Part One: The Fire at Chavat Gilad

Living in Samaria can be intense. The land is beautiful and ancient beyond telling, but it hums with a low and steady vigilance, a watchfulness that settles into your shoulders on the drive home and does not easily let go. And yet there are a handful of places out here where all of that quietly drains away, where the guard comes down, and you can sit and breathe and simply be. For Becca and me, that place was a little restaurant perched on the western edge of Chavat Gilad, and for five years “Naftali’s” was our beloved date-night getaway of choice.

You reach it the way you reach most good things in these hills, slowly and by a winding road. You climb up into the Samarian mountains and turn in at the community entrance. The lane threads you past houses where children are always out playing, past little playgrounds, curling all the way through the community. And there it sits, right on top of the world. A rustic wooden cabin with a chimney puffing out the back where the smoker is working its magic. 

In the winter, a wood fire snapped and glowed inside. In the summer they threw the whole place open to the air, and Becca and I would take a table on the western edge and watch the sun go down in reds and golds over the Samarian ridgelines, the birds settling into the brush, a fox slipping through now and then like part of the show God had arranged just for us. Naftali would come out carrying his smoked chicken, half a bird on the plate, cooked to perfection every single time, at prices so gentle they never quite made sense. He ran that place with a smile that told the whole story of a man who loved his work and loved his mountain. We went dozens of times over the years, and it never once grew old. Without our ever quite deciding it, that little cabin on the edge of the hills became one of our favorite places in all the Land.

Last week, it burned to the ground.

We have not had rain out here since May, and every blade of grass that came up green and glad through the winter was standing brittle and gold, waiting. The wind was up. And someone, we believe, struck the match. The fire tore across the parched hillside and climbed straight into the community, and for all the courage of the firefighters and the first responders, the flames were merciless. Home after home went up. Building after building. And when the smoke finally thinned, our little cabin on the western edge, the smoker, the tables, the view, all of it was gone. I texted Naftali, half hoping I had the story wrong. He wrote back within the minute. Everything is destroyed, he said. We are in shock.

And here is the part that pressed hardest on my heart. It happened during the Nine Days, in the deepening shadow of Tisha B'Av, that solemn stretch of the calendar when the whole nation is already mourning that the House of God does not stand. It is the season we grieve every fire that has ever consumed something holy in this land, the burning of the Temple itself, and now, right in the middle of it, another fire, another column of smoke over the hills of Israel’s inheritance, another family standing in the ashes of the life they had built. One of the mothers, forced from her home in the dark with her children, said the next morning that her heart was somehow full of gratitude, that her little ones were healthy and safe and that with God's help there would be a new home. 

In one of the burned houses lay a small honey jar, an heirloom of the grandmother who had survived the Holocaust. The family looked at the ruin of it and said the thing this whole land keeps saying, over and over, across every century of its sorrow: from ashes to glory. This will be a land flowing with milk and honey. Another family, who had come to that hillside more than twenty years ago as one of the very first households, refugees from the expulsion of Gush Katif, expressed gratitude for all the support they received. They were surrounded by more friends than they ever knew they had.

That is the thing you have to understand about this place. They do not stand in the rubble and despair. They stand in it and say, we are going to rebuild. We are not going anywhere. This is our land, God has given it to us, and we are here to stay. Am Yisrael Chai.

And they are building on holy and hard-won ground. Chavat Gilad carries a name soaked in sacrifice. It is named for Gilad, the eldest brother of our dear friend Rabbi Yonadav Zar of Har Bracha, a man who has taught our volunteer groups for years and continues to bless us in our work at Israel Lighthouse. Gilad was the head of security for the whole region. He was wounded in one attack, recovered, went straight back to his post, and was later murdered by terrorists on these very roads. The community rose up in his memory and still bears his name today, so that every home on that hilltop is, in its own quiet way, an answer to the men who tried to end his family. This is not stolen ground. There is no Arab village crowded up against it, no one uprooted to make room for it. It was a rocky, desolate, forgotten hillside, and Jewish hands turned it into a thriving town. That is the whole story of the return, told in miniature. Not people driving others out, but people taking wasteland and blessing it back into a garden.

Which is exactly why the enemy reaches for fire. A well-placed flame in a bone-dry land at the height of summer is one of the surest weapons they have against the one thing they cannot bear to watch, the Jewish people coming home and taking root and making the hills bloom again. And so, while the families of Chavat Gilad were fleeing their burning homes, residents reported that in the surrounding villages there were fireworks going up in celebration. It is the same spirit that has always come crawling out of the shadows whenever tragedy falls on this people. But it is too late, and it was always too late. In the very days after the fire, Chavat Gilad received official recognition from the Israeli government, formally legalized and even granted a new name, and money began pouring in from Israel and from the nations, millions raised in a matter of days to rebuild what the flames took.

The prophet Amos heard the promise long before any of us stood on these hills. "I will plant them on their land," the Lord said through him, "and they shall never again be uprooted out of the land that I have given them." The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob spoke that word thousands of years ago. He promised the return, and He promised that once the return had come, it would never be undone. Not by fire. Not by arsonists. Not by all the hatred the darkness can muster. The land is being replanted, and it will not be torn up again.

So let me leave you with something to do, and not only something to feel. Naftali and his family lost both their home and their livelihood in this fire, our beloved little restaurant among the ashes, and even now the people of Israel are rallying to put them back on their feet. If the Lord stirs you, stand with them. You can give directly to the family here:

https://givechak.co.il/mishpachatyafe

Pray for the community of Chavat Gilad. Pray for the families still sifting through the ruins. And if you can, come and see it for yourself, come and taste what is being rebuilt on the edge of these hills, and watch the words of Amos come true in front of your own eyes. The same God who turns ashes into glory is not finished with these mountains. Chavat Gilad will rise again. And one day, please God, so will the House on the mountain, a house of prayer for all nations.

Am Yisrael Chai.