Eight Minutes on the Land
Friends,
This week Israel moves outdoors. Sukkot begins, and for seven days this whole country eats and sings and sleeps in booths open to the sky, because the Book says: so that your generations may know. Knowing, in this land, has always been something you do with your body. You sit in the booth. You walk the ground.
Most of you cannot walk the ground this week. So I built something for you, and the truth is I built it over many months and never properly told you.
On the map of the holy places on our site there now live eight short films, each about one minute, each from one place, in my own voice. I call them One Thing, because each film gives you a single thing to carry: one thing about Capernaum. One thing about the Mount of Beatitudes. One thing about Cana, Bethsaida, Kursi, Nain, Shiloh, and the Jordan.
Eight places. Eight minutes. A pilgrimage the length of a coffee.
Read Eight Minutes on the Land in full →
In His Sukkah
Dear Watchmen,
This week the whole of Israel has moved outside. On balconies in Tel Aviv, in the courtyards of Jerusalem, and here on the Golan, families are eating and sleeping in a sukkah, a small hut with a roof of palm branches, for seven days. Because the LORD said so: Ye shall dwell in booths seven days.
Here is something the English Bible hides. The King James translates that one Hebrew word four different ways. Booths in Leviticus. Pavilion in the psalm of David: in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion. Tabernacle in Amos, where God promises to raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen. And tabernacles in Zechariah, where the nations go up from year to year to keep the feast. In Hebrew it is one word all the way through. Sukkah, סֻכָּה.
So I made you a short film of that one word, on our own land. A booth on the black basalt above the Kinneret. A lamp inside it. The stars through the roof, because by the old rule a sukkah’s roof should be thin enough to let you see them. And a long table set for guests who have not arrived yet. It is twenty-three seconds long. Watch In His Sukkah, and then pray it with me.
And He Saw
Friends,
This Shabbat, Israel finishes the Torah and begins it again in the same morning. That is Simchat Torah. The reading ends with Moses on Mount Nebo, shown the whole land he will not enter. Then the scroll is rolled all the way back, and the next words read aloud are the first words of Genesis.
I have stood on Nebo. On a clear morning the eye takes in the Dead Sea below, the ridge of Jerusalem opposite, and Hermon far to the north. What Moses was shown reached further than that, and the old teachers read it plainly: God let him see more than eyes can.
Four verses hold one word. On Pisgah, God tells Moses to see with his eyes. On Nebo, God causes him to see, the same verb, with God as the one doing it. Moses is not climbing to look. He is being shown. Then the scroll turns, and the first thing we hear after the world is made is: and God saw that it was very good. The land Moses is shown at the end of the Torah is the good God saw at its beginning.
So I built that view for you from the real ground. Every ridge and shore in the film is made from the elevation data and satellite imagery of Israel, nothing painted, so that for twenty-two seconds you can stand where he stood. Watch And He Saw.
Here is my ask for Simchat Torah. Read the last page of Deuteronomy and the first page of Genesis in one sitting. Then pray for the land that lies between them, by name: the Golan, the Galilee, Jerusalem, the Negev. Moses saw it from the far side. You can pray for it from any side, and I believe God still gives the ones who pray for this land from far away a sight that reaches further than their eyes.
A stop for the road. This month I began writing the Bible from the ground it happened on: eighty-five stops from Ur to the New Jerusalem, every passage in full, a map for every stop. I call it Walking into the Pages. The first stop is yours, free: read one stop free. If you want the rest, Part I is finished, and a founding reader gives 29 dollars once for Part I today and every Part as it is finished: walking-the-pages.netlify.app/buy.
Written in the Book
Friends,
On Monday the whole of Israel will stop. Not slow down. Stop.
If you have never seen it, it is hard to believe. On the eve of Yom Kippur the last cars leave the roads before sunset, and then nothing moves. No buses, no trucks, no radio, no television. The airport closes. The highways, six lanes wide, go silent, and by nine in the evening there are children riding bicycles down the middle of them, because for one night a year the roads belong to no one. From my hill I can hear the silence. It is a real sound. The Golan is quiet most nights, but on this night the quiet has a floor under it, and the floor is a whole nation holding its breath.
