It was May, 1967. The mood in Israel was tense. Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt was riling up the masses, talking about driving Israel into the sea. There was a fear that the surrounding Arab countries were about to attack Israel from all sides with the intent of destroying it, and there was a sense of imminent tragedy. High school students were put to work digging trenches around Israeli towns to impede foreign attack. City parks were consecrated as burial grounds. The common black humor of the time was, “Will the last person to leave Ben Gurion Airport please turn out the lights?”

When there are wars in Israel, they arouse fierce emotions. To the extent that they involve us personally, they make us ask ourselves who we are and what is important to us. Here is a “war story” from my own past.

A friend of mine, a pulpit rabbi in a large city in the United States, was approached by parents from his congregation when the 1990 Gulf War broke out. Israel was being bombed by Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The couple had a son in his “gap year” learning in a Jerusalem yeshiva, and they were concerned. They asked the rabbi if they could bring their son home. He answered, “You can do it, but realize that if you bring the boy home, he will remember for the rest of his life that you pulled him out of Jewish history.” This gave them new focus, and they let their son stay.

Before I start, a few words about Rabbi Moshe Yechiel HaLevi Tzuriel (Weiss), born in 1938, who passed away 24 Av, three days ago. He was a musmach of Rav Ruderman, zt”l, in Ner Israel, and moved to Israel as a young man. An enormous talmid chacham, the author of 49 books on halacha and Jewish philosophy, he also came into contact with the writings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook and was attracted to them. In Israel, he learned in both Mercaz HaRav and Kollel Chazon Ish. He remained a chareidi rabbi all his life, raised a chareidi family, and was revered in Bnei Brak. But he also served as a moral beacon to the Torah-true settler community, particularly during the difficult 1990s and 2000s, the years of Oslo and the Disengagement, and provided guidance when it was needed. His son, Rav Avraham, is the Chief Rabbi of Nes Tziyona, a medium-sized Israeli town.

As I wrote a month ago, Israel’s religious and rightwing parties won a major victory in Israel’s November 1 elections, winning 64 out of 120 seats in the Knesset (53 percent versus 47 percent), and this after three years of stagnation and stalemate. When one considers that 10 of the losing seats went to Arab parties, who will never be a part of the rightwing, and that four politically prominent rightwing Knesset members (Avigdor Liberman, Gideon Saar, Matan Kahane, and Dov Elkin) were part of the losing side, the rightwing victory within the Jewish population was much more pronounced than 53 percent (58 to 42 percent or, arguably, 61 percent to 39).

There is a truism in Israeli politics. It relates in particular to the past 40 years since the rightwing Likud party came into power during the great upheaval of 1977 that ended the Socialist Labor party’s hegemony: “Israeli voters vote Right and receive Left.”

As truisms go, there has been a lot of truth to this one. As the country has been growing more religious and more rightwing, its politicians have remained middle of the road. The Israeli voter always wants more religion and more fearless, principled politics than its politicians are willing to provide.

In my last article, “The Making of a Chocolate Monster” (Purim issue), I briefly described my friend, 89-year-old Zechariah Nahari, and I was asked if I was willing to write a series of articles about interesting Chevron characters, beginning with Zechariah. Tentatively I agreed, and whatever else happens, here is my article about Zechariah.