Excerpting: “Miracles, Missiles and Mesiras Nefesh” by Rabbi Nachman Seltzer. ArtScroll Shaar Press. 2025. 328 pages. ISBN-10: 1422643204.

(Courtesy of Artscroll) Dafna lived in Kibbutz Re’im, in the vicinity of Gaza, before the war. She served as the cultural director of the kibbutz and was one of the people who organized the Nova Festival. After the attack on October 7, they found her mother and her children, Shira and Meir, murdered together. Dafna is the only survivor of her family.

Before the war, Dafna was the type of person who fought off anyone who tried to teach the people of her kibbutz about Torah and mitzvos. When Rabbi Shlomo Raanan, who runs a kiruv organization called Ayelet HaShachar, organized a basketball game between yeshiva bachurim and people from the kibbutz, to be held on October 2, just a few days before the war broke out, Dafna ordered him to cancel the game. She believed that the only reason he was arranging such a game was because he wanted to influence the members of the kibbutz to become religious.

“Cancel the game,” she wrote to him. “If you don’t, we will block the entrance to the kibbutz with our bodies!”

In the end, Rabbi Raanan canceled the game.

Five days later, the Arabs burst across the border and began rampaging through the kibbutzim, killing, pillaging, and kidnapping Jews. Suddenly Dafna, a woman who had believed in peace between Arabs and Jews for so long, found herself a prisoner in a tunnel in Gaza.

“Why are you torturing me?” she asked the terrorist who was guarding her. “For the last twenty years of my life, I have created programs where Arabs and Jews could spend time learning how to get along with one another. We are your cousins! Why are you doing this?”

The Arab guard was not impressed.

“You are not a child of Ibrahim,” he shouted at her. “You are not even a Jew!”

Dafna was shocked.

“What do you mean? Of course I am a Jew!”

“No. You are not a Jew. You are a European colonialist who came here to Palestine to steal our land!”

Dafna felt as if she had been struck with a blow to the heart and she experienced a moment of clarity the likes of which she had never felt in her life. Hearing those words issuing from the mouth of a terrorist, she suddenly saw herself for who she really was and how she had been living a life of denial for so long.

“I had always defined myself as an Israeli,” she said. “Never as a Jew. I cared much more about healing the differences between Arabs and Jews than about healing the conflicts that existed among the Jews themselves. For years, whenever I traveled to different countries, if someone would ask me if I was Jewish, I would always answer, ‘I’m not Jewish, I’m Israeli.’ Now, when that Arab accused me of being a colonialist, I understood something very important. I understood that he didn’t see me as a Jew because I didn’t see myself as a Jew.

At that moment, standing inside the tunnels of Gaza with the terrorist kidnapers, I began to shout in Arabic with all my might, “Ana Yahudiun! Ana Yahudiun! I am a Jew! I am a Jew!”

The terrorists immediately restrained Dafna and taped her mouth shut. But they couldn’t quell the stormy and emotional turnaround that was taking place within her, as Dafna suddenly understood that she had a soul and she was a Jew.

“Every Arab village has a mosque,” she would later say, “and Christians build churches where they live. In our kibbutz, we had nothing. Nothing to say that we are Jews. At that moment, I realized that if we were going to rebuild, we would need to reclaim our Jewish identity. With this realization coursing through my mind, I accepted upon myself to build a beit knesset in my kibbutz. And when we rebuild, our beit knesset will be the most beautiful structure in the kibbutz.”

In the tunnels of Gaza, where a Jewish woman lost her entire family and previous existence — she discovered another completely different one.

The existence of someone who knows what it means to be a Jew.

Reprinted from Miracles, Missiles & Mesiras Nefesh by Rabbi Nachman Seltzer with permission from the copyright holder, ArtScroll Mesorah Publications.