They wear white. They do not eat or drink for twenty five hours. And at sunset on the second day, when the light goes gold over the Kinneret, they stand for the last prayer, which is called Ne'ilah, the closing. The word means the locking of a gate. For twenty five hours the gates of heaven have stood open, the old teachers say, and at Ne'ilah they begin to swing shut, and the whole people leans into the gap and asks one more time to be written in the book.
I want to tell you about that book, because it is older than the fast, and it belongs to you too.
The first time it appears is in Exodus. Israel has made the golden calf. Moses goes back up the mountain, and he does not argue for himself. He says: forgive their sin, and if not, blot me out of the book you have written. It is the most reckless prayer in the Bible. A man offering his own name for his people. And God answers him with the line above: whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book. The book is real. Names are in it. Names can be removed from it. Moses knew it, and he bet his own on it.
David knew the book. "In your book they were all written, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." Psalm 139:16. Malachi knew it: "a book of remembrance was written before him for those who feared the LORD and thought on his name." Daniel saw it opened. And Jesus, sending seventy of his friends out into the villages of this land, told them not to rejoice that spirits obeyed them, but to rejoice "that your names are written in heaven." Luke 10:20. He was speaking to Jews, in the language of Yom Kippur, and every one of them knew exactly which book he meant.
So this is what a Jew is doing when he stands for Ne'ilah with his shoes off and his stomach empty. He is asking to be written. Not to be admired, not to be right. Written. Chatima tova, we say to each other in these days. A good sealing. May your name be sealed in it.
Now the goat.
On the Day of Atonement in the days of the Temple, the high priest took two goats. One was for the LORD. On the other he laid both his hands and confessed over it all the sins of Israel, and then a man led it out of the city, east, down into the wilderness, and let it go. Leviticus 16 says the goat "shall bear all their iniquities to a land not inhabited." Not filed. Not remembered against them. Carried away, out of sight, into country no one lives in.
I think about that goat every year, because I live at the edge of that kind of country. Behind my farm the Golan goes up into basalt and wind, and there are whole valleys where you can walk a day and see no one. The Bible's idea of forgiveness is not a ledger being balanced. It is a weight being carried out of town by something that does not come back. Micah saw it: "he will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea." Isaiah heard it: "though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." That is why they wear white. Not because they are clean. Because they have been told they will be.
You know where this goes for you, and I will not preach your own gospel to you. The watchmen on this wall carry a letter to the Hebrews in their hearts that says the goat went out one final time. I will only say this: the day is the same day. The book is the same book. When Israel stands for Ne'ilah on Monday evening, she is standing in front of the same gate you walk through, and she has been standing there, every year, for three thousand years, holding it open.
So here is what I am asking of the wall this week.
On Monday, sometime between sunrise and sunset, stop. Wherever you are. Find one hour, or ten minutes if that is what you have, and do nothing but pray for Israel while she fasts. Pray that the names are written. Pray for the soldiers who will keep watch on the borders that day, because someone always has to, and on Yom Kippur it is the hardest post in the world. Pray for the families of the ones who will not come home this year, and there are many. And pray that the gate, when it closes, closes with this land inside.
Then send this letter to one person who has never heard that Israel stops. Let them hear the silence.
Gmar chatima tova. May you be sealed for good.
More Than Watchmen Wait for the Morning
Friends,
Something is about to happen across Israel that most of the world never sees, because it happens while the world is asleep.
This Saturday night, after midnight, lights will come on in synagogues all over this land. The season of Selichot begins. In the last days before the new year, Israel rises in the dark to say one word to God: selicha. Forgive. Our Sephardi brothers have been rising for it all month. This week the rest of the country joins them. Grandfathers who have done it for seventy years and boys doing it for the first time, standing together in the small hours, saying the old words while the streets outside are still black.
Why before dawn? The tradition answers simply: those are the hours when the gates are most open, and the heart is least defended. A person who gets out of bed in the dark to apologize is not performing. There is no audience at four in the morning.
And the psalm that anchors those dark-morning prayers is Psalm 130. Out of the depths I call to you, O LORD. Then comes the line that belongs to this wall more than any other verse in the Book:
נַפְשִׁי לַאדֹנָי מִשֹּׁמְרִים לַבֹּקֶר שֹׁמְרִים לַבֹּקֶר
My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning. More than watchmen wait for the morning.
The psalmist says it twice, and anyone who has stood a night watch knows why. Think about how a watchman waits. He does not wonder whether morning will come. His waiting has no panic in it. It is certain. The question on a night post is only how long the dark lasts, never how it ends. That is the waiting the psalm asks of us: eyes open, post kept, sure of the sunrise.
