Emotional. Watch: From Sayeret Matkal to the Righteous Rabbi Eliezer Berland

Many people know Rav Aharon Berkowitz, if not by name, then at least by sight. His towering figure, crying out the Psalms into the microphone at the prayer assemblies of the 'Shuvu Banim' yeshiva, stands out among the many students. However, not many know the story behind him, the stirring story of his drawing close to our teacher, the Gaon and Tzaddik Rav Eliezer Berland shlit"a.

"I don't have any interesting stories," Rav Aharon Berkowitz begins the story of his return to faith with a modest tone. But, just as Rebbe Nachman writes about a person who did not include Hashem in the negotiations he conducted and therefore had to go to a rabbinical court to rectify it, we too come to tell the story of our return to faith in order to bring the Torah and Divine Providence into all our affairs. Especially since the Sefer Chasidim writes that a person will have to give an account for the insights he had and did not publicize to the masses.

"In November 1983, I served in the army in a unit—Sayeret Matkal—and one night we did a rooftop navigation exercise. Everyone received an aerial photograph. It is a photo of Jerusalem from above, and you walk according to it from roof to roof. During one of the navigations, the edge of a roof broke and I fell down. I don't remember from how many stories, because I fell on my knees and immediately lost consciousness. They evacuated me immediately; it was a complete miracle."

"Another time was when we were on a trip in the Ein Gedi ascent. We sat to rest on one of the cliffs, and suddenly someone shouted, 'Falling stone!' I pressed myself against the mountain and managed to see a stone the size of a large ball fly centimeters from my nose. It was simply the merit of the ancestors and the mercy of the Rav shlit"a. We are originally descended from important families of the Sanz and Belz Chassidic dynasties, because the 'Sar Shalom' was a study partner of my great-grandfather's uncle (David Wolf). And they were, as I recall, with Rebbe Naftali Horowitz of Ropshitz, who told them to go and establish the Belz Chassidut, so my ancestor was one of the founders of the Belz Chassidut."

"Another miracle was during an operation with helicopters on the Jordan-Iraq border, when there were only four of us and we merited to take what we needed. When we crossed the border, half the army was on alert. The army itself didn't know this, but they were advancing them to the area so that if necessary, they could be scrambled. Once, when Raful was Chief of Staff, we were before an operation in Damascus, Syria, and Raful started testing us with questions and answers. Finally, he said to us: 'Why do we ask so many questions? Because with us, there is no "suddenly." "Suddenly" is when a person is not prepared.' I remember his words entered my heart like an arrow—the pride—that a man thinks he controls everything and manages the world. I suddenly understood that all this 'my strength and the might of my hand' is a very great shell (kelipah)."

"Ehud Barak was then the head of Military Intelligence, sitting next to us with biscuits and cookies, arguing about nonsense. We were four guys before boarding a helicopter that was supposed to take us to Iraq—you realize that you really have no one to rely on."

"Afterward, the whole team went on a joint trip to South Africa and South America. I continued to engineering studies at the Technion and finished civil engineering and environmental engineering, a field dealing with solutions for environmental pollution. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, we opened a private company and dealt in this field. We arrived at a farm that raises chickens in quantities four times greater than anything raised in Israel. And there, it is impossible to use their waste for fertilizing the fields because of the large layer of snow in the winter. We offered them technology that would generate electricity from this waste. The company we worked with was enthusiastic about the matter, with the future profit expected to be 1.6 million dollars from the smallest factory. In the heart of the city, there was an area where the project could be built, but when we started building, a cache of flaxseed oil barrels was discovered below, and somehow the whole project went down the drain."

"Anyway, we needed a mezuzah for our home, and my wife went to purchase it from Rabbi Drupman who was in the area, and they invited us to stay for Shabbat. During the Shabbat prayer, I thought to myself that I cannot say 'Forgive us, our Father' when our behavior is the opposite, so I approached the bookcase, took a Rambam (Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, Book of Knowledge), and started to study. The Rambam writes in chapter 8 about the miracles of the Exodus from Egypt, that everything Hashem did was for a purpose; the faith of Israel was measured at the Revelation at Mount Sinai. There are special glasses used for analyzing aerial photographs because in the desert there are almost no differences in height, and on the map, it looks like a flat plate. The glasses turn everything into 3D, and you can distinguish between the heights. When I saw the words of the Rambam, I felt as if the words came out to me from the page—'Our eyes saw and not a stranger.'"

"I suddenly felt that Hashem and the Torah are like a rock; you can close your eyes and lie to yourself, but the truth does not move. We are connected to Moshe Rabbeinu in every generation, and everything is like a chain of rocks that cannot be moved. From here we understood that there is something else, until I started to meditate on the Torah day by day in our basement, like the stories about the Rav shlit"a. I stood and shouted every single word."

"From here we progressed quickly in Torah study and the fulfillment of mitzvot, but as we progressed, conflicts began to be revealed in the project until the business went down the drain. A friend came to me and suggested a new idea—to market fish from the north to New York, but in the winter, the lake froze for half a year and there wasn't even one fish. We rented an apartment in an Indian village where there were no Jews besides us. On the holiday of Chanukah, we intended to celebrate properly and take the Chanukiah outside as is customary, so we drove for hours to Detroit, where the closest Jewish community was. There was also Rabbi Groskin, who was a student of a student of the Chafetz Chaim, and he drew us very close to the bosom of Judaism. He wanted to return to Israel, but the great leaders of the generation at the time, among them Rav Shach, told him that they needed him in Detroit, and he stayed. In the Indian village, we had great spiritual elevation, and yet we descended into great poverty. Although we saw miracles around us all the time, my wife was forced to return to Israel, and I had to find work in a slaughterhouse to survive."

