The Rising Lion

This week, as we read the passage in the Torah from which 'rising lion,' the name for the recent operation against Iran, was called, it is time to thank G-d for the miracles He showed us during this time. As we survey the commentary on this passage, we will see it reads like a newsreel of this operation.

I grew up in the shadow of the Six-Day War. The impossible yardstick of this war measured every subsequent war in Israel. It redefined the term blitzkrieg as Israel rebuffed a three-nation attack and came away with land from each of them.

All this changed when we woke up on Friday, June 13, 2025, to the news that Israel landed a devastating blow against the Iranian Nuclear plants, missile silos, and military leadership. The campaign lasted 12 days and resulted in the most asymmetrical victory in the history of warfare. Israel crippled Iran’s military and nuclear ambitions without losing a single soldier or airplane. It absorbed terrible blows from Iranian missiles, brutally and cynically dispatched against civilian areas, but that did not lessen the magnitude of the mission’s success. This will now be the new standard bearer for Israeli military success.

The name of the campaign, Rising Lion, was drawn from this week’s Torah portion. Speaking of the Jewish people, Ballam and Balak, our sworn enemies, proclaimed: “Behold [they are] a people that rises like a fearsome lion, raising itself like a lion.

Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (Rashi) explained that the Jewish people rise like fearsome lions to snatch as many mitzvot as they can get. They put on Tefillin and read the Shema. If you were anywhere in Israel during the last few weeks, you would have seen thousands of people lining up to put on tefillin to thank G-d for His mighty miracles. Even when, often especially when, their homes were demolished with hardly any, and frequently no loss of life.

Rashi comments on the second half of the passage, “It does not lie down until it consumes prey.” As soon as the Jews lie in bed and recite the bedtime Shema, G-d rises and fights their wars to protect them from the enemy. We were all asleep the night the operation began. We were lying in bed, while G-d, working through the IAF, dismantled our sworn and bristling enemy.

Abraham Ibn Ezra, twelfth-century biblical commentator from Spain, along with Rabbi Bachye ben Asher, the great fourteenth-century biblical commentator from Spain, wrote that Ballam was referencing a war in which Jews would rise like lions and decimate their enemies without losing a single soldier. If Divine Providence did not select this passage to herald this war, I don’t know who did. In this operation, not a single Jewish pilot was captured or killed, yet the enemy was utterly vanquished.

Rabbi Chaim Ibn Atar, whose Yahrtzeit is today seventeenth-century mystic and biblical commentator from Morocco, said Ballam was referring to Jews in their maiden attack. Though they would have no experience with such attacks, though this would be the first time they would try their hand at an operation of such magnitude, they would be as proficient as old hands and ferocious like hungry lions.

He also wrote that the words “He does not lie down” refer to their prowess at nighttime attacks. As night falls, and their enemy retires to bed, they rise like lions and press their attack. The initial nighttime aerial bombings included stunning eliminations of numerous high-ranking military leaders and nuclear scientists in Iran. They were caught in their beds just as Ballam had forewarned thirty-three centuries ago.

Finally, Rabbi Atar wrote that this operation would result in restoring Israel’s deterrence. Nations would fear rising against the Jews after Israel displayed its stunning capabilities on the battlefield. Indeed, countries are lining up to sign peace accords with Israel. There are reports of impending agreements with Syria, something deemed impossible just last summer, and other countries will likely follow.
A little later in the prophecy, Ballam foretold that Jews would rest in Israel without fear due to their lion-like might. He concluded with, “Those who bless you will be blessed and those who curse you will be cursed”. Ballam did not compose those words; he borrowed them from our patriarch, Isaac, who told them many years earlier. “Those who curse you will be cursed and those who bless you will be blessed”. Note that Ballam used Isaac’s words but reversed the order.

For decades now, Iran has enjoyed a free hand to fund proxy terror groups that encircle Israel in a noose while developing missiles and nuclear weapons as a backup. No one stopped them. If anything, nations signed treaties with them. It looked like dawn would smile on Iran for the rest of time while night would reign in Israel forever.

A new reality has dawned, and the tables have turned. The Jews are now free of this terrible albatross. The threats of Hamas and Hezbollah have been crushed, Syria has dropped off the map, and Iran’s missile and nuclear threats have been demolished. Iran’s wicked regime has enjoyed its blessings; it is now welcome to its curses. We have endured our curses; we are now welcome to our blessings.

My dear friends, as we chant the Torah portion this week, it is our privilege and duty to thank G-d for the magnificent miracles we experienced in our lifetimes. They are of the same caliber as biblical miracles, except that we were privileged to witness them. One good turn deserves another. As G-d turned to us in love to protect us, let’s turn to Him in love and demonstrate our profound gratitude. Let us thank Him and recommit ourselves to what He asks of us. May dawn break over a new day, and may this day last forever.

It is fascinating that some of the most splendid prose in the Hebrew Bible emerges from the mouth of Balaam, a brilliant poet, a prophet, and an archenemy of the Jewish people, who, summoned by the Moabite king to curse Israel, ends up delivering the most poignant poetry ever uttered about the history and destiny of the Jewish people.

