April 30th, 2026, 7:12 in the morning, local time, southern Lebanon.
The Mediterranean sun already high over a fortified IDF position outside the village of Bent Jabale.
A Hezbollah fiber optic suicide drone.
No jamming signature, no radar return, controlled through a cable so thin you wouldn’t see it in daylight.
Slips into the dead space of the Iron Dome and detonates at chest height, 8 m from a Galani Brigade reconnaissance patrol on the third hour of a 6-hour rotation.
Sergeant Liam Ben Hamo is killed instantly.
He is 19 years old.
He is from Herzelia.
He is the only son of a widow named Miriam whose husband died in a car accident on the Yoknam interchange in 2024.
He is the 17th IDF soldier killed since the Lebanon front reopened on March 2nd of this year, 2 days after Thran was struck.
His name is added that morning to a list that the Israeli press now publishes weekly in column inches that get smaller every time.
This is the story you saw on the news.
This is not the story his mother told us.
Because three nights before that drone slipped under the Iron Dome at 3:41 in the morning, exactly on three consecutive nights, somebody walked into her son’s bedroom in Herzelia in a house where no son had slept for 13 months and called her by her name.
She had never spoken about it publicly.
She had been told by her sister that it was grief.
She had been told by her family doctor that it was trauma.
She had been told to take half a milligram of Rivetril at 10:00 at night and to try for everybody’s sake to sleep until she found what her son had hidden in the bottom drawer of his bedside dresser underneath a false bottom she had owned for 16 years and never noticed.
A letter dated April 23rd, 2026, 7 days before he was killed.
6 days before the third night.
Stay with us because what’s written in that letter has now been independently confirmed by two other people.
By a Messianic Jewish woman in Tel Aviv named Sarah, who is Liam’s father’s older sister and who Liam had not seen in four years.
And by the battalion chaplain of the Golani 13th, a rabbi named Ezra, who has been quietly keeping a notebook of soldier visions in southern Lebanon for the last 8 weeks.
There are now 12 names in that notebook.
Liam’s was the fourth.
The 12th was added the morning we sat down with Miriam.
This is her story in her own words from a quiet living room in Herzelia, Israel, April 30th, 2026.
My name doesn’t matter.
My family name.
I want to keep my given name.
They use my given name in the bedroom three nights in a row.
So I will let you have that one.
It is Miriam.
I’m 52.
I was born in Petakikva.
I was raised in Ramat Gan.
I have lived in Herzelia for 26 years in the same apartment on the third floor of a building on a quiet street whose name I am also keeping for myself because I cannot have anyone come to my door right now.
I am sorry for that.
I think you will understand by the end.
What matters is whose mother I am.
was am I’m still figuring out the tense.
Liam was 19.
Golani brigade, the 13th battalion, the one that holds the brown beret, the one his father served in 1983.
He had been in the army for 13 months.
He had three months left until promotion to staff sergeant.
He had a girlfriend in Givatim named Nama who he had broken up with in February and was supposed to call again at the end of his rotation.
He was my only child.
His father Ellie was killed in November of 2024 on the Yoke Neem interchange when a truck carrying scrap metal lost a load and a single piece of rebar came through the windshield.
He died at the side of the road before the ambulance got there.
He was 48 years old.
We had been married for 23 years.
I had to call Liam at his base in Bahad 1 at 6 in the morning and tell him.
He said three words and hung up.
He came home that afternoon.
He stood in our kitchen with his uniform still on and said, “Ema, I am the man of the house now.
I will not let anything happened to you.
” He was 18.
He kept that promise for 13 months.
For 13 months, it was just me in this house in Herzelia with a bedroom across the hall that I did not open.
I did not open it.
I would walk past it every morning when I went to make tea.
I would put my hand on the door sometimes, just my palm flat against the wood, but I did not turn the handle.
The door was painted the same off-white as the wall.
If I did not look directly at it, I could pretend it was just a wall, that my son was just at base, that he would be home for Shabbat.
The longer I did not open the door, the more I could believe he might come back through it on his own.
The last time I spoke to Lim was the night of April 26th.
We did a video call.
It was around 9:30 at night his time.
He had just come off a 4-day rotation near Bint Jabel.
He kept calling it, the rocks, because that’s what the older guys in Gulani call that whole hill country, the rocks.
And he was tired.
the kind of tired where his eyes wouldn’t focus on the screen properly.
He was eating something out of a foil pouch.
I think it was the IDF beef stew, the one the soldiers all complain about.
And he kept laughing at me because I was crying for no reason just from seeing his face.
And then he went very quiet.
He set the pouch down.
He looked just slightly off camera, the way he used to look when he was a child, and was thinking about whether to tell me something.
