New Year's Eve 5766 – Our faith is strong
By Moti Sender
It has now been a month-and-a-half since that terrible day when IDF soldiers came to our doors in wonderful Gush Katif where we lived happily for twenty-seven years and raised a great family (three generations living at Gush Katif), expelled us from our homes and destroyed everything we had left behind.
So many prayers, so many entreaties, tears, hopes, attempts, but the order from above prevailed, the order to go through with the crime of expulsion that has been hovering above us for the past year-and-a-half. Yesterday it destroyed a charming and beautiful part of our homeland and today, after it “succeeded” so completely and without any noticeable protest, it hovers over other areas of our land; it is with a heavy heart that we foresee it destroying other towns and villages in the heart of our homeland, God forbid, a prospect that makes the personal pain of the evicted exiles of Gush Katif more poignant.
We have been refugees now for a month-and-a-half and we still cannot assimilate what we have gone through. We left behind us a proud history of pioneering enterprise that will certainly be long taught in the schools in history and civic classes, as an object lesson for a country that did not know what it was destroying; and more than that, we left behind our own wonderful Gush Katif that we and our comrades had built up with our own hands.
Our heart breaks whenever our memory is jogged; every hint and story about Gush Katif brings an ocean of tears to our eyes; the coming holidays and the uncertainty of our future increase our pain. From owners of estates we have become homeless, from families that give and receive guests we have become families that receive and are themselves guests; before we were happy families, and now we are sad and worried. From a single block of twenty-one unified settlements we have become bits and pieces, each community located somewhere else in Israel with no idea of what the future may hold; communities are splitting up and deciding to move to various places around the country; small children whose whole world was their home and their friends now find themselves without a protective home, without their usual friends and without their classmates, who are now attending schools in different places around the country.
“All believe that He is a God of faith, who examines and peruses what is concealed and hidden”
Today, just a few hours before the beginning of the New Year of 5766 we know that it is only through faith that we shall overcome this terrible crisis; only through faith will we be able to build new houses and communities; only through faith can we survive and heal our wounds; because only through faith can we continue to live our lives, for the sake of our children and our families.
In these moments we know that the people of Gush Katif were the true heroes. Every single inhabitant of Gush Katif deserves a medal of honor for their steadfastness and hold on the land in the various communities of Gush Katif, for their inexplicable ability to withstand all the terrorism threats, six-thousand mortar bombs and Qassam rockets, tens of thousands of shooting incidents, thousands of explosive charges that went off on the roadsides and countless intelligence warnings and road shut-downs day and night, for their ability to send their children to schools and kindergartens, for the children’s heroism in getting up every morning and going to school, for the leadership shown by our youth who worked tirelessly to encourage their parents and families so that they would not cave in.
In the last days of Gush Katif we all prayed for a miracle that would stave off the disaster. Unfortunately the miracle did not happen. I heard that Rabbi Yaakov Ariel, Chief Rabbi of the city of Ramat Gan, said a few days before the expulsion that the miracle had already happened: the miracle was that all the people of Gush Katif remained in their homes until the very last days, with their green flourishing gardens; they stayed in their towns until the very last moment and did not fear; this was the great miracle.
Today, six weeks after the most significant and terrible event that happened to the Jewish people in recent times, I have confidence in them, in my friends from my own village and from all the other communities of Gush Katif; only with people like them can we continue to raise our heads high and continue the wonderful project that our government destroyed without thinking. I am convinced that with the wonderful youth of my own town and of the other communities of Gush Katif we can make other deserts bloom, build new flourishing towns and communities. I have confidence in the children of all the towns of Gush Katif who were full partners in our worries and pains and experienced with us the expulsion and destruction and did not want to run away but insisted on staying with us and hold out a loving hand so that we could rehabilitate ourselves and recuperate from our painful injuries. I am confidence that due to the merit of our three Patriarchs and the merit of all the wonderful parents of Gush Katif who brought their children there in its first days (and who are now grandparents) to build houses in the middle of nowhere, who encouraged the families not to run away under terrorist attacks, who gave the children the strength to continue building in Gush Katif and living there until the very last moment despite the doubts and the fears, who helped families that had to cope with financial difficulties.
Because of all this, and thanks to their merit, we shall rise, live in hope and pass on to our children the heritage of their fathers.
Source: katif.net
