Saluting Aviel Wiseman: Messianic believer and IDF soldier who fell in battle in Gaza

A long contrail hangs above us, painted on heaven’s blue endless sky. Aviel, your fellow uniformed defenders of Israel have come to salute you. They, like you, are the best, freshest, strongest, most disciplined young citizens of this unlikely-to-be-resurrected nation. They. like you were, are entrusted with deadly weapons that now lay casually slung over their shoulders.

At 77, I find myself wishing I could trade my life for yours. I have lived a full collection of years. You were crushed in the flower of youth. 

Here, at the modest Poriya Ilit cemetery, perched on a knoll above the expansive Kinneret spread out below, a significant portion of Israel’s believers have gathered. We’ve come from near and far. Jews and Arabs. Locals and Internationals. We’re standing as one, in sorrow and in unutterable gratitude, to honor the Wiseman family, to weep with them.

This full military funeral for the son of a multi-generation Messianic Jewish family, is a tribute to the rebirth of Israel and the sacrifices it requires. We are one fabric with the rest of our people.

Aviel, as the fourth generation to serve in the IDF, your selfless service to Am Yisrael points to a long history. Your great-grandfather, Eliezer, escaped Poland just as the Nazis invaded in 1939. His trail led through the Soviet Army (forced to serve in order to survive) and finally conscripted as a raw immigrant into modern Israel’s first war (1948-49). Against all odds, and while the embers of Europe’s ovens still smoldered, the Almighty brought us up from our graves to fight and to live again.

I’m looking across the Kinneret to the southern Golan ridge. From this commanding site, kibbutzim along the lake shore were pummeled by Syrian artillery prior to the Six Day War. I look back, pondering the ancient intractable opposition to our existence. Before statehood, before the early waves of Aliyah. Pogroms and persecution in Russia, ejected from every adopted home, the Jewish story reaches back through the halls of time. 

But the fact that we are here, burying you, is the result of many, many more brave young men and women donating their lives over decades and centuries and millennia. The brutal fact is that without your willingness to die for all of us, there would be no re-established Israel. Yes, we believe that God has sovereignly reconstituted this nation. He has brought us back from all the lands to which we were banished. Yet without the human element of sacrifice, we would have no homeland. This was true in Moshe’s generation as well. God told him:

Now therefore, behold, the cry of the children of Israel has come to Me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come now, therefore, and I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring My people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt” Exodus 3:9,10.

The rabbi chants over you, piercing our soul with ancient songs, broken melodies, sung in the tongue of the patriarchs and the prophets. These plaintive sounds touch our collective memory. Listening, I want to cry my eyes out. But it is not enough. How can we glorify God in such deep sorrow? Yet it is what we do as the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. “Yitgadal v’yitkadash shmei rabbah. Magnified and sanctified be His great name.”

Now, your officers speak of not allowing your family to be alone. Not now; and not in the future. One after the other they declare a commitment to the Wisemans beyond this somber ceremony. Is this not what everyone desires? Genuine, lasting, with-you-in-all-circumstances love and presence?

Mordechai, your father, stands with incomprehensible poise and clarity, his voice breaking with his heart, daring to quote Shaul the Shaliach with your voice: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day, and not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing.” And then the agonized words of Job’s faith. “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken, blessed be the name of the Lord.” His words to you, in eloquent Hebrew will later be broadcast to the entire nation on the evening news.

A hawk glides gracefully, elegant on wafting winds above the grave, soaring freely, unhurried, as if you, Aviel, are released from the struggles of this life and float boldly above us, drawing our attention upward.