And he said, “Ema, I have been dreaming about Aba this week.
Aba is what we say in Hebrew for father.
” I said, “What kind of dreams, MK?” He said, “Three nights in a row, he’s standing at the foot of my cot in the staging area.
He doesn’t say anything.
He’s just there.
I told him it was stress.
I told him to drink water.
I told him I loved him.
I told him to pray Shama before he slept.
The way Eli used to pray with him when he was small.
He said, “Besa, I will.
Good night.
” That was the last conversation.
Four nights later, he was dead.
But by then, I already knew because three nights before the offices came to my door.
At exactly the same hour, three nights in a row, at 3:41 in the morning, somebody else came first.
The first night was April 27th, a Sunday.
I had taken half a rivetry at 10:30.
The prescription was Eli’s from after his accident, and I had been rationing them for over a year, and I went to bed.
I do not remember dreaming.
I remember waking up at 3:41 in the morning.
I know it was 3:41 because the very first thing I did on instinct was look at the digital clock on my bedside table.
Red numbers 3 4 1.
The room felt different.
There was a quality of light in it that there should not have been at 3:41 in the morning in April in Herzelia.
My bedroom faces north.
My bedroom does not get light from anywhere at 3:41 in the morning.
But there was light diffused coming from somewhere down the hall.
I thought I had left the kitchen light on.
I had not.
The kitchen, when I checked, was dark.
The light was coming from down the hall, from under the closed door of Liam’s room, the room I had not opened in 13 months.
The light was warm.
It was warmer than a light bulb.
It was warmer than a candle.
It was the kind of warm you only get from sunlight.
But it was the wrong color of sunlight.
Too gold, almost orange, almost honey.
And it was perfectly still.
It did not flicker.
A flame would flicker.
A bulb would have a tiny tremor in the line voltage and the light would buzz a little the way fluorescent does.
This light did not.
It was a stillness of light I had never seen.
I stood in the hallway for I do not know how long.
A minute, 5 minutes, maybe 10.
I was not afraid.
I want to be very clear about this because every single person who has heard this story so far has asked me the same question.
Were you afraid? And I keep saying the same thing.
I was not afraid.
I felt heavy.
The air in the hallway felt thicker than air should feel.
Like there was something on the other side of that door that was too big for the room.
Like the whole house was a glass that something larger was being poured into.
I opened the door.
He was standing in the corner between the bookshelf.
Lim had a small bookshelf on the wall opposite the bed with his tanak and his books from school and a stack of comics that I had not had the courage to throw away and the window.
He was facing the bed with his back to me.
He was tall, but not unnaturally so, perhaps a meter 85.
And he was not wearing anything I had seen anyone wear in modern Israel.
He was wearing a simple white robe, what they call a cheeton in old paintings that fell to midshin.
His feet were bare.
His hair was dark, cut short, not shoulder length the way the church paintings show.
Short like a man who had cut it himself.
I stood in the doorway.
I did not move.
I did not breathe.
I looked at his back for what felt like a very long time.
I noticed, and I’m telling you this because Sara when I told her said it was the part she needed to hear.
I noticed that he was emitting light.
The room was illuminated by him.
The corner of the room where he stood was the brightest point.
The far corners of the room were in shadow.
There were no other light sources.
He did not glow the way a bulb glows.
He was the source.
He was lighting the room the way a small fire would light a cave except there was no fire.
The light came from him.
He turned around his face.
I am not going to describe it the way the movies do because he did not look like the movies.
He looked like a man, a Mediterranean man, the kind of face you would see at a falafel stand in a fishing dock in Hifur or at the Drews villages on the Caramel.
olive skin, dark eyes, a short, well-kept beard, cheekbones that suggested he had been thin for a long time, but was not starving.
He was beautiful in the way that an old olive tree is beautiful, not because of any one feature, but because of the whole accumulation.
He was 30ome.
He was timeless both at once.
His eyes I cannot.
I’m sorry.
I have to take a breath.
His eyes knew me.
That is the only way I can put it.
His eyes did not look at me.
His eyes knew me.
The way you know a sentence you wrote a long time ago and forgot until you read it again.
The way you know your own handwriting on an envelope that someone hands you in a crowd.
That kind of knowing.
He had known me longer than I had known myself.
And on his left wrist there was a scar.
Not a wound, a scar, an old one the size of a small coin.
The skin had healed around something that had gone all the way through a long time ago.
It was smooth, slightly raised, not red, not angry, just there.
the way a scar that has lived with a person their whole life is just there.
He spoke in Hebrew, but not modern Israeli Hebrew, the Hebrew you would hear at the Knesset or in a Tel Aviv cafe.
