s story in Into the Fire, Sara Lamm’s book about the Israelis who ran toward the danger on October 7. Three years after October 7, it reads differently than when it was first published in 2024.
The fire has not gone out. Israel won the war on the battlefield, but the war against Israel has not let up. Saturday Night Live still cracks jokes about Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, a genocide that never happened. In September, eleven European countries and Canada announced they would ban goods made by Jews in Judea and Samaria, the biblical heartland of Israel. This isn’t the first time Europe has boycotted Jewish businesses; they did the very same thing in Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s.
And Israelis are tired. Reservists who left their families for months in 2023 keep getting called up, again and again. Many Israelis are rightfully wondering: Why won’t God give His people a break?
The question is as old as Abraham himself. The Bible tells us almost nothing about Abraham’s life before God called him to the Land of Israel, but the Sages fill in the missing chapters through a midrash, a teaching that explains what the biblical text leaves unsaid. Their starting point is the name of Abraham’s hometown, Ur of the Chaldeans. In Hebrew, ur means fire, and God later reminds Abraham:
The Sages read those words literally: God brought Abraham out of the fire.
According to the Sages, Abraham grew up in a city of idol worshippers, where his own father, Terah, sold idols for a living. As a young man, Abraham became convinced that the idols were worthless and that one God created the world, and he smashed the idols in his father’s shop to prove it. Terah handed his son over to Nimrod, the king, who ordered him thrown into a fiery furnace when he refused to bow to the king’s gods. God saved Abraham from the flames (Genesis Rabbah 38:13). Abraham could easily have kept his beliefs to himself and lived a quiet, comfortable life in Ur. Instead, he chose the fire.
Then God sent him to a new home:
Look at where that land is. The Land of Israel is a narrow bridge where Asia, Africa and Europe meet. Every caravan traveling between the continents passed through it, and so did every army. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome all marched across it. Of all the places on earth, God chose the one every empire would fight over. As Rabbi Reuven Sasson puts it, “If God had wanted a nation of recluses, devoted to Him in isolation, He would have sent us to Tibet or Antarctica” (Rabbi Reuven Sasson, Olam Katanm Lech Lecha 5787).
This was no accident. “This is Jerusalem; I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries all around her” (Ezekiel 5:5). God placed Israel at the crossroads of the world because He gave us a job: to bring His light to every nation. “For instruction will go out from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:3). A nation hidden away in the mountains of Tibet could live a holy, peaceful life, but it would not be able to teach the world. You can only light up the world from the place where the whole world passes through.
This is why the Jewish people never get a quiet life. The land that sits at the crossroads of the world has always been its battlefield as well. For thousands of years, every empire that wanted to rule the world first had to conquer this narrow strip of land, and today every enemy of God’s light aims its fire at the place where that light shines brightest. The world’s obsession with Israel, the boycotts and the lies and the rockets, is not a sign that we are in the wrong place. It is proof that we are standing exactly where God put us.
God will not give His people a quiet life because He never created us for one.
Sara Lamm opens her chapter about Elchanan with the words of the prophet Isaiah, and they fit him perfectly: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!'” (Isaiah 6:8).
Elchanan grew up in the hills of Hebron, Abraham’s city. He was a religious Jew who drove nearly fifty miles to save a secular kibbutz, full of people who had little in common with him except one thing: they were his people. When the call came, he did not ask whether it was his job, or wait to see if someone else would go. He answered like Isaiah. He did what Abraham did in Ur. He walked into the fire.
During the week of mourning, residents of Be’eri came to the Kalmanson home in tears to tell his family how Elchanan saved their lives. His team received the Israel Prize for civilian heroism. His widow, Shlomit, received the news with pride and with longing. “This is his place,” she said, “in the chain of generations of the people of Israel.”
Three years after October 7, Israel still stands in the fire. The boycotts will keep coming, the comedians will keep lying, and the reservists will keep packing their bags. The temptation to run toward a quiet life somewhere else is real.
But Abraham’s children were never meant to live in a quiet corner of the world. God placed us at its center, to bring His light to every nation that passes through. That calling comes with a price, and Elchanan paid it in full.
Every one of us faces the choice he faced in his kitchen in Otniel: every Israeli tempted to leave, every Jew watching from abroad, and every Christian who stands with Israel when standing with Israel costs something. We can look away and hope someone else will go. Or we can answer the way Elchanan did.
“It doesn’t look good. I need to go and help.”
