Written by Yehuda Ben Saadon. Originally published in English in Tzarich Iyun. Reprinted here with permission.

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I am a Haredi man.

My life has always been Torah, prayer, and family. In the army, I will not have my regular minyan. I will not have my fixed times for Torah study. It won’t be easy to maintain the level of kashrut and the Torah lifestyle I live by.

But when I looked around me over these past years, and saw the terrible price that people were paying for the Jewish people, that difficulty almost disappeared.

The decision to enlist began to take shape in my mind on the morning of October 7.

When I left for shul, I knew nothing of the massacre taking place just five kilometers, as the crow flies, from the city where I live. The faint, surreal rumors that reached our ears were met with total disbelief. But during davening, when a rocket fell on the street across from the synagogue and no emergency forces arrived at the scene, we began to understand that something enormous was indeed happening.

A few minutes later, a burst of heavy gunfire rang out. I began running home in a frenzy, back to my wife and my little girls.

That run, and the terrible day that followed, would not let go of me. The feeling of helplessness; the realization that while my brothers were being murdered and slaughtered, I was fleeing to hide inside my home with no way to come to their aid — struck me mercilessly. And the first thought began to flash through my mind: This cannot go on.

Over the year and a half that followed, I saw again and again the price the Jewish people was paying so that I, my wife, and my daughters could continue living here. I saw hundreds of soldiers leave their homes and never return. I saw parents bury their children. I saw young women become widows in a single moment, and small children who will grow up knowing their father mainly from pictures and stories.

I saw young men who had already set a wedding date, but never merited to stand under the chuppah. I saw men who left behind pregnant wives. And this is without even speaking of the wounded — in body and in soul — and so much more.

As the months passed, the question that had begun flickering inside me on that Simchat Torah morning became harder and harder to silence. In May 2025, I made a decision. I closed the office I had built with blood, sweat, and tears, and went to the enlistment office.

For personal reasons, the enlistment process took far longer than expected. And during that time, something happened. A few months ago, the war entered my family itself.

My father-in-law, Amram Hazan, may he live and be well, a father of nine, had been suffering for more than a decade from a severe lung disease. In recent years, his condition continued to deteriorate, until he reached the point where only a lung transplant could save his life.

And so, slowly, we watched him wither before our eyes. And there was no donor. We had already begun the complicated process of arranging a transplant in the United States.

But Hashem wanted otherwise.

On 3 Shevat 5786, January 21, 2026, Master Sergeant (res.) Asael Babad, of blessed memory, fell. Asael, a father of five, had been seriously wounded several months earlier in battle in the southern Gaza Strip, and he died of his wounds.

After his death, his family chose, with extraordinary nobility of spirit, to donate his organs and save lives.

Asael’s lungs were transplanted into my father-in-law’s body. They saved his life.

Suddenly, the price paid by the Jewish people was breathing inside my home.

In every breath my father-in-law takes today, there is life given to him by a soldier who went out to defend the Jewish people and did not return home; by a family that lost a husband and a father; by a family that, in the most terrible moment of their lives, chose to give life to my family.

It is hard for me to explain in words what that realization did to me.

Until then, I had wanted to enlist out of a sense of mutual responsibility and partnership. I felt that I could not stand aside while my brothers were paying such a heavy price. But suddenly, it became something else. It was no longer only service born of mutual responsibility and partnership. It became service born of a moral duty: personal, immediate, and of the highest order.

And then another realization landed on me — alive, tangible, unavoidable.

This story does not begin and end with my father-in-law. Not every family needs to have a lung-transplant recipient whose life was given to him by a fallen soldier in order to understand the following simple truth:

We all breathe today because of them.

For my father-in-law, it is Asael’s lungs that bring air into his body. For us, the lungs are our own. But the air inside them; the home to which we return; the children we put to sleep at night — all of these exist because people went out to fight for us, and some of them did not return.

Asael gave his life for the Jewish people. And after his death, he gave my father-in-law the ability to breathe.

Many others gave their lives so that you and I could breathe.

This coming August, I will begin my regular military service. And yes, it will be hard for me — with minyan, with kashrut, and with my Torah way of life.

So what.

I am breathing.

Originally Hebrew post available on Twitter here.