His Hebrew was older, the cadence of it softer, the way my grandmother spoke Hebrew when I was a child.
She had grown up in a religious family invat.
There was something of that in his voice.
The vowels were rounder.
The consonants were less sharp.
It was the Hebrew of someone who had learned the language the first time it was spoken.
He said, “Miriam, my name.
” He said, “My name first before anything else.
The way you say a name when you’ve been holding it.
” Then he said, “Liam shalom.
” Jose Liam is at peace, but he is coming home a different way.
He used the present tense of the verb to come.
Jose, not yavo, not will come, is coming, as if it had already started.
as if at 3:43 in the morning on April 27th, some part of my son was already in motion toward the door of this apartment, and the body that would arrive on April 30th was just the part that was running late.
And then the room was a room again.
The light was gone.
He was gone.
The clock said 3:43.
2 minutes had passed.
I stood in that doorway until the sun came up at 5:40.
I did not sit down.
I did not call anyone.
I did not cry.
I did not pray.
I just stood because the only thing I could think over and over was that he had said it like it had already happened.
He had said is coming home.
He had not said will.
And if it was already happening, then no phone call I made and no prayer I prayed and no plane I bought a ticket on was going to change it.
I closed the door at 5:40.
I went to the kitchen.
I made tea.
I drank it standing at the counter.
I went to work.
The second night was April 28th.
I had spent the entire day pretending the first night had not happened.
I called my sister Braha and told her I was sleeping badly and asked if I could borrow her son’s electric kettle because mine was making a noise.
There was no noise.
I just wanted to hear her voice.
I went to the pharmacy on Soalov Street and got a stronger sleeping pill, Lendorman, without a prescription because the pharmacist there has known me for 20 years and just gave me one without asking.
I took it at 10:00.
I went to bed.
I opened my eyes at 3:41 in the morning.
I knew before I looked at the clock, before I sat up.
I knew my body knew.
My breath had changed.
My heart was already beating slowly and deliberately as if it had been waiting to wake up.
I walked to Liam’s room.
The door was already open this time.
I had not opened it.
The door was already open.
He was inside but closer to the bed now, sitting on the edge of it with his hand resting on the pillow.
The way you put your hand on a child’s pillow when you have just put them to sleep.
The way Eli used to put his hand on Liam’s pillow when Liam was four years old and would only fall asleep if he could feel his father’s hand near his face.
I came into the room.
I closed the door behind me.
I do not know why I closed it.
I sat on the floor at the foot of the bed.
I did not sit on the bed.
The bed was Liam’s.
I did not sit on the bed.
He looked at me.
The way someone looks at a friend they have not seen for many years.
And he said, There is a letter in the bottom drawer behind the false bottom before the others arrive.
I asked him.
My voice was a whisper.
My voice was barely there.
My voice did not feel like my voice.
I asked him, “Atami, who are you?” He did not answer.
He looked at me.
He smiled.
And I want to describe this carefully because the smile was not the smile of an answer that he was withholding.
It was the smile of someone whose answer would not fit through the question.
It was the smile a parent gives a four-year-old who has just asked, “Aba, why is the sky the smile of I love you?” and that is not the right shape of question.
He reached out his hand toward me toward where I was sitting on the floor and I closed my eyes just for a second just for the length of a blink and when I opened them he was gone.
I went straight to the dresser, the bottom drawer.
I pulled it all the way out.
I dumped everything on the floor of his bedroom.
t-shirts, three of them folded.
Lim folded his shirts the way I taught him with the sleeves tucked behind.
A pair of gym shorts from his old high school.
Two pairs of athletic socks.
The flag of Israel that they give to families when their son finishes basic training.
Folded into a triangle the way a soldier folds it.
A small Hebrew English dictionary from middle school.
A photograph of Eli at the Sea of Galilee in 1996.
I knocked on the back of the drawer.
I knocked on the bottom.
I knocked on every panel.
The wood sounded normal.
I felt around the edges with my fingernails.
I tried to lift the bottom panel up.
It did not lift.
I sat on the floor surrounded by my dead son’s clothing and his father’s photograph and I started laughing.
The kind of laugh you make when you have understood finally that you are losing your mind.
The lendorin was working.
I had taken too much.
I was hallucinating.
I was hallucinating my son in advance.
Some mothers do that.
I had read it once in a magazine.
They grieve the death before it happens and the brain breaks under the weight of waiting.
I put everything back in the drawer.
I pushed the drawer closed.
I went back to bed.
I cried for the first time that week.
I cried until 6 in the morning.
I drove to my sister’s house and slept on her couch until noon and did not tell her why.
The third night was April 29th.
I did not take the pill.
I did not get into bed.
