Jay* doesn’t have flashbacks, but he does think often about the day he
saw a neighborhood of fellow Israelis get gunned down around him.
“There were bullets flying over our heads,” he said. “It was intense urban warfare.”
He
and fellow soldiers were pursuing the shooters from house to house as
the wounded lay around him. A little boy got the first bullet. A little
girl, fleeing into a tent set up for the Feast of Tabernacles, took one
next and fell face forward into the tent.
Neither recovered.
“We
had to clear all the houses and all the tents set up for the feast,
just to make sure shooters weren’t hiding in them,” Jay recounted.
That
was several years ago, but now every year when he sees the tents or
builds them for his family, he remembers the day he walked through them
with his gun drawn. And he thinks of the teens who did the shooting –
17- or 18-year-olds — and he wonders one thing: “What kind of message
did they get from those who invested in their lives? What kind of
message of anger and hate in their lives made them willing to give
themselves to kill and avenge?”
And he committed to do everything he could to teach a different message — one of hope and unity in Jesus Christ.
Jay,
a Messianic Jew, had for years already spent time reaching across the
Jewish-Palestinian divide to train youth leaders in the Palestinian
territories. He also had long been committed to building relationships
with teens who live there and connecting them with Jewish youth leaders
and teens.
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