And this week, you taught me the other half of the verse. The wall wrote back. A man of ninety, who has stood on this soil twice and wears his Israel cap to church so that strangers will ask him about this land, and they ask, and he tells them. A couple who wrote in the morning that they could not afford to come this year, and sent a gift to the farm that same day. A pilgrim who once walked these hills with me and sent a single verse with nothing added: I am a companion of all who fear You.
I built this wall to watch over Israel. I did not know it would watch over me.
So here is the watch for this week. Join Israel's pre-dawn shift, once. One morning this week, before the light comes to your window, pray Psalm 130 over this land. If rising in the dark is beyond the week you are having, then take the darkest hour you are awake and pray it then. Either way you will be saying the same words the whole house of Israel is saying, in the same season, for the same land.
The new year is less than two weeks away. The Forty Days page keeps the count with you, one verse and one prayer focus each day, and it knows what day it is when you open it.
The King Is in the Field
Friends,
It is the driest hour of the year on the Golan. The hills around my farm have gone the color of lion skin, the cisterns are low, and the fields stand stubbled and bare, waiting for rain that is still weeks away. If you walked the land with me now you would say: this is the empty season. Nothing is happening.
And yet the Hebrew calendar says the opposite. We are in the month of Elul, and tradition calls Elul the month of mercy. It is the month when the whole land turns its face toward the Days of Awe, toward the new year and the Day of Atonement. Every weekday morning in the synagogues, from now until then, the shofar sounds at the end of prayers. Not the great blasts of the holy days. A short call, a wake-up knock, thirty days early. On Shabbat it rests.
There is a teaching about this month that I have loved since I first heard it, from Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, two hundred years ago. All year, he said, the King is in His palace. To reach Him you pass gates and guards and chamberlains, and not everyone is let in. But in Elul, the King is in the field. He comes out to where the farmers are. And whoever wants to can walk up to Him there, in work clothes, with mud on his boots, and the King receives every one of them with a shining face.
I am a farmer. I live in the field the whole year round. So you can imagine what this month does to me. I drive the dirt track along the fence line in the last light, and the teaching rides with me: this month, He is here. Between the rows. In the dry grass. Closer to the mud than to the marble.
There is one more Elul custom you should know, because it belongs to you, watchmen. Through this month, in many communities twice a day, morning and evening, Israel adds one psalm to its prayers: Psalm 27. The LORD is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life, of whom shall I be afraid? And the custom does not stop at the new year. It carries on through the festivals, deep into autumn. For weeks on end, this people rehearses one sentence: do not be afraid. One day at a time.
You know why that practice matters here. The new year is coming, and with it the anniversaries this land now carries. So look at what the calendar does: before the Days of Awe, it gives us the King in the field. The nearness comes first.
So here is my ask for this week’s watch. Do not wait for the perfect hour or the polished prayer. The gates and chamberlains are for another season. Pray for Israel the Elul way: in your work clothes, in the middle of the field of your ordinary day, one short call like the weekday shofar. Pray Psalm 27 over this land, one verse a day if that is what you have. The LORD is my light and my salvation. Say it over Jerusalem. Say it over the Golan. Say it over your own house.
And so the count is easy to keep, I built a page that keeps it with you: The Forty Days, from the first of Elul to Yom Kippur, with each day’s verse and one prayer focus for the land.
The wall keeps growing. Seventy one lights now stand on it, from Buffalo to the Rockies to Germany to Vietnam. If you are new this month: welcome. You joined a wall that prays for a land where, right now, the King is in the field.
The Year Before Jubilee
To the wall of watchmen,
Look at me. Almost fifty. Forty six, nearly forty seven.
I say fifty because I run straight to the worst case. That is how I calm myself down. If I can survive the word fifty, then forty seven is a gift.
Fifty was the age of my uncles and aunts from back then. An ancient age, an age that belonged to other people, to Ben-Gurion, to founders and statesmen. Me? I am a kid. I am still exploring. Still walking this land and discovering it, the way you discover it when you come with me.
But then I opened the Torah, and I found out what fifty actually is. And I have to tell you, it changed how I count.