I sat in Lim’s room on the floor with my back against the dresser with the door closed with all of his clothes still folded inside the drawer behind me from 11:00 at night until 3:41 in the morning.
I waited.
I had decided that if he came, I would ask him a different question.
Not who are you? A more specific question.
He came.
He was leaning against the window.
This time the window faces east.
The window faces a building wall.
And then beyond the building wall, a parking lot.
And then beyond the parking lot, the Mediterranean.
There is no light from the east at 3:41 in the morning in April.
But the window behind him was bright.
The light was coming from behind him from the other side of the glass as if there were a small sun balanced on the windowsill outside.
He said macharu zikri tomorrow when they arrive remember he was not alone and he was not afraid.
That was all.
He looked at me.
He nodded once slowly.
The way someone nods when they have given you everything they have to give and he was gone and the window was dark again.
And it was 3:43.
I sat on that floor until the sun came up.
The same way I had on the first night, three nights in a row.
3:41 2 minutes he was gone.
The sun came up.
I made tea.
The world began.
At 7:12 in the morning, the doorbell rang.
I knew before I walked to the door.
I knew before I saw the uniforms through the peepphole.
I knew before the chaplain, a young man, 25 26 with a name tape that read Yakov, opened his mouth.
He started, “It is with great sorrow that we are sent to inform you the formula, the Hebrew formula that every Israeli mother of a soldier has memorized in advance, the way American children practice fire drills.
I held up my hand.
I said, “Ani, I know he was not alone, was he?” Captain Yakov stopped speaking, his mouth closed.
His eyes, I will remember his eyes, went past me to the battalion commander standing one step behind him on the landing.
The commander was a major.
His name was Maur Maur Kesler.
He was 40some.
He had a scar across his right cheek from the second Lebanon war.
He looked at the chaplain.
He looked at me.
He looked at the chaplain again.
He said, “Get Ben Hamo.
” We We have a soldier from his patrol who survived the blast.
He was 3 m from your son.
He says he saw a light.
We thought it was trauma but he insists he is he is in Rambam in Hifa.
He has asked to speak to you when he is released.
That is when I sat down.
Not when they told me my son was dead.
When they told me my son was not alone.
I sat down on the floor of my own entryway with my back against the wall and I put my hand over my mouth and I did not say anything for a very long time.
The chaplain knelt beside me.
The commander stood at the door.
They did not move.
After what I think was 5 minutes, but was maybe 20, I looked up at Major Mayor Kesler and I said, “What is the soldier’s name?” He hesitated.
He looked at the chaplain.
He said, “I am not at liberty to share that yet.
He has asked for privacy.
He will be released in 3 days.
” He will tell you himself.
I want to stop here for a moment because what happens next? What I found that afternoon in the bottom drawer with 30 people in my living room is not something I would believe if somebody told it to me.
But I am not somebody telling you.
I am the woman who found it and I have it in my hand right now.
Before Miriam tells you what was in that letter, and before we hear her read the part she is shown to a journalist from Yetiote, to her synagogue’s rabbi, to the IDF Northern Command welfare office, and now finally to us, we have to ask you something.
If you are watching this, if you’ve made it this far into a 35 minute interview with a grieving Israeli mother about her son and a man she saw at 3:41 in the morning, then something in you already knows that what is happening between Israel, Iran, Lebanon, and the United States right now is not just war.
It is not just politics.
It is not just one more cycle of violence in a region the news has trained you to feel exhausted about.
It is something older, something that has been written about for 3,000 years.
And it is showing up quietly off the record in the margins of debrief reports and in the corners of dark bedrooms, in trenches in Bent Jabel, in cockpits over Thrron, in carriers off the coast of Iran, and in a house in Herzelia where the bedroom across the hall has been empty for 13 months.
We have spent the last four months collecting these accounts.
from American pilots, from Israeli reserveists, from Iranian defectors, from civilians on every side of the line.
We have over 400 of them now.
We compiled the strongest, most independently verifiable, most theologically careful of these into a free guide called Signs from Heaven.
The link is in the description below this video, pinned to the top of the comments section, and the QR code is on your screen right now.
There is no email gate.
There is no payment.
We made it free because 36 families have written us in the last 60 days saying the same sentence.
The same thing happened to me.
I just didn’t have a name for it.
We don’t want anyone to wait 6 weeks for permission to read what is already true.
Scan the code, read it tonight, and then come back.
Because what Miriam is about to read from that letter is the part that when we heard it made us stop the camera and have to leave the room for 15 minutes before we could continue.
Now back.
>> Captain Yakov and Major Kesler left around 9 in the morning.
The chaplain offered to stay with me until family arrived.
I said no.
I needed the house to be empty for the next 3 hours.
He understood.
He had done this before.
