By: Rabbi Elie Mischel MARCH 10, 2026
On March 1, 1920, the 11th of Adar, a one-armed Jewish war hero named Joseph Trumpeldor stood with seven comrades at a tiny outpost in the Upper Galilee called Tel Hai and fought to the last breath. Arab terrorists had flooded through the lawless post-Ottoman north, vastly outnumbering the small band of defenders. Trumpeldor’s men were outgunned and surrounded. They fought anyway, like lions, and when Trumpeldor was mortally wounded, he did not curse or weep. He said: tov lamut be’ad artzenu, “it is good to die for our country.” All eight of them died that day. Not one of them broke.
The 11th of Adar became Tel Hai Day, the annual commemoration of that heroic last stand, one of the founding stories of the Zionist spirit. A sculptor named Avraham Melnikov was commissioned to give that spirit a permanent form. In 1934, he unveiled Aryeh Shoeg, the Roaring Lion, a bronze statue of a lion in full roar, standing at the Kfar Giladi-Tel Hai cemetery over the graves of the fallen defenders. Every year, youth movements made pilgrimages to stand before it. The roaring lion became one of the most recognizable symbols in the history of modern Zionism.
Now move forward exactly 106 years. On February 29, 2026, the 11th of Adar, 5786, Israel and the United States launched a surprise attack on Iran, killing the murderous Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and much of the Iranian leadership at the start of an awe inspiring campaign. The operation’s name: Aryeh Sha’ag, Operation Roaring Lion.
On the very day Israel honors the men who fought and died like lions at Tel Hai, the State of Israel launched its own lion’s roar against the mullahs of Iran. We don’t believe in coincidence.
What is the connection? What does a small, desperate last stand in the Upper Galilee in 1920 have to do with the most powerful military operation in Israel’s history? And where does the bronze lion standing over Trumpeldor’s grave fit into the story?
The Hebrew language contains no fewer than five words for lion. There is aryeh, the full-grown lion in his power. There is lavi, the young lion or lioness, not yet fully mature. There is shachal, the fierce lion, a term that emphasizes raw ferocity. There is layish, a poetic name for the lion. And there is kefir, the lion cub. The Book of Job gathers three of them in a single verse, noting that “the roar of the lion (aryeh), the voice of the fierce lion (shachal), and the teeth of the young lions (kefir) are broken” (Job 4:10).
שַׁאֲגַת אַרְיֵה וְקוֹל שָׁחַל וְשִׁנֵּי כְפִירִים נִתָּעוּ׃
The lion may roar, the cub may howl, But the teeth of the king of beasts are broken.Job 4:10
Amos uses the aryeh, the great mature lion, to describe God’s speech:
אַרְיֵה שָׁאָג מִי לֹא יִירָא אֲדֹנָי יְהוִה דִּבֶּר מִי לֹא יִנָּבֵא׃
A lion has roared, Who can but fear? My Hashem has spoken, Who can but prophesy?Amos 3:8
The lion, in all its stages, is the Bible’s image of sovereign power, fearless and unchained.
The pagan prophet Balaam was hired by Moab’s king to curse the Jewish people camped in the valley below. He could not do it. What came out of his mouth instead was a blessing he never intended:
Lo, a people that rises like a lion, Leaps up like the king of beasts, Rests not till it has feasted on prey And drunk the blood of the slain.Numbers 23:24
Two different words for lion, two different images in a single sentence. Nachmanides noted the distinction: lavi refers to the young lion, the cub. And afterward, it raises itself up like the aryeh, the full-grown lion whose roar carries across the wilderness.
The verse is not describing two different peoples. It is describing two stages of the same people. A nation that begins as a cub and grows into a lion. A people that begins with merely hoping to defend itself and ends by taking the fight to its enemies.
No one did more to transform Balaam’s words from prophecy into reality than Joseph Trumpeldor. When he arrived in the Holy Land in 1911, even the pioneers rebuilding the Jewish homeland had not yet shed the psychology of exile: two thousand years of persecution had conditioned Jews to endure violence, not answer it. The antisemitic pogroms of Europe did not only kill Jews; they trained Jews to absorb violence and wait for it to pass.
Trumpeldor rejected that template entirely. He was a warrior who earned Russia’s highest military decorations in the Russo-Japanese War. He organized Jewish self-defense groups from inside a Japanese POW camp. He was not interested in survival; he sought victory. At Tel Hai, outnumbered and surrounded, he stood his ground until he had nothing left to stand with. He showed a generation of young Jews how to stand their ground and fight.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor were close friends and partners in the Zionist struggle. Together in Alexandria in 1915, they co-founded the Zion Mule Corps, recruiting Jewish volunteers to fight the Ottomans under British command at Gallipoli. When Tel Hai fell and Trumpeldor was killed, Jabotinsky was devastated, and he channeled that grief into fury and resolve. He founded the Betar youth movement, naming it Brit Yosef Trumpeldor, the Covenant of Joseph Trumpeldor, and built the entire movement around Trumpeldor as the model for what a young Jew could and should be. Betar imbued a generation of young people with the conviction that Jews were not victims waiting for the gentiles to show mercy, but warriors who would force history’s hand. “From the banks of the Jordan to the cliffs of Tel Hai” became their marching cry. The Aryeh Shoeg statue, erected at the Tel Hai cemetery in 1934, was not a monument to death. It was a monument to a people rising.
Israel’s Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, spent most of his career as a cautious, calculating leader. For years, critics accused him of endless deliberation and last-minute hesitation, a leader who could see the threat clearly but could never quite bring himself to act decisively against it. His approach to Hamas was to periodically bomb them back into submission without ever dismantling them entirely. Critics called it “mowing the lawn.” For decades, he warned the world about Iran’s nuclear ambitions with eloquence and urgency, standing before the United Nations with diagrams, invoking Purim and the Book of Esther, drawing red lines. The world listened politely and did nothing – and neither did Netanyahu.
But everything changed after October 7. Gone was the Netanyahu of old, and in his place stood a leader who hit Israel’s enemies with devastating force and fury. The pager operation that crippled Hezbollah in September 2024, the June 2025 campaign that destroyed Iran’s air defences and much of its nuclear program. This is what Balaam saw in the valley of Moab, the lavi raising itself to become the aryeh, the young lion transforming into the full-grown lion whose roar shakes the world. Netanyahu now speaks the language of Trumpeldor and the language of the Bible. He quotes Amos. As he himself declared: “Israel has changed the face of the Middle East as promised after the events of Oct. 7 — and it has also changed itself.”
The prophet Amos asked: ‘A lion has roared, who will not fear?’ (Amos 3:8). On March 1, 2026, Israel roared. The whole world heard it. Who will not tremble?
Rabbi Elie Mischel
Rabbi Elie Mischel is the Director of Education at Israel365. Before making Aliyah in 2021, he served as the Rabbi of Congregation Suburban Torah in Livingston, NJ. He also worked for several years as a corporate attorney at Day Pitney, LLP. Rabbi Mischel received rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. Rabbi Mischel also holds a J.D. from the Cardozo School of Law and an M.A. in Modern Jewish History from the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies. He is also the editor of HaMizrachi Magazine.
Leave a Reply