The Blesséd of the Earth:

The Heroism of Israel’s Healers

“In a world with so much darkness, I try to focus on the light.”

That was the last thing Rachel said as she finished telling us about her experience on October 7th.

Rachel, who was 22 at the time, spent October 7th creating and running a field hospital that served over 150 wounded souls.

Leah, who was 25 at the time, spent that day in Sderot, driving one of Israel’s 3 armored ambulances in and out of the city, saving as many people as she could.

Rachel and Leah are not their real names, but, as they told their stories, it became very apparent that I was in the presence of two righteous Jewish heroes, so, to both protect their identities and show them the respect they deserve, I will call them Rachel and Leah.

And these are their stories.

Leah joined Magen David Adom as a teenage volunteer. She had been a paramedic for almost ten years, and she did her national service as a paramedic.

She had no combat experience and no training as a combat medic.

On the morning of October 7th, she woke up in her Jerusalem home and, like many, saw what was happening on the news.

She immediately called her ambulance tema together and drove straight down south, not knowing what she would find there.

But she knew she had to go because she had access to one of Israel’s 3 armored ambulances.

There is only one way into the city of Sderot – a single road that passes beneath a gate.

As they drove under the gate, Leah saw, on both sides of the road, hundreds of bodies.

Families, on their way to shul, murdered.

Men’s prayer shawls covered in blood.

Children dead on the playground, the empty swing beside them still blowing in the wind.

Leah called it “The Valley of Death,” and I began to cry.

In Inferno, by Dante, the gates above hell say, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter.”

Leah drove through those gates on October 7th.

But she did not abandon all hope.

Rather, she, like so many other heroes on that day, ran into the fire.

She drove straight through the Gates of Hell into the Valley of Death, and, when she got into the Valley of Death, she got out of her armored ambulance and began checking the dead for any signs of life, any wounded who might need her care.

She told us the story of two of her patients.

There was a heroic battle at the Sderot police station that waged for more than 8 hours. Before she and her ambulance could approach the station, she had to battle battle armor.

But, she told us, she also had to fashion herself a suit of emotional armor, so that she would be able to perform her duty to the best of her ability.

A 25-year old girl, charging through the gates of hell, turning over the bodies in the valley of death, slipping into body armor and preparing herself for the hardest day of her life.

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for You are with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”

After Leah had donned her two sets of armor, she approached the police station, where a soldier, crying, ran out to them and told them to leave – everyone there was going to die.

She treated his wounds, calmed him down, and, two weeks later, he sent her a picture from the hospital where he was holding his wife and daughter.

The second story Leah told was much more harrowing.

A police officer had been shot early in the morning. He had been bleeding for eight hours which, in trauma situations, is a death sentence.

In the ambulance, the man asked her, “Am I ever going to see my son and my wife again?”

Leah had a choice – do I lie to the dying man, or do I tell him the truth, knowing that, if he loses hope, he will die for sure.

So Leah did the right thing and lied through her teeth to a dying man.

As he was losing blood, he was also losing consciousness.

Three times Leah had to wake him up – three times he told her that she was annoying and asked her to just leave him alone.

After the annoying Leah dropped him off at the hospital and returned to Sderot, she thought she would never see him again, and she wondered to herself if she had done the right thing.

Later that day, as the sun was setting and that Black Sabbath was coming to a close, she thought to herself that there was no holiness on that sabbath day.

But, as she was thinking this, she saw the sun setting over the gates that led so many into hell, and she saw a long line of ambulances marching into the city.

“Everyone who could come, came.”

Ten months later, on October 8th, 2024, Leah got married. It turned out that the man who she so bitterly annoyed had lived, and he came to the wedding and gave the bride and groom a blessing under the Chuppah.

This is Rachel’s story.

Rachel was 22 when she woke up on October 7th. She had Shabbat off that week.

Rachel was stationed in Ashdod, and her best friend, Amit, was stationed in Kibbutz Be'eri.

Like Leah, Rachel had joined Magen David Adom as a teenage volunteer but was not trained as a combat medic and had no combat experience.

When she heard what was happening, she immediately got in her ambulance and drove.

Because she did not have an armored ambulance or any other kind of protection, she decided to set up a field hospital at a roadside junction in between two Kibbutzim and the location of the Nova festival.

As the wounded began pouring into the field hospital, Rachel realized that she was the most senior paramedic there.

Despite being just 22 years old, she triaged each of the 150 patients who came in.

At 22 years old, most American youths spend their Saturday mornings recovering from Frat parties and all night benders.

At 22 years old, Rachel ran a field hospital in the middle of the worst pogrom in living memory.

Because she was doing triage, Rachel had far less time with each patient than Leah, but there was one man Rachel remembered very clearly.

His whole body had been shot up, and he was bleeding everywhere.

