Episode Transcript
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Right after October 7, we spent some time talking about it here. We have not stopped talking about it. We haven't. Much of the world has and sort of has moved on to the next thing.
But there was this very famous phrase, never again related to the holocaust. Never forget.
It is incumbent upon us to ask for the peace of Jerusalem, despite what the world continues to show us and the feelings toward the jewish people and toward the idea of a state, a home for the jewish people in Israel. We have not forgotten October 7, and we are blessed today to have a friend. He's a longtime friend.
Let's see. Approaching 20 years. Probably approaching 20 years. Iki Elner is the founder, the director of the Israeli Leadership Institute. He has spent the last nearly 20 years raising up leaders in Israel, people to serve in government positions.
And the staff that he has assembled is a testimony to the respect that Iki has in Israel. Generals and incredibly, incredibly gifted and competent people who serve on the teaching staff and are raising up, have raised up, are raising up leaders that will lead Israel into what still certainly seems to be challenging times. Iki lived in Sterot. Does anyone know where Steroot is?
It's on the border with Gaza for many years, running to shelters, hearing the alarms, living in the eye of the storm, so to speak. In sterot, he has military experience, political experience. He speaks and teaches in churches and synagogues, this one being his favorite synagogue in which to teach. It is an honor and privilege to welcome my friend and respected leader, Iki Elmer.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Everybody.
Good to be here.
You can hear me without this, probably. You know, I don't need the device. Okay.
Thank you for the introduction.
Rabbi Damien, rabbits and Kelly. Thank you for inviting me here today. Jane, Richard, thank you for being my friends for so long.
I'm happy to be here. I'm on a very short trip to the United States with so many obligations. But I couldn't skip asking to be here. Not that I was just invited. I asked to be here. Why did I ask to be here? Because this congregation is so devoted to supporting Israel that even the hardships that we have there, if you have one day off that you can fly to America and you want to visit a place where you will be re energized and feel like you're not alone there, like Israel is in many ways, you want to come here, and I'm blessed for it. And thank you all for coming today and for giving me the opportunity to talk to you and tell you about Israel. I said Israel feels very lonely.
So I would like to tell you. Why?
Every day since October 7, we wake up to a nightmare. Every day, another soldier falls, another soldier is killed.
That's war. And we fight for our independence.
We fight for our cause.
And that's part of life. If you go to battle, there's always a chance as a soldier that you will die. By the way, in Israel, men and women serve in the military of them in fighting positions. And if any of you, that most of you have learned about what happened in the first days of the war, women were heroes, just like men. There. We count on our sons and daughters to go and fight.
But it's a nightmare. It's a nightmare because since October 7, and of course, even before I'm saying, Mr. Paris, they don't feed me. That's the problem, right?
[00:05:33] Speaker A: What is this you're eating, Jane?
[00:05:36] Speaker B: Giving me a star.
Someone wants to get into trouble here, the better. Not hear my voice on here. Yeah, all right. I'll do it one day.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Just put that.
Don't worry about the core.
[00:06:06] Speaker B: Okay? Better.
Thank you. Sorry for the interruption. I have a very bad tech team here.
It is a nightmare because we are fighting monsters.
And the fact that every day we wake up with anxiety to learn what happened last night. Did we lose another soldier?
Is not only saddening, which is terrible, because those are the fighters.
Not just of me, but of you as well, because those are the fighters of God.
They're not fighting in some secular state somewhere around the world.
They fight there on the ground, in the land.
They're part of what we are all taught. And you are doing this here, in this synagogue, that we serve God. We serve the cause that he put for us, the destiny, the vision, the Bible, and we have to follow it.
And every day as we wake up, we learn about another family that lost a dear one. And because we are a small nation, there's just seven and a half million Jews in Israel. There's about almost 2 million Arabs and others. But there are seven and a half Jews in Israel. Seven and a half million Jews. Everybody knows everybody. There is no way that there is a name that doesn't meet a circle of more than 200, 300,000 people because someone went with him to the military, someone went with her to the university. Someone was in kindergarten with them.
