Rabbi Zalman Melamed, venerable founding head of the Beit El yeshiva and rabbi of Beit El, sent on Sunday a video message to the IDF soldiers who are defending Israel against Hamas’ ongoing rocket attacks on the south.
Rabbi Melamed sent words of encouragement to the soldiers, as the IDF prepares for a possible ground operation in Gaza.
“May you succeed in defeating the enemy and silence it and make sure there are no more dangers and no more missiles and the like coming from Gaza into Israel,” he told the soldiers.
“We should know that we are in the midst of a spiritual and religious struggle between us and Hamas and all the other religious movements in the region,” said the rabbi. “They are all fighting against our existence and there’s no possibility of finding any solution for true peace between us and them, unless we manage to convince them about the truth of our way and the truth of our faith and our real right to the land of Israel. So the only way is to cause such a deterrence that they won’t try to hurt us. They’ll see they can’t move forward by using war and they will stop hurting us in terrorist attacks, in wars and in all the other ways.
“We need to know that we came to the land of Israel in order to build our faith here, striving for full redemption and to build complete lives for the entire people of Israel in the entire land of Israel, build the Temple and be a light unto the nations. We will continue.”