Rabbi Liraz Zeira, a Chabad shliach serving university campuses in Yerushalayim, is recovering after losing both legs in an explosion during military service in Syria and says that he has chosen life, faith and even laughter over despair.
“Don’t say Shema Yisrael over me — I’m staying alive!” he shouted seconds after an IDF grenade detonated beneath him, severing both of his legs. Now, in an emotional and at times darkly humorous interview on the “Hashem Echad” program in Israel with Yossi Abedo, Zeira recounts the moment his life changed, the medical drama that followed and the faith that carried him through.
Sitting in a rehabilitation room at Beit Levinstein Hospital, Zeira smiles — not just politely, but with what appears to be genuine joy. Just five months ago, he accidentally stepped on a grenade while stationed in Syria. Today, speaking openly before the cameras, he reflects on the ordeal that nearly cost him his life.
The incident occurred on the seventh of Tishrei, shortly before his battalion was scheduled to be released from duty. Zeira, who served both as a combat commander and as the battalion rabbi, set out on what seemed to be a routine final mission: inspecting the eruv at a military outpost in Syria.
“Soldiers told me there was a rumor the eruv was invalid,” he recalls with understated irony. “I said to myself: ‘Oh, finally the rabbi has a real job.’” He walked along the trenches surrounding the post, lifted his eyes to check that the eruv wire was intact — and in an instant, everything changed. “While I was looking up, I slipped and fell on my back. My legs fell downward and then I heard the ‘pak-boom.’ Later we understood it was an IDF grenade that flipped me onto my stomach.”
What followed was a desperate fight for survival. Zeira immediately realized he could not move his legs. He began crawling across the ground, his face pressed toward the earth, focused on a single goal: to stay alive. “It’s hard to look back in a situation like that, and my focus was only forward,” he says. He crawled dozens of meters until he reached a visible position and called out for help.
His fellow soldiers acted quickly. Within two minutes and twenty seconds, tourniquets were applied. But it was the radio report that seared itself into his mind: “I heard the company commander report: ‘One wounded, two legs amputated.’ That sentence, instead of breaking me, gave me tremendous clarity.”
The drama intensified inside the military Humvee during evacuation. Zeira lay bleeding, struggling to remain conscious, when a frightened soldier beside him began reciting “Shema Yisrael,” believing Zeira was in his final moments. “I opened my eyes and shouted at him: ‘No! Not Shema Yisrael!’” Zeira recounts with a smile at the absurdity of the moment.
“I think it’s the first time in history a Chabadnik tells someone not to say Shema Yisrael. But at that moment, ‘Shema Yisrael’ was, for me, a confession before death, like Rabi Akiva. I told him: ‘I’m not going anywhere! I have a mission and I’m going to carry it out with all my strength.’”
Rather than mourn what he had lost, Zeira chose a different perspective, drawing inspiration from a 1976 address by the Lubavitcher Rebbe to wounded Israeli soldiers. “The Rebbe said that someone whom G-d chooses to function without a certain limb is not ‘disabled’ but ‘exceptional,’ a person with special strengths. I told my children: ‘I was accepted into a special club.’ I don’t feel damaged — I received an upgrade. If G-d takes legs, He gives wings to influence an entire generation.”
Today, as he begins basic training on prosthetic legs and continues delivering his daily Tanya class via Zoom from the hospital, Zeira says he feels embraced by the Jewish people.
“When I woke up in Rambam Hospital, I told my wife I feel like a child who jumped from the stage into the crowd, and the crowd is holding him up in the air. The prayers and good deeds of the Jewish people are what hold me. All the checks I handed out to students about faith and trust — now it’s time to cash them.”
When he arrived at Rambam, his condition was critical. He had lost nearly half of his body’s blood volume, and during the helicopter evacuation no pulse was detected in his arms. Doctors managed to stabilize him, but then faced a harrowing medical decision. Professor Norman, one of the senior surgeons, told Zeira’s wife he did not know how to save the knees — a vital component for future mobility and rehabilitation.
The choice was stark: a shorter, safer surgery that would leave him permanently wheelchair-bound, or a risky series of 12-hour operations for each leg in hopes of preserving function. “My wife wrote to the Lubavitcher Rebbe that she was at a loss,” Zeira says emotionally. “And I told her the Rebbe would find a way to answer.”
The response, he says, came unexpectedly. A stranger named Yinon Cohen entered the intensive care unit. “At first I didn’t understand who he was, until I realized he himself had lost both legs and was walking on prosthetics,” Zeira recalls. “The first sentence he told me was: ‘Your mission not only hasn’t ended — it has just begun.’ He explained exactly which medical path to choose and resolved the dilemma in a single moment. I felt it wasn’t coincidence — it was a direct message from Heaven sent to me in the darkness.”
The chain of what Zeira calls divine providence continued before the decisive second surgery. Searching for someone to pray on his behalf at the Rebbe’s gravesite in New York, he discovered that a close friend was there at that very moment and sent him a live video of the prayer. Even the surgeons’ skepticism about the complex procedure met with Zeira’s unwavering faith. “The doctor told me ‘two out of two is hard to believe,’ I answered him: ‘Doctor, not only do miracles happen to us — we count on miracles.’ And that’s what happened.”
Yet Zeira says the most difficult moments were not the major surgeries or the explosion itself.
“Everyone thinks the hardest moments are the big surgeries or the injury,” he tells Abedo candidly. “But the truth is the breaking point comes in daily life, in the small things.”
He describes summoning enormous effort to get out of bed on his own, maneuvering his wheelchair down the hallway to the water dispenser — only to discover there were no disposable cups left. “I got all the way to the water, victory already in hand, and I had no way to drink. At that moment, it’s a harder test than a grenade exploding on you. That’s where you break.”
Another time, when he slipped from his wheelchair and fell to the floor on a Friday afternoon with no one around to hear him, he made a surprising choice. “I sat on the floor and just burst out laughing. I realized how surreal the situation was. The tests that come without a sign saying ‘test’ are the real examination of faith, and there I chose to laugh instead of cry.”
At the close of the interview, when Abedo calls him a hero of Israel, Zeira declines the title for himself.
“Anyone who thinks being a hero means I slipped on a grenade — I’m not with him. But anyone who thinks a person who is willing to give everything for the Jewish people is a hero — then okay, I agree. And Baruch Hashem, we have many heroes like that.”
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Matzav.com}