And it's tough. It's tough because every morning. I'm sorry, again, a little excited about it, because it's crazy. We will wake up every morning and you say, this shouldn't have happened.
We shouldn't lose that soul.
Who are we fighting? We're fighting monsters, and even the battle is not fair. You know why it's not fair?
Because our soldiers fight like real fighters. And what you would expect them to do in a battlefield, soldiers shoot each other, whatever. And whoever wins, wins.
The terrorists of the Hamas, they don't really fight us in what you would imagine. Imagine a fair war can happen.
They booby trap, they put bombs everywhere, and they use humans as shields against our soldiers.
And everybody's criticizing us all over the world for the way that people are herder. Well, we don't hold a gazan person in front of us when we fight. Dhammas Dahmas is doing this.
You know, what is the price of playing fair in a war? It means that more and more Israelis are killed in the war.
There is a price tag for values, and we don't want to be like them. We will never be like them.
But then what it causes is that every morning you wake up and again, who did we lose today?
And the sadness is all over the country.
We can't even rejoice the winning of the war. Whenever a battle is won and we do another step and another step to outro the Hamas, we don't have time for this.
We don't have the necessity even to do it, because all we care is how are we going to finish this? Not just in terms of taking out the terrorist organization, the monstrous terrorist organization out of Gaza, but also how many killed ones we're going to count.
I'm telling you this because when you explain Israel, and in this place, I don't need to explain Israel too much. Rabbi Demian is doing a very good job and everybody around understands Israel and your commitment to Israel. But many times when you talk about Israel, you talk with the big making.
How is our maneuver going on in Gaza? Are we making a progress? What do the other states think? And so on, which I love talking about.
But let's go back to the basis we're human beings, there's lives that we're losing.
Know, I don't know how many of you know my Facebook post or follow. Every time there's a soldier killed, I put a post and I say, thank you for sacrificing your life for us. I hope we will be worth your sacrifice because those people go to the war with no questions. You should know there is hundreds of thousands of reserve military soldiers who have gone down to the south before. Even the military called them on October 7, before, on October eigth was the official time that the military started recruiting the reserves.
They went on their own, because they understood one thing, that when you live in Israel, you understand it's either you or the enemies of God. That's all. There is no in between.
People of Israel. And also here, say hello. When you come here, you don't say hi, you say shalom, right? The only nation in the world that says hi in a word that means peace. Shalom.
We all want peace. What do we do? We pray for peace. You praised and you sang for peace, Rabbi. Right? This is what you did.
But there's no peace with our enemies. We tried. Nobody can blame us even when we tried. And we said, okay, maybe we'll give you some territory, maybe we'll give you some state or whatever.
They kept on shooting and killing us.
Why am I saying this? Because we all need to understand that the fate of Israel is a fight until the end of the days, until the right time comes and Messiah comes, and we win the war. Amen.
There's no shortcuts there. We had a war in 48, we had a war in 56. We had a war in 67. We had a war in 70, 71 that nobody even remembers. But there was a war.
There was a big war in 73, which 50 years later, we found ourselves in the same situation like we were in 73, in the Yom Kippur war.
By the way, the war started now, on October 7 on Simhatora, which is what? Two weeks after. Less than two weeks, even after Yom Kippur.
How significant is that? 50 years after Israel is required to fight for its life again?
I want to tell you again about the human side of it, the daily side of the war, not just the big slogans and so on. So Rabbi Damian told you that I lived in Zdrot. I moved to Zirod because I wanted to start the first class of the Israel leadership institute there. I wanted to train young leaders in that community, because I believe that we need to start raising leaders at the very spot where the nation is hemorhaging, where it's bleeding. They are in the need, not Tel Aviv or Haifa, where I live today. They're down in the road. So I moved down to Zirad from Tel Aviv, which all of my friends told me, it's like committing a suicide. You might as well just lay down on the road and have a bus go over you, because, no, you're bringing yourself to the border. I didn't have fear in my heart, believe me. Not even for one time. Even when a rocket hit my home and almost killed me, I didn't have fear in my heart, I did not. And I went there.
And this is the place where you work with young people who stick to their homes there. They're not living because it's tough. They don't live because it's troubled.
They believe that they are part of a big chain which is based on the religion and the history of our nation.
So I want to tell you about some of my friends that used to be my neighbors and my friends.
Three of them were just shot in the head on October 7 in front of their kids.
And then the terrorists left. Thank God they didn't kill the kids as well.
What kind of a future did those kids have?
What kind of recovery will be needed here for them to overcome seeing their parents being shot in front of them?
One of my friends, she and her husband and their kid, who's ten years old, were tied together and burned alive.
You know what that brought me to think? First of all, it brought me to tears, of course, because you can't even imagine this.
It brought me to think that my parents, the Holocaust survivors, their destiny or whatever happened to them never ended. Actually, both my parents passed away about two and a half and three and a half years ago. Okay, you know what's the first thing I told my sister? I have only one sister and that's enough.
You know what I told her when she called me and she asked if I'm at home in Haifo or maybe I'm down in the south where the war is, because she knows her brother. I might go immediately there and see what I can do. And you know what the first thing I told her? I told her, I'm almost keen to say that I'm happy that our parents are not around anymore.
They would have gone crazy that this can happen today again, this is our second holocaust.
And I hated when people use the word holocaust to other events that happen in. And I said, no, there's only r1 Holocaust. 6 million Jews burned to life. That's all. But this Israelis call today, is our second holocaust.
1400 people slaughtered by those monsters who crossed the border on Simhatora, knowing that, just like Yom Kippur, it's a holiday, there will be less soldiers in the camps around the border. Because what do we do? We let the soldiers go home once in a while for shabbat, short vacation for Simchatorah, for whatever is the holidays, especially the high holidays. We let them go home, be with their families. We keep only the minimum necessary at the camps.
There were hardly any soldiers down there.
And it's a drive. It's not as a center of Israel. It's down in the south. And any of you have seen the maps of what's called the settlements around the border of Gaza? They're far from each other. They're like small kibuts. They're like a small village. You need to drive another 15 minutes to the next one, another 25 minutes to the next one. It's not easy for the military that needs to come from hours away to come down there.
This was our second holocaust.
And if something has happened since then, is that we are united more than ever, because you understand that you fight for your life.
Now, did we get surprised that something like this happened to us?
Yes and no. Yes, because we couldn't even imagine the scale of the cruelty that is going to be there. And no, we were not surprised, because we know our neighbors. We know what they do.
To be frank, I'm in the house of God and I'm in a religious place, and I don't want to attack any other religion here.
But that's what they're taught to do.
Not by their teachers, but their imams, by their own rabbis, pastors, whatever. You would translate the word imam to kill the Jews?
Of course. The next ones are the Christians, next ones in turn. But first, finish with the Jews.
Okay.
You want to kill a jew? Okay, take a gun and shoot.
Why do you need to burn?
Why do you need to rape? Why do you need to cut organs of a person even after the person is dead? And before the person is dead?
What kind of a monstrous mind takes you all the way there?
What kind of a teaching you had at home and at your mosque that brings you to this?
Look, I came here and rabbi is singing and praising, and it's all about love and shalom, peace and gratefulness and thankfulness.
This is what we do in synagogues.
We don't pray in synagogue singing the destruction of others. We don't.
We pray for hope and for peace.
This is what we do.
This is what you do here every week, every Shabbat, every holiday.
So if you can imagine that the opposite happens in the mosques, you understand that you cannot communicate with those people.
You can't negotiate peace with them.
You can't offer any solution.
Because whenever you offer a solution and you think that things may go, may go, you're not sure, but they may go in the right direction. You found out then another crazy terrorist organization is coming up and killing you from behind.
That's what they do.
What kind of fighters of freedom as they're called by some countries and some stupid United nations officials which are being paid by your own money, by the way, and you should stop doing it.
What kind of freedom fighters stab babies in the head with a knife that long?
What?
That's freedom fighters.
Not only that, I don't consider them as human beings but the fact that the whole world is saying, okay, we're not sure that that happened at all.
Those are freedom fighters. This is because Israel is occupying the land.
And I'm like, what land?
Whose land is it?
God spoke to Abram and said, this is your land and it will be yours. And for your children, grandchildren forever.
And your children will be as big as the sand.
There will be as many as the sand in the sea.
What? I came and I said, I want to live here because it's nice, because it's comfortable. No, it's God's word. I have to live there. We have to live there.
Of course, I can move tomorrow and live in New York because they're a sanctuary city and they'll take anyone anyhow.
They'll probably take someone out of his home and give me his know. Of course I can do it.
But that's not what my life is all about. And when I say my, I speak of Israelis, not just myself. Of course we have to live there.
It's not, oh, God has given us the land of milk and honey. Of course it's milk and honey, but it's also of wars never ending. And we are there because we know that we follow his word that we have to do it because he told us go there. He told Abraham to leave his family and everyone else and travel about thousand, about a thousand miles all the way to Israel.
And believe me, there were no airports and airplanes. He was walking with the camels, okay, it wasn't easy to get there. But you do not argue with God. God's word is God's word. We are here. You know, you were praising and singing before about we breathe the breath that you gave us, right? See, I follow what you do.
We're here because God wants us to be here. God has created us. We don't argue about this, right? We don't argue where he tells us to live. And if he told us the Israelites go back and live in Israel even after 2000 years and it happened now, if you believe in witchcraft, you would call it just a miracle. But that's a miracle by God. That's God's will that we will return after 6 million jews were burned at the holocaust to death. After we were dispersed all over.
Every day is a fight in Israel, and now it's the biggest fights of all. It's the biggest because we need more and more time to finish the work. What has happened in Gaza is unbelievable. Imagine a place the size of Macon, okay? Or maybe Macon or Warner Robbins, okay, altogether. And imagine that under this territory, there is hundreds of hundreds of miles of tunnels, some of them at this level, under the ground, some of them are this level, down the ground, some of them are this level.
It's madness.
And we're chasing them because they're holding our hostages.
Now, I know that some of you are praying for the hostages, maybe all of you praying for the hostages on a daily basis. Some of you I know have their names in your homes. I've seen at Jane and Richard's home, they're taking those human beings who were taken out of their homes, not even wearing shoes, walked them all the way to Gaza, gunpointed at them.
You know what they're feeding them? With one pita bread a day. You know what's a pita bread? That small thing.
There was one interview yesterday, which I watched on the israeli tv with one of the women that were released from captivity.
She said, they gave us six small pieces of fruit in the morning. And that's all.
No protein, no bread, just a little water, that's all.
When we now find out, after we gain more and more success in the war, when we found out where they held them, it's unbelievable. In cages.
They dug cages in those tunnels. They put the bars. This is how they hold the Jews. This is how they hold the Israelis.
You can't even imagine being. After being behind those bars for 1 hour. Let's be frank. I can't imagine it.
Does anybody can. Anybody here can imagine being behind those bars? It's crazy. The whole day you do?
Why?
I served ten years in prison and 17 months in solitary.
[00:26:32] Speaker A: I can appreciate the work.
[00:26:35] Speaker B: You're talking out of some experience, right? Compared to what? No. And out of experience. But if you don't have experience, or so you can't even imagine a person stand. Now, we're not talking soldiers. They're just about maybe 15 or 20 soldiers there.
We're talking young kids. We're talking old men and women.
What did they do? Do you think they have a chair to sit on? Forget about it. Do you think they have a bed or a mattress? Forget about it.
They don't.
Some of them are not even held by the Hamas. You know why? You could see it if you go to the videos. Once the Hamas broke in and the 3000 monsters got in with their guns and whatever, and they started live streaming with their. How do you call those cameras here? GoPro. Right? They started a live stream of what they're doing, how they're slaughtering. This is how we have the videos.
Others from Gaza got in, so called innocent civilians with no guns. But, hey, they were brave because the terrorists are already killing all of us. They come in, they participate in the slaughtering. They kidnap bodies because they thought that they will make money out of it.
They took bodies.
One of the videos was released yesterday, by the way, internationally, of a worker of UNRa, the United nations relief Agency for the Palestinians.
Him and his face was identified kidnapping a body and taking it to his home in Gaza, thinking that that guy may blackmail Israel in the future to get a couple of thousands of dollars for the body.
Others kidnapped living people from living Israelis, people who are alive. They just kidnapped them. Why? Because the word was that the Hamas will give you $10,000 if you have a hostage in your home.
First of all, only stupid like guzzans would believe the Hamas. Of course, they wouldn't pay them.
But we found out that those hostages are in houses of so called innocent Gazans. Why are they called innocent Gazans? Because they're not members of the chamath.
I want to make sure that everybody understands there are no innocence in Gaza. There are no innocence. Okay? They chose that government. They chose the terrorist organization to be their government. They're collaborating with them. And even after four months of war, you can hardly see Gazans demonstrating against the Hamas. There were a few small demonstrations, 200 people out of a population of 1.5 million. 200 people here, 300 people there a few times, and that's it.
And what did they demonstrate against? The fact that Hamas is taking their relief, their humanitarian aid.
They chose them.
This is how you choose to live.
You pay the price for it. And the rage of God has no limits here, and we are just the ones who are executing it.
And there's no way that we would stop before we get the Hamas out even.
And I'm not getting into politics. I'm just saying this sentence. Even if the president of the United States will call Bibi Netanyao twice a day, you know what? Twice an hour and tell him to stop, we will not stop.
You know why we will not stop? Because it's a fight for a future. If we stop now, there is no future. And you know why there's no future? There's a biblical reason, and there is a political reason. I'll start with the political reason. The political reason is because in our tough neighborhood, if you show that you're weak, your end is coming one day.
We deter our enemies only by being strong, by showing that we're not giving up.
And if we will stop just before the city of Rafa, before we finish with the terrorism, we finish the Hamas completely.
Either we kill or they run away. Whatever. Never come back.
Then the others who are making so called peace agreements with us lately, in the last few years, will say, we don't want to do peace with Israel. Why? Because Israel is not that important, not that strong.
The United Arab Emirates, the arab agreements, the Abraham agreements, between us and them. Okay. The peace agreements is based on the fact that they calculated who's the strongest in the Middle east. It's not because they like the Jews. Suddenly, they did not stop being Muslims. Being told that the Jews and the Christians are infidel, and we got to kill them. It's because they said, why do we care? We want to make money. That's what the United Arab rights is about. It's about making money.
And if Israel is a good partner, let's do it. So, did Bahrain think about.
But Saudi Arabia, that is, thinking about a peace agreement or some normalization, will not do it. If Israel will lose the war.
Because the Middle east is like a neighborhood of hungry dogs who can smell the prey from a distance.
And if our smell is going to be a smell of a prey, they'll come. That's a political reason.
But there's also a biblical reason. And everybody who says, I don't know how the Bible is reflecting our lives today. Every time there is a new evidence for this, and here is the evidence of what we're doing. We did not finish with the Amalekites at the time.
If you remember the biblical stories of us fighting the Amalekites, God has told us at that time, you need to finish with the Amalekites until the last one.
And we did not.
And the prices have been paid every time, again and again, for this. No more.
It's the word of God. It's his command. We got to do it. We'll do it.
We understand the mistakes of the past. When you don't finish with the Amalekites, they come again.
The way we feel in Israel today is that every time there was a verdict of death against us and we rise and we fight for our lives.
This is how we feel, not just as a nation, but also personally for an Israeli.
Every day is the last day of your life that you have to fight for.
Nothing is secured.
God has his promise for us, but we need to do our part.
Every day is like the last day on the positive side of it, not on the negative.
Every year is like the last year of our lives. We have to fight for it and show that although they wanted to finish us at 48 and much before 48, much earlier than 48, people don't really know the whole history of the Jews who started, the Zionists who started returning to Israel back at the. At the 19 hundreds, at 80, 82 was the first time that a ship came to Israel with Jew Zionists who wanted to sell the land.