She had to take his clothes off in order to treat him, but, before she could, he grabbed her hand and said:

“I know I am going to die, but I need you to find my wife and children and tell them that I love them and that I tried my best to protect them. I am not religious, but I am a Jew. Please say my last Shema Yisrael with me.”

Together, they recited the Shema, and he was medevaced from the field hospital.

Rachel never heard from him again.

Around 2 P.M., she lost connection with her friend Amit in Be'eri.

While Rachel was helping the man say his last shema, she was doing her best not to worry about her friend Amit.

When they eventually found Amit’s body, she had bullet wounds in her legs and her head.

But she had tourniquets on her legs and gloves on her hands.

After Amit had been shot in the legs, she apparently tied a tourniquet around herself and continued to perform her duty as an EMT until the terrorists eventually returned and shot her in the head.

“Her dream was to be a paramedic and help people,” Rachel told us, “so at least Amit died doing what she always wanted to do.”

Of course, Amit was not the only healer who was so viciously murdered on October 7th.

So many EMTs, doctors, and nurses were found dead, still in their scrubs, still in their gloves.

It is an international war crime to harm healers, just as it is a war crime to use hospitals as military facilities.

Of course, Hamas does not abide by international law, so the first thing they did when they entered Israel was shoot the tires out of every ambulance they saw.

Rachel and Leah knew that when they went into the fray. So did Amit.

These brave women saw the house on fire, and they ran straight in.

I write this piece in their honor, and in the honor of all those who have dedicated themselves to healing others.

And it is not just the paramedics and the EMTs.

Everyone in Israel is traumatized, but some people are more traumatized than others.

The nurses and EMTs, Leah told us, were holding up alright, all things considered.

At least, she said, we could do something helpful at the time.

The emergency dispatchers, however, had one of the hardest jobs to do.

An emergency dispatcher is trained to take traumatic phone calls, coordinate help, and reassure the person on the other end that help is on the way.

But, on October 7th, they could not even do that one things.

Dispatchers took calls they had never been trained for.

A 7 year old boy calls a dispatcher because his parents were both just murdered in front of him, and now he does not know what to do.

The dispatcher cannot promise that help is on the way, so all they can do is tell the child to take their little sister into the closet and hide until the good people come to save them.

That is no less heroic than what Leah and Rachel did.

It is easy to see the clear heroism of some people without seeing how many heroic people are behind them.

When asked how she is able to cope with everything that has happened, Rachel said, “there is a lot of darkness in this world, but I chose to focus on the light, like the people who still care.”

And there are millions who still care.

On October 8th, every Magen David Adom station in Israel had lines around the block of people trying to give blood.

Orthodox men in tallitot and secular women in flip-flops – everyone came.

The world is filled with heroes; they just don’t wear capes.

When I think about the courage and bravery of these young women, I feel incredibly encouraged about the fate and future of the Jewish people.

As long as there are people who charge headlong into the Gates of Hell to help their fellow man, we are in good shape.

Healing is heroic.

We ought to be inspired by the courage and bravery of these young women.

Of course, like any NGO, Magen David Adom is entirely funded by donations, and they need as much money and support as they can get.

After hearing these two brave women’s stories, I immediately opened up my checkbook.

The donations will go to buying more ambulances, replacing the ones which were destroyed, purchasing more armored ambulances, and things like that.

But the real value Magen David Adom provides the world might not be the help it provides to its patients – it might be the kind of paramedics it trains.

People like Rachel and Leah make the world better. People who want to help others are good for the world.

So, in addition to all of the millions of lives that Magen David Adom has saved and helped, it has also trained and taught a cohort of brave and heroic healers.

There is a tremendous amount of pain in this world, and, unfortunately, a tremendous number of people who would like to see that amount increased.

But there is also a tremendous amount of good in this world, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the stories of the healers of Israel.

There is no comparison between the righteousness of Amit and the depravity of those who murdered her, despite what the faculty of America’s Ivy-League Ivory Towers might say.

I feel so blessed and honored to have gotten to meet these two righteous women.

I will conclude with the last thing that Leah said to us.

“In Israel, we all know that the healing has not started yet. We are still in the trauma, not yet the post-trauma. But I am not worried about Israel – I am worried about the diaspora. So many Jews in America, in Europe, in Asia, tell me that they aren’t comfortable wearing their Judaism outside. But listen, I wear this Magen David on my chest because my great-grandmother had to wear a very different one. They tried to make her wear hers with shame, just like they are trying to make you hide yours. But I wear this one with pride. I am proud to be a Jews, I am proud to be an Israeli, and we have no reason to hide any of that.”

To Leah, to Rachel, and to Amit – Thank you.

Thank you for reminding me that there are still heroes in this world.

Thank you for showing me why it is so important that we keep fighting.

Thank you for giving me hope.

You can donate to the healers of Magen David Adom here.

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Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai