Is It You, Gabriel?

Is It You, Gabriel?

A long time ago, amid the endless battles in Lebanon, I was assigned to an elite reconnaissance infantry unit. It was a time of unrelenting conflict, where each day bled into the next with the rhythm of war. My new unit, the spearhead of the Northern Brigade, was tasked with crossing the border nightly, setting ambushes in enemy territory.

I was a young officer then—an outsider with no deep roots in this legendary unit. I kept to myself, barely speaking. On the third night, we were ordered to an especially distant location, six miles past the border—a gruelling twelve-mile trek in total, burdened with thirty pounds of ammunition.

That March night was hauntingly clear. The air carried the delicate scent of early figs, and above us, the Milky Way stretched endlessly, a river of light against the abyss. In the silence of the mountains, the stars seemed infinite—so brilliant, so far removed from the madness consuming the land below.

After climbing the first mountain, exhaustion overtook us. We collapsed for a brief rest, gulping down water, reclaiming our strength. I lay back, eyes locked on the heavens, lost in their vastness. The unit leader noticed and leaned in close.

"Our enemies aren’t up there," he whispered.

"It’s the most beautiful sky I’ve ever seen," I whispered back.

He studied me for a moment. "What do you know about those stars?"

A question—on enemy land—that stirred something deep inside me. I spoke in hushed tones of the hundred billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, of our tiny place on the Orion Arm, adrift in the cosmos at unimaginable speed, 26,000 light-years from the galactic core.

"I love the stars too," he said. "My name is Gabriel. But for now, Starman, we need to move."

From that night on, Gabriel always rested beside me during our stops, listening as I whispered about the universe. A bond formed. We became inseparable. I visited him at his kibbutz in the Negev Desert; he visited me in Tel Aviv, where he proudly showed me his strange, goat-like bird. Gabriel dreamed big—I could see him leading our nation one day.

But dreams in times of war are fragile.

Ten years after that night, again in March, Gabriel was killed, near the spot we first connected, by a roadside charge.

Since then, he visits me only in my dreams. His face is always blurred, elusive, slipping away before I can grasp it. Sometimes, it’s not even him I see—only his strange goat bird, fluttering between worlds, while his body remains in another dimension.

The artwork "Is It You, Gabriel?" is my tribute to a friend who walked this earth for thirty years before rising, like the prophet Elijah, into the stars in a storm of fire.

If you see Gabriel’s figure in it, tell him I miss him.

If you don’t, let it remain as pure abstraction.