He gave me his card and he wrote his personal mobile number on the back and he said, “Whenever, Giver, whenever.
” Then they left.
By 11:00, the neighbors began to arrive.
By noon, there were 30 people in my living room.
The women from the synagogue had brought casserles in glass dishes.
My sister Braha and her husband Asher had driven down from Pares Hana.
Two of Liam’s friends from Herzelia High, Tomer and Our had come straight from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
the principal of Liam’s old school, a woman named Guit Eton, who had been Liam’s home room teacher in the 11th grade, the rabbi from our synagogue, my elderly aunt Sepora, who had taken three buses to get there from Batyam, the downstairs neighbor, Yuron, who had taught Liam to ride a bicycle when Liam was seven.
They were all doing what Israelis do when somebody dies.
They were making coffee.
They were sitting on the floor.
They were not asking me anything because they knew not to.
At 2:00 in the afternoon, I told them I needed to lie down for 15 minutes.
I went down the hall.
I went into Liam’s room.
I closed the door.
I locked it from the inside.
There is a small slidebolt on the inside of his door that he installed himself when he was 13.
I had never used it.
I used it that day.
And the sentence came back from the second night from the figure leaning against the bedu before the others arrive.
They had come the neighbors, the ants, the friends from school.
Captain Yakov and Major Kesler had come.
Tomare and Ore had come.
The casserles in glass dishes had come.
He had told me to look before they arrived and I had not.
And now they were here.
And they were going to be here for 7 days.
And after that they were going to be here in shifts for a month.
And I had used my one moment alone.
I went to the dresser, the bottom drawer.
I emptied it onto the bed this time, not the floor, the bed, because I had decided I was going to start sleeping in this room.
t-shirts, three of them, the gym shorts, the athletic socks, the folded triangle of the Israeli flag, the Hebrew English dictionary from middle school, the photograph of Eli at the Sea of Galilee in 1996.
I knocked on the back of the drawer.
It sounded normal.
I knocked on the bottom.
Hollow.
I want you to understand something.
Two nights earlier, I had knocked on the same bottom of the same drawer, and it had sounded normal, solid wood.
I would swear to that on Lim’s grave.
I will swear to it under oath if anybody asks.
The first time I knocked two nights earlier, the bottom of that drawer was solid.
I sat on the floor and laughed about it.
I went back to bed.
But that afternoon on April 30th, with 30 people sitting in my living room and the smell of casserole in my hallway and Major Ma Kesler’s words still ringing in my ears, the same drawer, the same bottom, the same wood sounded hollow.
The way a wooden box you have just been told contains something sounds different than the same wooden box did the day before.
I went to the kitchen.
I went to the toolbox under the sink.
Eli’s old toolbox, the red metal Sears one he had bought in Tel Aviv in 1998 that I had not opened since the funeral.
I took the small flathead screwdriver.
I came back to the bedroom.
I locked the door behind me again.
I wedged the tip of the screwdriver into the corner of the drawer bottom, into the seam between the panel and the side wall, a seam I had never noticed in 16 years of opening that drawer.
to get out winter sweaters and put them away every spring.
I pushed the bottom panel lifted out.
There was a false bottom.
There was a false bottom in my son’s dresser drawer in a piece of furniture I had owned since Lim was 3 years old that I had used every single week that I had inherited from my mother-in-law, and I had never noticed it.
The false bottom was a thin rectangle of birch, maybe four millimeters thick that had been cut to fit the drawer exactly and held in place with two small magnets at the front edge.
I would never have found it.
I would have lived with that drawer for another 40 years and never found it.
Underneath the false bottom was a single white envelope folded in quarters, held in place by a small piece of black electrical tape so it would not slide around.
On the outside of the envelope in my son’s handwriting in Hebrew letters slightly slanted to the right was one word, Ima.
I sat down on his bed.
I peeled the tape off.
I unfolded the envelope.
I opened it.
There were three pages inside, lined notebook paper torn from a small spiral notebook, his handwriting, his ballpoint pen, the cheap blue one he always carried in his front uniform pocket.
The date at the top of the first page written in the European format day domon.
year was 23.
04.
2026 April 23rd 7 days before he was killed.
6 days before the third night I am going to read you what it said.
Not all of it.
The middle page is for me.
There is a section about his father, about Eli, about something he remembered from when he was 5 years old.
And I am keeping that for myself.
I am sorry.
But the parts that matter, the parts that I have shown to Captain Yakov and to Major Kesler and to Sarah and to Rabbi Ezra and to a journalist from Yediote named Dorit Stein.
And now to you.
Those parts I will read.
The letter starts, “Ema, if you are reading this, somebody told you where to look.
I want you to read this slowly.
Sit down on my bed.