The law of seven. God built freedom into the calendar of this land in sevens. Every seven days, Shabbat. The land of Israel does not just have a day of rest, it has a day when even the farmer's donkey rests. A step up. Every seven years, shmita. The whole land itself rests. The fields of the Golan around my farm lie open, and whatever grows belongs to everyone and no one. Another step up. And every seven sevens of years, forty nine, the shofar sounds on the Day of Atonement, and the fiftieth year is proclaimed. The Jubilee, the yovel, the year of release. Slaves go free. Debts release. Every family returns to its own land.
And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. Leviticus 25:10. In Hebrew, liberty is dror, the same word as the free bird that nests where it pleases.
So fifty is not the age of getting old. In God's arithmetic, fifty is the age of getting free. And forty nine, where I stand now, is the last year before the trumpet.
You are not your body. Here is something I have learned traveling between countries, and between states of mind. You can stand in Greece while your thoughts are stuck in Australia. Then you are not in Greece at all. You are wherever your thoughts are. The body waits in line at the airport, face scan, hand scan, step forward sir. But that is not you. That is the tent you travel in.
Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul. Genesis 2:7.
Dust carries the breath. The breath is not the dust. So much of the frustration in this world comes from a person looking at the dust and saying, this is me, this is all I am. And the world is happy to agree. The world loves to tell a soul, stay small. Stay inside your borders. Do not move, or we take this away, we take that away. Why do so many people sink into sadness under that? Because you have taken a breath that came from God and told it, do not move. You have enslaved something vast to a country the size of a body.
The return. And then, sometimes, the true self wakes up. In Hebrew we call it teshuva. Return. Not religion. Return. Not a garment or a label, but a homecoming. The prophet does not say, become something new. He says, come back to what you are.
Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity. Hosea 14:1. Turn us back to You, O LORD, and we shall return. Renew our days as of old. Lamentations 5:21.
Notice the direction of that second verse. Turn us, and we shall return. The homecoming is something we do and something done to us, both at once, like a child taking his first steps toward hands that are already reaching.
You watchmen know where this river flows. When the carpenter's son stood up in the synagogue of Nazareth, in the hills I can nearly see from my ridge on a clear day, the scroll he was handed was Isaiah, and the words he chose to read were Jubilee words: The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound. Isaiah 61:1.
Proclaim liberty. Dror. The same word from Leviticus 25. The Jubilee was never only about land deeds and debts. It was a picture, drawn in law, of what God intends for every captive soul: release, return, and coming home to your inheritance.
The death zone. Now let me tell you why the forty ninth year is dangerous. I have loved watching Everest climbers since I was a boy. Never had the courage to climb it myself, and honestly, never the desire to be that cold. But one thing about that mountain teaches more than a hundred sermons.
Near the summit there is a stretch they call the death zone. The air is too thin to live on. And the climbers who die there, many of them die the same way. Not falling. Sitting. They are meters from the top, and the body whispers, you are so tired, look at this soft inviting snow, sit for just a second. The ones who sit do not get up. They fall asleep warm, in their finest gear, within sight of the summit.
The last stretch before the peak is where the sitting kills you. And the forty ninth year, the last flight of stairs before freedom, is exactly where a soul is most tempted to sit down in the snow.
Let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. Galatians 6:9.
Watchmen, whatever your age, some of you are in your own year forty nine right now. You have climbed a long time. You are tired in a way you cannot explain to the people around you. Hear the shofar from this hill: do not sit down in the snow. The trumpet is closer than the tiredness is telling you.
The ache is a message. My father, of blessed memory, taught me a word: mussar. It means discipline, correction, and in Hebrew it is a cousin of the word for a message. Because that is what correction is. A message, hand delivered from your soul, saying: you can do better. You spoke that way, and you could have been gentler. You went quiet, and you could have knocked.
And mussar, my father would say, often arrives wrapped in ache. You feel off, you feel low, and the ache itself is the delivery. The Book of Proverbs says it exactly, and the Hebrew word in the verse is mussar itself: My son, do not despise the discipline of the LORD, nor be weary of His correction, for whom the LORD loves He corrects, as a father the son in whom he delights. Proverbs 3:11-12.
The moment you understand where the ache came from, you stop cursing it. A message arrives from the King's own house and you thank the messenger. It is okay to be not okay for a while. Sadness that carries a message is not your enemy. It is the knock on your gate.
Who is rich. Our sages asked in Pirkei Avot, who is rich? And answered: the one who rejoices in his portion. Not in a portion he saw on a screen. Not in a life he scrolls past at midnight and promises himself for someday. His actual portion. This body, this field, this family, this day. The one who can look at all of it and say, we got this.
That joy is a fortress. Bad news slides off a truly joyful person, it cannot find anything to grab. Nehemiah said it to a weeping people standing in their ruins: Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength. Nehemiah 8:10.
Believe you can fix. Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, whose words I have carried through many seasons on this farm, said: if you believe you can break, believe you can fix. Think about it. If you had imagination enough to build the worst-case scenario, to picture everything falling apart in detail, then you have already proven the strength of your imagination. Now turn the same power around. Take the very strength with which you believe things can break, and use it to see everything whole. Picture yourself alive, present, joyful, standing in your own portion of the land.
That is not wishful thinking. That is the direction the whole Book leans: I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten. Joel 2:25. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. Psalm 147:3.
The God who counts sevens toward a Jubilee is a God who has already scheduled your release.
The Watchman Who Knocked
Friends,
For a little while I went quiet. Nothing was wrong. It was summer on the farm, and summer here is loud. The water lines, the animals, the heat, the work that does not wait. The letters waited instead.
And then a knock came from the other side of the world. One of you wrote to me. A few short lines. You have been quiet, I just wanted to make sure you and your family are ok.
I read it standing in the yard, and I stood there longer than the message deserved, because something in it was bigger than the message. For months I have stood on this hill telling you that you are watchmen. That you stand on the walls and look out over a land most of you have only walked once, or never. I thought I knew what I was saying.
This week I learned it from the other side of the wall. A watchman does not only watch the land. A watchman notices silence. When a light on the wall goes quiet, a watchman does not shrug and look away. A watchman knocks.
In Hebrew a watchman is a shomer. The same word means a keeper, one who guards what he loves. And the psalm of the travelers, Psalm 121, takes that word and gives it as a title to God Himself. Hinei lo yanum v'lo yishan, Shomer Yisrael. Behold, He who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
I always read that verse looking up. This week I heard it through a knock on my own gate. The Keeper of Israel does not sleep, and sometimes the way He shows it is through a watchman in another time zone who notices that a farmer on the Golan has gone quiet, and asks.
So hear what happened to this wall. I set out to build a wall of people who would watch over the land with me. And the wall turned around and watched over the watchman. That is not a mailing list. That is a family on a rampart.
The wall keeps growing. Sixty seven lights now, from the Rockies to Germany to Florida to Vietnam. If you are new on the wall this month, welcome. You have just read what kind of wall you joined.
The Eagles of Gamla
Friends,
Not far from my farm, deep in the Golan, there is a ridge shaped like a camel's back. We call it Gamla, from gamal, the Hebrew word for camel. It rises alone out of the canyon, steep on every side, and the wind never stops moving over it.
Two thousand years ago it was a city. When Rome came, the people of Gamla held out on that ridge to the very last, and the place has been silent ever since. Today it is a nature reserve, and if you stand at the edge and wait, you will see them: the great eagles of Gamla, riding the wind off the cliff, wings wide, never once flapping. They do not fight the wind. They lean on it, and it carries them.
There is a promise in Isaiah written for people who are tired. Not for the strong. For the ones who have run out. Even youths grow faint and weary, and young men stumble and fall. That is honest. Strength runs out. Mine does. And then the verse turns: but those who wait on the LORD shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles.
The eagle does not climb by working harder. It climbs by waiting on the wind and letting the wind do what the wings alone never could. The strength is not in the bird. It is in the air that holds it up.
You have been on this wall a long time now. Some of you keep watch while your own town is asleep. So hear the promise again, said over this ridge where the eagles still ride the wind: the ones who wait on Him do not run out. They rise.
More Dreams Than Regrets
And what if you actually did it.
What if you made every dream
you carried since childhood come true.
What if
the time you once thought it would take
simply stretched longer.
What if it is happening.
This dream of yours,
it is happening now,
only it is taking far longer than you thought,
and it looks nothing like you imagined.
That is the whole story.
If you hold more regrets than dreams,
then you are old,
because you decided
your time had run out.
And if you hold more dreams than regrets,
you are on your way
to all of them.
Like in that good song by Chemi Rodner.
Whatever it takes,
whatever it gives,
redemption.
Your redemption,
in your own way,
and only in your own way.
The regrets you cannot undo.
But you can always add a dream.
And do not give up,
not to the end.
And there is no end.
Psalm 126:1
Habakkuk 2:3
Joel 2:28
Proverbs 13:12
The Arms That Are Held Up
Friends,
Israel is fighting in the desert at Rephidim. Moses lifts his hands on the hill, and as long as his hands are up, Israel prevails. But Moses could not keep his own hands up. He was a man. His arms grew heavy.
So Aaron and Hur climbed the hill, one on each side, and held his arms steady until the sun went down. The victory in the valley was decided by the hands on the hill, and the hands on the hill were held up by friends.
You are Aaron and Hur to me. These are the hardest days this land has seen since 1948, and when my arms grow heavy, your prayers are the hands that hold them up. You are seen. Every one of you is a named stone, with your hand on the arm of this land.
Read The Arms That Are Held Up in full →
Standing at the Gates of Hades
Friends,
An hour north of my farm there is a cliff with water pouring out of it. In the days of Jesus it was covered with pagan shrines. People called the cave there the gate of Hades.
Jesus took His disciples to that exact spot. He stood them in front of the darkest place in the land and asked, Who do you say I am?
He did not ask it in a synagogue. He asked it at the enemy's front door.
I have stood at that cliff a hundred times with pilgrims. Today the trails are empty. The border is loud. But the rock is still standing. It always is.
The Four Friends of Capernaum
Friends,
Twenty minutes from my farm, on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, sit the black basalt ruins of Capernaum. This was His town.
One day the house was so crowded no one could get in. So four friends climbed onto the roof carrying a paralyzed man. They tore the roof open with their hands and lowered their friend down to Jesus.
When Jesus saw their faith. Not the faith of the sick man. The faith of the friends who carried him.
That is what you did for me and my family these past weeks. You were the four friends. I was the man on the mat.
The Hill That Blesses the Broken
Friends,
From my farm I can drive down to a green hill that slopes gently toward the Sea of Galilee. On that slope Jesus sat down and gave the greatest sermon ever spoken.
The hill is shaped like an amphitheater. The breeze carries a voice downhill across the grass. The land itself helped Him preach.
And the first thing He did was bless the people nobody blesses. The poor in spirit. The mourners. The meek. Not the winners. The wounded.
On that hill, mourning is not the end of the sentence. For they shall be comforted. That is a promise spoken over this soil. It is still in force.
What Do These Stones Mean?
Friends,
East of my farm the land falls toward the Jordan. The river where Israel crossed into the promise. The river where Jesus went under the water and the heavens opened.
When Joshua led the people across, God told him to take twelve stones from the riverbed and stack them on the bank. Not a monument for God. A question for children.
When your children ask, what do these stones mean, tell them. Tell them what the Lord did here.
Every answered prayer in your life is a stone too. The question is whether you stacked it where your children can see it.
The First Messenger
Friends,
Below my hill, on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, there is a quiet ruin called Kursi. This is where Jesus stepped out of the boat and met the man no chains could hold. And healed him with a word.
The man begged to follow. And Jesus said no. Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you.
The first messenger Jesus ever sent was not a priest. He was a local man with a hard story and a healed heart.
I live above that shore. I am a local man with a hard story too. And these letters are me obeying that same verse.
The Man on the Hill
Friends,
For weeks now I have written to you about a cliff, a roof, a hill, a river, a flame. But you have been praying alongside a voice without a face. So today I want to tell you who is writing.
My name is Amitai Elon. Everyone calls me Tai. I was born in this country in 1979. I live on a farm called Havat HaChaim, the Farm of Life, thirty three dunams on a hill in the southern Golan Heights, within sight of the Sea of Galilee.
I am a tour guide. For twelve years I have walked Christians through this land. Many of you reading this walked with me once.
I am a father. Three children. Oriya, eighteen. Eliya, sixteen. Yaheli, eleven.
And I am a son. My father was Rabbi Benny Elon. The work that outlived his titles was building a bridge between the Jewish people and the Christians of the world who love Israel. He spent his years telling the church one sentence. You are not strangers here. You belong to this story.
The ache I feel for my earthly father is the same ache, in a smaller key, that all of us feel for the Father in heaven. My father pointed me to the land. And the land keeps pointing me to the Father who never leaves.
I served at nineteen on a cold fortress in Lebanon called Beaufort, where I learned what a watchman is. He is not the strongest man. He is just the one who stays awake so others can sleep.
And in our own hardest season, the farm found a calling larger than tourism. Since October 7 we have opened our gates to the survivors of the Nova festival, and to soldiers and families across Israel who carry the trauma of this war. The same hill that welcomes pilgrims now also shelters the broken.
A guide. A farmer. A father. A son who misses his father. And I would be honored to pray for you by name too. If you ever want to tell me what to carry for you, just write back. I read every word.
Four Stones from the Wall
A watchman has two jobs. To see what is coming. And to say what the Word already said about it.
Stone One · Persia
Stone Two · The Seas
Stone Three · Lebanon
Stone Four · The Table of the Kings
The Night the Watchman Rests
Friends,
The sun is going down over the Golan right now. In a few minutes, this farm stops. The tools are set down. The phone goes quiet. The week lets go.
I want to tell you what Shabbat really is. It is not a day off. It is a surrender.
Six days we watch. We build. We carry. We hold the world up with our worry. And on the seventh day God commands us to do the bravest thing a human being can do. Open your hands. Let go. And trust that the world keeps turning without you.
Shabbat is how we say to the Almighty, You lead now. The farm is Yours. The borders are Yours. The children are Yours. We were never holding the world. We were only invited to help, six days at a time.
And here is the secret of the watchmen. Even the watchman rests on Shabbat. Because the verse above is true. The Keeper of Israel never slumbers and never sleeps. When you rest, you are not leaving your post. You are handing the watch to the One who never needed to be relieved.
That is the infinity we step into tonight. Not emptiness. Fullness. One day a week, we rest inside the truth that He is God and we are not. And everything in us that was clenched all week finally breathes.
Three Stones from the Wall
The watchman reports again from the hill. This month the news moved fast, so I will move fast too. Three stones. Three verses that saw them coming.
Stone One · The War That Will Not End and Will Not Burn
Stone Two · The Strait and the Belt
Stone Three · The Table of Abraham
Before We Pray Again, Let Me Tell You Who I Am
You have been praying for a man you have never met. For a land you may have walked only once. For a farm on a hill you have maybe only seen in a photograph.
So tonight I want to stop sending you prayers for a moment. And simply introduce myself.
My name is Amitai. Most people call me Tai. I was born in this land, and I have guided people across it for more than twelve years. Mostly Christians. Mostly pilgrims. Many of you walked these hills with me, which is the only reason you are reading this at all.
My father was Rabbi Benny Elon. Some of you knew him. A few of you have written to tell me so, and every time, it undoes me a little. He is gone now, but he is not absent. He is in every word I write, including this one.
I have three children. Oriya, who is eighteen and already braver than I am. Eliya, who is sixteen and carries his grandfather's stubbornness like an inheritance. And Yaheli, who is eleven and still believes the whole world is good. I would burn down anything to keep her believing it.
We live in Natur, in the southern Golan. On a small farm we call the Farm of Life. It was built to be a place where tired people come to breathe. Geodesic domes under a sky full of stars. A pool. A long table. Strangers who leave as family.
Then came the war. The buses stopped. The pilgrims stopped. The hill went quiet in a way a hill should never be quiet.
And in that silence I learned something I should have known all along. This land was never kept alive by the buses. It was kept alive by prayer. By you. By a wall of watchmen scattered across the world who never stopped lifting this place up, even when no plane was landing.
That is why these letters exist. Not to ask you for anything. To tell you that your prayers are landing on real soil, in front of a real man, with real children, on a real hill that the Bible still calls by name.
You are not praying into the dark. You are praying into the Golan. And the Golan is praying back.
So now you know who I am. A guide. A father. A son who misses his father. A man on a hill who is astonished, every single week, that you are still standing with him.
The Peace the World Cannot Give
Friends,
From the ridge behind my farm, I can see three countries.
Jordan to the east. Syria to the north. Lebanon beyond the next ridgeline. I can see the wire. I can see the watchtowers. And I have been standing at this fence my whole life, watching the world try to give this valley peace.
Treaties. Ceasefires. Handshakes and tables and names signed on papers. They come. The fences stay.