They were zionist. They went after the call of the Bible. This is your land. Every time, a few more hundreds came, and they were slaughtered and slaughtered, and we never finished coming again. We thought again and again, until we managed to get to 1948 and get the resolution of the United nations recognizing Israel and its right to a state. And even then, seven armies of seven different arab countries attacked us.
We survived, but we should always remember, this is like the last year of our lives, the last day of our lives. We have to be there, fight for it until Messiah comes.
When the mashiach comes, it will be different.
It will be end of the wars, there will be a big war, but it will be after it, the end of the wars.
And until then, we have to fight and fight again. Look, I've been here before, and I really love being in this place. And when I say that in this short visit that I do to the states, this and just another place in Macon where I'm going to be in a church, are the only places that I'm speaking about Israel. It's because I really wanted to be here. I really wanted to meet you today. I really wanted to say thank you for supporting and encourage you to keep on supporting Israel.
We all have troubles in life.
I'm battling a stage four cancer for more than seven years, successfully, by the way, because I know that I have to do what I have to do in this world, and my time is not ended, and I need to keep on doing.
I'm saying it because every one of us has their own battles in life and hardships and so on.
But sometimes, I wish every day, but sometimes we have to lift ourselves up to understand our relationship with God, to understand our role in history, of humankind, of the nations, of the people, and say, yes, I had hardships in work, I had hardships at home, I had this and that.
But on top of it. My source of inspiration and strength come from the fact that I see the big picture. And the big picture is Israel lives forever. Amen.
Thank you very much.
[00:37:17] Speaker A: I want to thank Iki Elner for it's hard to hear and I know there's a lot of emotion surrounding it, but for me, the most important thing is that we have an Israeli who comes to Macon and comes here and shares his heart.
And I guess it's a call. It's a call that we're not in the land, we're not in steroot, we're not faced with these things. And as I said at the beginning, never forget, he said, it's the second holocaust that's very hard for us to put any connection to, because it's not us.
But in a sense, it is us.
It is us. We are Jews and gentiles. One in Messiah. We have a calling to stand with the nation of Israel. That's fine. A lot of people stand with the nation of Israel and they love the romance of Israel. And wow, that's where Jesus is coming back. And so I'm going to support it. But Israel is the people.
Israel is land. It's dirt, it's rocks, it's beautiful buildings, it's ruins, it's history. But Israel is people.
It's Jews. It's jewish people. And when I say stand with Israel, that's what I mean.
And I'll say something very controversial.
We don't just stand for Israel and hoping so that we can just talk about them coming to be believers in Jesus.
There's a decency, there's a component of human support and love. To love your neighbor as yourself. Yes. I want every Israeli to acknowledge Yeshua is the messiah. And I'm willing to have conversations about that, but it's not going to stop me for one millisecond from standing and supporting the people of Israel.
And so that's a calling that, following the words of my friend, that I would ask us all to remain diligent in our prayers, in our asking, in our support of the land and the people of Israel. We have an amazing community here who has done just. I'm not going to ramble on here, and I don't want to be braggadocious in any way, but I read a statistic from the union of. Not a statistic, something in a newsletter from the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations. It's a synagogue oversight organization. There are I don't know how many hundred synagogues, messianic jewish synagogues under the umbrella of the UMJC. I read something that said, we're thankful to report that we gave over $200,000 in support to the land of Israel after October 7. That's a huge blessing. Okay, that's fine.
You gave $40,000.
It's not about the money. It's the heart behind it. But this community in the middle, literally, of nowhere, the middle of Georgia. Macon, Georgia. A community of people, you know, sadly, someone's heart, often by what they do with their money.
One fifth of the entire messianic jewish community that's represented in the UMJC was given from the hearts of Shalom Macon.
May our reward, may our treasures be in heaven. May the tangible reward be in the land and the people of Israel.
[00:41:26] Speaker C: Please visit our website, shalommaiken.org, to learn more about us. Join our live services access other teachings sign up for our newsletter join our private network that will connect you with our greater community from around the world, or contribute to the work of Shalom Aiken. Thank you for watching, and we look forward to connecting with.