Take your time.
The casserles will keep.
He knew.
He knew there would be casserles.
My son knew there would be casserles in the hallway when I read this letter.
I am sorry.
Give me a moment.
The letter goes on.
Three nights ago, that would be April 20th in the early morning, I was on watch in a fighting position outside Bent Jabel.
The position was assigned to a fourman fire team, but at 03:30, I was the only one in it.
Eton had gone back to the support trench for water.
The other two were sleeping in the bunker.
The drone alarm had gone off three times in the previous hour, and we were exhausted.
I was sitting on a sandbag with my back against the rear wall, my rifle across my knees, watching the wadi.
There was a quarter moon.
The moon was setting.
The wadi was dark.
I saw motion in the corner of my position.
to my left.
I turned my head slowly the way they teach you to keep the night vision in your right eye intact.
And there was a man standing at the edge of the parapit.
Imma, I will tell you what I tell you and you can decide.
He was not in uniform.
He was wearing a long white robe in a fighting position in southern Lebanon.
White.
He was barefoot on the gravel in April at 03:30 in the morning.
He had his back to me.
I did not pick up my rifle.
I want you to know that.
I have thought about this for 3 days now.
I did not pick up my rifle.
I should have.
By the rules of engagement, I should have.
He could have been a Hezbollah scout in disguise.
He could have been a hallucination.
He could have been a hostile drone in shape shifter mode, which is not a real thing.
But at 0330, after 72 hours awake, your brain produces things that are not real things.
I did not pick up my rifle.
My hands stayed exactly where they were on the stock and the magazine well, and I just looked at him.
He turned around.
He had dark hair, short, a short beard.
His eyes, Emma, I do not know how to write what his eyes did.
I do not have words for what his eyes did.
He looked at me the way you used to look at me when I was four years old, and I had done something wrong, and you were not angry.
You were just sad that I had done it because you had hoped I would do better.
that kind of look from a stranger in a fighting position in southern Lebanon at 03:30 in the morning.
He had a scar on his left wrist.
I could see it because his sleeve had ridden up when he turned.
It was old.
It looked like the kind of scar a carpenter would have if a nail had gone all the way through.
He spoke to me in Hebrew, but not the Hebrew I speak.
Older, softer, like the Hebrew that the Kazan at the Yom Kipur service in Tel Aviv prayed when I was 12.
And I thought it was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.
He said, “Liam, my name.
” He said my name first.
He knew my name, Emma.
I had no name tape on my vest because of the new operational rules.
Name tapes have been banned since Tangiri’s hit because of the opsec briefing.
He had no way to know my name.
He said Liam as if we had known each other a long time and he had been waiting to see me again.
He said, “You are not alone.
” He said, You will go home to your mother, but not the way you think.
He said, “Alifakad, do not be afraid.
” And then he was gone.
And I was sitting on a sandbag with my back against the rear wall.
And Eton was coming up the trench with a jerry can of water and asking me if I had heard the second drone alarm because he had not.
He had been at the spring.
Emma, I am writing this in the morning after I came off watch and I am still not sure I am not having a stroke.
I am 20 years old in 3 weeks.
20 year olds do not have strokes, but I do not know what else to call this.
I went to see Rabbi Ezra this morning, the battalion chaplain.
I have never spoken to him before.
I told him what happened.
I left out the part about the scar.
I do not know why.
I just left it out, but I told him everything else.
He did not write it down in front of me.
He just listened.
After I finished, he opened a small black notebook he keeps in his pocket and he wrote my name in it.
He did not say anything else.
He shook my hand.
He told me to drink water and pray shama and call my mother on Friday.
I did not call you.
I am sorry.
I did not call you because I did not know how to say it on a video chat with a foil pouch in my hand.
I am writing it instead.
Ima I do not know if I am going to come home walking.
If I am not, I came home the way he came to me.
Tell Doda Sara she was right.
Tell Rabbi Ezra I saw.
Tell Nama I was going to call her on the 14th.
Tell Aba.
Wherever you think Abba is, tell him I dreamed about him.
He was at the foot of my court.
He did not say anything.
He was just there.
I love you, Emma.
L.
That was the letter.
Three pages.
The middle page, as I said, is for me.
I did not know who Doda Sara was.
Doda is what we say in Hebrew for aunt.
I had a sister-in-law named Sara, Eli’s older sister.
But Liam had not seen her in 4 years.
Sara had a falling out with Eli in 2021 over a religious matter.
And after Eli died, she had tried to come to the Shiva and I had asked her not to.
I am ashamed of that now.
I am still ashamed.
I did not know who Rabbi Ezra was.
Liam had never mentioned him by name.
It took me 4 days to find them.
Sarah is 61.
She lives in a small two- room apartment on Yehuda Halevi Street in central Tel Aviv on the third floor.
Walk up.
She is a translator.
She translates German philosophy texts into Hebrew for an academic press.
She lives alone.
She has two cats.
And and this is the thing that broke our family in 2021.
She is a Messianic Jew.
She believes that Yeshua of Nazareth is the Messiah.
She has believed it since she was 31 years old.
For 30 years, she has been gently, carefully, never pushing, telling Leeim about Yeshua.
For 30 years, Lee had been gently, carefully, never angry, rolling his eyes.
For 30 years, I had been changing the subject every time she came up.
I called her on May 2nd, the afternoon.
I was still wearing the same clothes I had worn at the funeral.
I read her the letter, the whole thing, including the middle page, which I am not reading to you.
She did not say anything for a long time.
She was crying.
I could hear her breathing.
I could hear one of her cats meowing in the background.
When she could speak, she said, “Miriam, he came to me last summer at the cemetery on Eli’s yard site, the first one.
I did not see you because you came in the morning and I came in the afternoon.
I waited until I was sure you would be gone.
” I was sitting at Eli’s grave.
Liam came.
He was in his Golani uniform.
He had taken a bus from his base.
He sat down next to me.
We did not speak for an hour.
Then he said, “And Miriam, I am quoting him exactly.
” He said, “Do I think you might be right about Yeshua.
I have been reading the Brit Khadesha you gave me when I was 12.
The book you snuck into my bar mitzvah present and Ema never knew.
I have been reading it under the covers in basic training.
I think you might be right.
But please, please do not tell Emma yet.
She is not ready.
Wait for me to be home from the army.
I will tell her myself.
I told him I would wait.
I have waited for 10 months.
I would have waited forever.
I am so sorry, Miriam.
I should have told you.
He asked me not to.
I should have told you anyway.
I did not say anything.
I held the phone for a long time.
I told Sarah I would call her back.
I sat in my kitchen and looked at the tea kettle and I did not move for an hour.
Then I called the brigade welfare office.
I asked for Rabbi Ezra.
They put me through after one ring.
He picked up after one ring.
He said, “Grit Ben Haml.
” “Yes, I know who Liam was.
I have his name in my notebook.
” I said, “What notebook?” He said, “Grett, I am going to tell you something.
I have not told anyone outside of three other rabbis in northern command.
I have been keeping a notebook for the past eight weeks.
I started it on March 5th after a soldier in Charlie company came to me at 3:00 in the morning and said he had seen a man in the wadi that he could not explain.
There are now 12 names in this notebook.
Soldiers who have come to me privately off the record, never in front of a commander, never in writing, and told me they have seen things in fighting positions in southern Lebanon that they cannot explain.
Three of them have used the word Yeshua.
Lim was the fourth.
He came to me on the morning of April 24th, the morning after his encounter, which would have been the early morning of the 20th.
So, 4 days after, he told me about a man at the corner of his position.
He told me, and I want you to hear this carefully, he did not tell me about the scar.
He left out the scar.
I asked him later if there had been any distinguishing physical feature.
He said no.
I think he did not want me to write it down because he was afraid I would think he was inventing details.
But the next soldier 4 days later told me the same scar without prompting.
I told Liam what I have told all of them.
I am a rabbi.
I do not affirm what I cannot explain.
I do not deny what I cannot explain.
I record.
I am recording you.
I am holding what you tell me.
He said to thank you honored rabbi.
He said, “And if the time comes, tell my mother.
” He said it like a soldier giver.
He said it like a man who already knew.
I sat on the floor of Liam’s bedroom holding the phone.
I told the rabbi about the three nights in Herzelia.
I told him about the false bottom.
I told him about the letter, including the part about the scar that Liam had withheld from him.
I told him about Sara at the cemetery on Elie’s yard site.
He was very quiet for a while.
Then he said, “Get Ben Hamo.
I want to come visit you with your permission.
I would like to bring my notebook.
I would like to show you what I have.
He came on Saturday night after Havdala.
He drove down from Kar Vadim.
He sat in my kitchen.
He drank black coffee.
He had brought the notebook.
He opened it on my kitchen table.
He showed me the 12 names.
Each one was written in his own handwriting.
Each one had a date.
Each one had three or four lines underneath fragments.
The rabbis notes from the conversation.
Sergeant David A.
Charlie Company.
March 5th.
Corporal Itamar M.
Bravo Company.
March 11th.
Sergeant Liam Ben Hamo, 13th Battalion, April 24th.
And underneath in a slightly fresher ink than the rest, written that morning the name of the soldier who had survived the blast on April 30th.
Rabbi Ezra had visited him in Rambam yesterday.
The rabbi said, “He came to see me yesterday.
I went to him.
He told me he saw a man pull him to the ground a half second before the second drone hit.
He said Lem was beside him on his knees looking up not at the drone but at the man.
He said the man had dark hair, short, a short beard.
He was wearing white.
He was barefoot.
He had a scar on his left wrist.
That is what I have.
That is everything I have.
I do not know if my son died a Christian.
I do not know if I am one now.
I do not know what I am supposed to do with what I have been given.
I am not a religious woman.
I am the widow of an engineer and the mother of a soldier.
And yesterday I went to my synagogue for the first time since Shiva and I sat in the back row and I did not say anything to anyone.
But I sat there for the full Cababalat Shabbat service and I did not leave.
I have started reading Lim’s Tanakh.
He kept it on his bedside table.
I had never opened it.
There are two ribbons in it.
One marks Yeshiu 53.
The chapter that begins miuenu.
Who has believed our report? The chapter that goes Meduka meonu.
He was wounded for our transgressions.
He was crushed for our iniquities.
And the line that I cannot read without stopping lanu and by his wounds we are healed.
The other ribbon marks toeim 91.
Verse 11 is underlined in pencil.
The pencil is light, hesitant, like Lim was not sure he was allowed to mark the page.
Next to the verse in the margin in his handwriting is a date, 23.
04, the same date as the letter.
He had marked this verse the same day he had written to me.
The verse in Hebrew is For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.
He had marked the next verse too.
Verse 12.
It says raglea on their hands they will lift you up lest you strike your foot against a stone.
I have not been able to bring myself to underline anything in that Tanakh.
I do not know if I have the right to, but I read those verses every night now before I sleep.
I read them in his room with the door open.
I am not asking you to believe me.
I am telling you what happened.
The letter is real.
The Tanakh is real.
The notebook is real.
Sara is real.
Rabbi Ezra is real.
The soldier in Rambam is real.
He is being released on Friday.
And he has agreed to talk on camera with his face blurred.
And my son was real.
And he is somewhere I cannot follow yet.
Still real.
If you are watching this and you are waiting for a sign, I want to tell you what I told my sister Braha last night when she asked me how I am sleeping.
I told her I sleep very well now.
I told her I sleep with the door of Lim’s room open.
I told her that on the night of May 1st, the night before yesterday, I dreamed that he came home walking and I was standing in the kitchen and he came in through the front door in his Golani uniform and he said, “Ema, I told you just not the way you think.
” And then I woke up and the door of his room was open and the room was empty and I was not afraid.
I said to Braha, “And this is the last thing I will say.
He already knows your name.
He knew my son’s name.
” He said his name in a fighting position in southern Lebanon before the IDF public affairs office had typed up the press release.
He came into my bedroom three nights in a row at 3:41 in the morning and he called me Miriam.
He knows your name, too.
The question is not whether he knows.
The question is whether you are willing to hear >> that sentence, the captain repeated, we thought it was trauma, but he insists is the sentence that’s traveling through Northern Command right now quietly in handwritten notes on the margins of debrief reports in WhatsApp messages between battalion chaplain in the comments of a private Facebook group of IDF reservist wives whose names we will never know.
The conditional ceasefire that started April 16th is being violated every day.
41 Lebanese civilians were killed in 24 hours on May 2nd in the village of Meadun, three valleys south of where Sergeant Liam Ben Hamo died.
President Trump is reviewing a 14-point peace proposal from Thran.
Tonight, the IRGC has set a deadline for the United States Navy to lift the blockade of Iranian ports.
None of this, none of it is going to bring Liam Ben Hamo back to his mother’s apartment in Herzelia.
But Miriam said something to us at the very end of our visit.
She had walked us to the door.
She was holding the letter still in her left hand.
And she said, “I do not know if my son died a Christian.
I know he did not die alone.
And I know that the one who appeared in his bedroom three nights in a row at 3:41 in the morning knew his name before it was in any newspaper in Israel.
If you are waiting for a sign, if you have been waiting for years or for months or for the last 45 minutes of this video, maybe he already knows yours.
Scan the QR code.
Download Signs from Heaven tonight.
It is free.
Read the section called What Miriam Founder.
It is on page 61.
Read it tonight.
And if even one line in there is the line you needed to read, send it to one person who has been waiting for the same line and doesn’t have it yet.
We will see you in the next one.
The next testimony comes out next Friday.
We’re sitting down with the surviving soldier from Liam’s patrol, the one Captain Yakov mentioned at Miriam’s door.
He’s agreed to talk on camera with his face blurred.
His name we cannot say yet, his sentence we can until then.
from everyone here, from Miriam, from her son’s memory.