There is a Hebrew word I have been carrying all week. The word is שָׁלוֹם, shalom. You know it. You have used it. But the root of that word is שָׁלֵם, shalem. Wholeness. Completeness. Nothing broken, nothing missing. Not a ceasefire. A restoration.
That is what this valley has never had. That is what I am praying for.
The night before they killed Him, in a room in Jerusalem, surrounded by men who were about to scatter, He said these words: שָׁלוֹם אָנֹכִי נֹתֵן לָכֶם. My peace I give to you. And then He said the sentence I have not been able to put down:
“Not as the world gives do I give to you.”
I think about that distinction every time I stand at this fence. The world gives what it can negotiate. It gives what the strongest party can hold. It gives until the next crisis rewrites it. What He gives is different.
He does not broker peace. He does not sign it into existence. He leaves it.
“Peace I leave with you.” As if it were a gift already on the table before He walked out of the room. Already done. Already given. Not waiting for the nations to agree. Not depending on what the armies hold.
I am still praying for this valley. I pray for the wire and the watchtowers and every name still being read. I pray for mothers on every side of every fence who are just trying to get their children through the week.
But I am praying first for the peace the world cannot give, the shalem kind, where nothing is broken and nothing is missing and the fences are finally not necessary anymore.
He promised that too. It is in the book. And His promises do not expire when the news cycle turns.
We bring You the fences. The wire. The watchtowers and the names. We bring You every heart that is tired of arrangements that don't hold.
Give us Your shalom. The shalem kind, the peace that starts inside a human heart and fills it so completely that no headline from the outside can empty it.
And give it to this valley. To this land. Somehow, in a way only You know how to do.
The peace You left in that room in Jerusalem has not been taken back. We receive it again today. Amen.
What the Watchman Sees
The world has one set of eyes. The watchman has another.
When the news shows you this land, it shows you smoke. Missiles over the cities. Soldiers on the ridges. Headlines that climb your chest like a fever. That is what the camera sees. And it is real. A watchman never pretends it isn't.
But you were not posted on the wall to repeat the news. You were posted to see what the news cannot.
Listen to how the Lord describes you. “I have posted watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem. They will never be silent, day or night.” (Isaiah 62:6) That is not a hobby. That is a post. You did not wander onto this wall. You were stationed here.
There is a night in the book of Kings I cannot stop thinking about. The prophet Elisha is surrounded. An army has come in the dark, horses and chariots circling the city, and his servant wakes, looks over the wall, and his heart falls out of his chest. Alas, my master. What shall we do? And Elisha says the strangest thing. Those who are with us are more than those who are with them. The servant looks again. He sees the same enemy. So Elisha prays one short prayer. Lord, open his eyes, that he may see. And the young man looks a third time. And the mountain is full. Full of horses and chariots of fire. (2 Kings 6:15–17)
The army was always there. He just couldn't see it.
That is the watchman's point of view. Same battlefield. Different sight.
The world looks at this land and counts the missiles. The watchman looks at the same hills and remembers they are full of fire the cameras cannot film.
Because there is a Watchman over this land who never blinks. “Behold, He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” (Psalm 121:4) Some of you take the night shift on purpose, praying while your town sleeps. You do it because you know the One you keep watch with took the night shift first. He has not closed His eyes over this land for one second in four thousand years.
And the watchman remembers the deed. Babylon is gone. Rome is gone. Every empire that planted a flag on these stones is dust under a farmer's boot now. The land remained. Ezekiel saw it before it happened. A valley of bones, very many, very dry. Can these bones live? And then the rattling. And the sinew. And the breath. And a whole nation on its feet that had no business existing. In 1948 that prophecy walked off the page and put on a flag. The covenant holds. Heaven's deeds do not expire when the news cycle turns.
And do not forget where we first stood together. At a cliff in the north, where the Lord said the gates of hell would not prevail against His church. (Matthew 16:18) Hear it again. Gates do not attack. Gates defend. We are not the besieged. We are the ones standing at the gate.
So this is the watchman's point of view, and it is yours now.
You are not a spectator, refreshing the news with your stomach in a knot. You are stationed on a wall. When you pray from your kitchen, your car, your bed at midnight, you are not whispering into the dark. You are taking your watch. And the watch does not go quiet because the hour is inconvenient or the heart is tired. Day or night, He said.
So see the smoke. Name it honestly. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, the wholeness only God can give. (Psalm 122:6) And then lift your eyes higher than the smoke.
Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.