"How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob; Your dwellings, O Israel! As winding brooks, as gardens by the river's side; like aloes which G-d has planted, like cedars beside the waters…"

"They crouch; they lie down like a lion and a lioness; who dares rouse them? Blessed is he that blesses you, and cursed is he that curses you…"

Eric Hoffer, an American social philosopher, author of the classic "The True Believer" and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, expressed Balaam's sentiments in a Los Angeles Times article decades ago.

"The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese, and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee called the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis."

"Other nations, when victorious on the battlefield, dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious, it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world."

"Other nations, when they are defeated, survive and recover, but should Israel be defeated, it would be destroyed. Had Hamas triumphed on October 7, they would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews."

"No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews, no one remonstrated with him. The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore, ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway."

"The Jews are alone in the world. Israel survives, it is solely because of Jewish efforts."

"Yet at this moment, Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened on October 7, had the Arabs and their Iranian backers won the war

Some years ago, in his Rosh Hashanah sermon at Temple Israel in Natick, Mass., best-selling author the late Rabbi Harold Kushner made this candid confession:

"This past year [of terrorism and anti-Semitism] has compelled me to come to conclusions I didn't want to come to. For all of my years as a rabbi, I have believed and I have taught that Jews were no different from other people, that Judaism was different from Christianity and Islam, but Jews had the same feelings, the same strengths, and weaknesses, the same fears, and dreams that Christians and Muslims have. I took issue with the Chabad rabbis who argued that Jewish souls are essentially different than gentile souls.

"I opposed and discouraged interfaith marriage, not because I believed that Jews were better than non-Jews but because a family with two religions was likely to raise children with no religion to avoid arguments."

"But this year has persuaded me that Jews are different. I find myself compelled to face the fact that the Jew plays the role for the world that the canary used to play for the coal miners. You've read about how the miners would take canaries with them into the mines because the canaries were extremely sensitive to dangerous gases. They responded to danger before the humans did. So if the miners saw the canaries get sick and pass out, they knew that the air was bad and they would escape as fast as they could.

"That's what we Jews do for the world. We are the world's early warning system. Where there is evil, where there is hatred, it affects us first. If there is hatred anywhere in the world, it will find us. If there is evil somewhere in the world, we will become its target. People overflowing with hatred for whatever reason, including self-hatred, make us the objects of their hatred.

"This is the role we play in the world, not by choice but imposed on us by others, to be the miner's canary, to smoke out the bigots, the haters, the people who will be a menace to their communities if someone doesn't stop them, and we identify them early on by their hatred of us.

"Hitler attacked Jews before he attacked Western civilization, and that should have alerted the world to what kind of person he was, but the world misread the signal. Muslim fanatics practiced their terrorist skills on Israelis before turning those skills on the rest of the world, but the world never understood the warning.

"Our job is to live as Jews were summoned to live, because we can't escape the fate of being a Jew. Generations before us have tried and failed. We can claim the destiny of being a Jew, because when we do that, we discover how satisfying a truly human life can be."

He said this before October 7th, and the explosion of global Jewish hatred that followed. Imagine what he would say today!

How can any rational Jew explain the fact that in our elite universities, intelligent professors and students sided with Hamas against the Jewish people? Millions were murdered in countries around the world, from Syria to Darfur, from the Congo to Ethiopia, and yet we did not hear of one demonstration. Israel is trying to avoid another Holocaust, Heaven forbid, and it is demonized?

For me, this is the great proof that the Jewish people dwell alone at the epicenter of humanity, chosen by the Creator to be ambassadors of truth, morality, love, light, and hope. So, nobody can be indifferent to Jews. Either you admire them, or you loathe them. 

But why are the Jews the canaries of the world? What exactly placed the Jewish people in this position?

The very existence of the Jewish people is suggestive of another dimension of reality. As long as the Jew is around, he is a witness that G-d is around. He is the witness, whether he knows it or not, whether he consciously testifies or refuses to testify.

"His very existence, his survival, his impact, testifies to G-d's existence. That he is here, that he is present, bears witness to G-d's presence in history. There lies the origin of the satanic idea of the Final Solution. If the witness were destroyed, G-d Himself would be dead."

Many of our beloved brothers and sisters, young and old, progressive and open-minded Jews, raised in the spirit of egalitarianism and equality, have for a long time attempted to suppress this historical truth.

Yet the virulent anti-Semitism resurrected during the past decades across the world and the irrational obsession to demonize Israel, especially in the last two years tens of thousands of rockets were sent into Israel with the attempt to murder as many Jews as possible; Hamas performed a mini-Holocaust, and yet Israel is blamed! is beginning to open many of our eyes.

If you open almost any news website in the world or watch any television news station internationally, you can hear the message articulated 3,300 years ago by a sophisticated and spiritual non-Jew: "It is a people that dwells alone, and is not reckoned among the nations."

This is not a curse. It is a privilege, and it is a reality. We are the Divine ambassadors of love, light, hope, and truth. If we wish to thrive, we must embrace this truth, acknowledged long ago by our fellow non-Jews. The world is embarrassed by Jews who are embarrassed by themselves; the world respects Jews who respect themselves. The world is ashamed of an Israel that is apologetic about its 4,000-year faith and tradition that the Holy Land is G-d's gift to the Jews.

Only when we acknowledge our "aloneness" will we become a true source of blessing to all of humanity.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky