His Last Words | Aish (original) (raw)

On October 7, as a member of the community’s volunteer security team of Shlomit, a community on the border of Israel, Gaza, and Egypt, Michael Gottesman grabbed his weapon, put on his vest and helmet, and went to defend his family and his community. Shlomit wasn’t infiltrated but the neighboring community of Prigan was and they desperately needed reinforcements.

Michael and others answered the call, the only volunteer security team that defended a neighboring community, not only their own. They encountered a large group of terrorists that far outnumbered them and were much better armed.

Tragically, four of those heroic volunteers fell in that battle. Michael himself was shot. The bullet entered from his side, in the small area not protected by the ceramic vest. It pierced his lung, went through his kidney and spleen, exited his left side and shredded his upper arm. He fell to the ground bleeding profusely and understood there was significant damage to his internal organs. He calculated that he didn’t have long to live and used what he thought was his last breath to say the Shema and to declare the unity of God’s existence.

After finishing the Shema, he found that he was still conscious but thought that he now had only moments to live, enough time to think or say one more thing. What should it be?

In a conversation at the Boca Raton Shul he shared that after saying the Shema, he looked up to the Heavens and said, “Thank you God. Thank you for a beautiful life. Thank you for my amazing wife, my beautiful children, my friends and neighbors. Thank you for all that you gave me. If I go now, God, I just want to say thank you for everything.”

Instead of saying, “Why me, God? How could you do this,” while lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, Michael chose to look at his life and to say thank you.

It took two hours to evacuate Michael and two more hours for him to be picked up by the helicopter and taken to the hospital. Miraculously, he survived, though he spent many months in the hospital healing and many surgeries to reconstruct his arm. He continues to need rehab three times a week. While his body will God-willing heal, he will forever carry the emotional and spiritual injuries and trauma of that day. He lost close friends, almost lost his life, but never lost his sense of gratitude.

Michael Gottesman (Photo credit: Sivan Rahav Meir)

If he could express gratitude in that moment, can’t we express gratitude when everything is going well, when we have food to eat, a roof over our head, and air in our lungs? We don’t need to wait until we think it is the last moment of our life to say thank you for our lives, the big and small, the ordinary and extraordinary. We don’t need a raging fire to destroy everything in order to appreciate what we have.

When we wake up in the morning, the very first words a Jew says are Modeh Ani, which literally means, “Grateful am I.” Grammatically, it would be more correct to say “Ani modeh, I am grateful,” but the Sages understood that the first word on our lips cannot be “I.” Despite its clumsiness, we wake up and say instead, “Grateful,” setting the tone for our day, an attitude of gratitude.