"We were strengthened by what is written in 'Orchot Tzaddikim,' that a person who draws close to Hashem has all his non-kosher money taken away because they are cleansing him. From there I traveled to New York, and during the Torah reading at the Mincha of Shabbat Parshat Eikev, they called me up for the third aliyah, and it is written there: 'For Hashem your God is bringing you to a good land, a land of streams of water, of fountains and depths that emerge in valleys and hills: A land of wheat and barley, and vines and figs and pomegranates, a land of olive oil and honey: A land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, you will lack nothing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and from whose hills you will mine copper' (Deuteronomy 8:7-8). I received the message and went outside. While I was continuing on my way, they called me again to complete a minyan. I entered and sat to study on the side because I had already prayed, and they called me up to the Torah again. Now the message was clear and sharp, in the sense of 'by two witnesses shall a matter be established.' Together with the blessing of the Admor of Vizhnitz in Monsey, we resolved to move to Israel."

"Another instance of Divine Providence was meeting a friend of the head of the 'Chayei Olam' yeshiva, with whose help I entered this yeshiva immediately upon my arrival in Israel. We arrived in Israel with $35 in our pocket. It was at the end of the Ten Days of Repentance, and we received a temporary apartment in Jerusalem from my parents to stay in until after Sukkot. Because of my knowledge of the Spanish language, I gave classes in 'Orchot Tzaddikim' to the new immigrants in the yeshiva."

"Following the economic situation, we moved from Jerusalem and purchased an apartment in Kiryat Sefer. There, friends from the army told me about a mutual friend of ours from Sdot Yam named Sagi, who had been in a very serious car accident and was lying in recovery in Eilat. If that wasn't enough, he went through a divorce, and from a war hero, he went through a great upheaval. I contacted him, and he told me that he had gone up north on his motorcycle to visit his children. Suddenly, at the Ra'anana junction, a truck came toward him that had run a red light and ran him over. Hashem enlightened me that Sagi had undergone a near-death experience, so I asked him what he saw there. He was surprised by the question because, until today, he was ashamed to tell it."

"'I am lying in bed and my soul leaves my body through the railing of the bed, and I walk inside a black tunnel. As I advance, I see a light at the end of the tunnel. When I reached the end of the tunnel, I saw a plaza bathed in light, and the light is very pleasant. I enter the plaza in an attempt to reach the source of the light, and suddenly I see bars from the ground to the sky that do not let me advance. I looked for an opening when suddenly I see a small gate (sha'ar) in the fence. I try to open it, and it is locked. I searched in my pocket for something that could help me break the lock. I didn't find anything, so I stood in front of the fence and thought to myself: I don't want to return to the black hole behind me, and in front, the bars prevent me from advancing. So I stand and hear a voice saying to me, "Sagi, do you know that you have reached the end of the road?" And the voice rivets me to the spot and doesn't let me move right or left. I answered him, "Yes," Sagi continues to tell me. "Now return to your body, you haven't finished your tikkun (rectification)!" the voice commands me. I fly backward through the black hole, to my body in the hospital, and within a short time, I recover against all odds.'"

"All night I thought about Sagi's story, and the verse passed through my mind: 'This is the gate (sha'ar) to Hashem, the righteous shall enter it' (Psalms 118), and I understood that I had a mission here. 'Do you know that not everyone is shown such visions with such clarity?' I asked him. 'I know that this world is nothing and that in one second a person is not here,' he answered me. 'Who is your grandfather? Surely there is merit of the ancestors here,' I argued with him. After three months we spoke again, and he asked me if I knew someone named Yonatan Eybeschutz, who was his great-grandfather—referring to Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz. And the second was the 'Tiferet Shlomo,' and he is a descendant of both."

"The book 'HaKav HaYashar' (The Straight Line) fell into my hands, and there it is written in chapter 5 about the mitzvah of 'Love your neighbor as yourself,' that the main thing is to teach your friend Torah and draw him close to Judaism. Therefore, a person must pray for his friend to return in teshuvah, and in the days of Elul, this is most effective. From Rosh Chodesh Elul, I started mentioning Sagi in prayer, and on Sukkot, I called to see if anything was progressing with him. He tells me that because his father was saved in the Six-Day War, they have a tradition in the house to fast on Yom Kippur, so he left his work at the marina in Eilat early. At a traffic light, a motorcycle stops next to him, and my friend says to me: 'Sagi, look, there is your motorcycle!' 'It can't be,' I answer him. 'The accident was in Ra'anana and my motorcycle was totaled.' We advance, and at the next traffic light, the motorcyclist signals me to open the window. The motorcyclist is completely covered, and he doesn't recognize him at all. He opens the window, and he asks him if he is Sagi. 'Yes.' 'This is the motorcycle from your accident!' and he flees. 'From Heaven, they reminded me that this is the time to do teshuvah.' I was frightened because it happened on the eve of Yom Kippur, and it was after the last prayer I had prayed for him, that they sent him a messenger right to the vehicle."

"At that same time, the mother of one of the friends with whom I studied in Kiryat Sefer passed away. I made a shidduch between him and a scribe (sofer stam) I knew so that he would write a Torah scroll for the elevation of his mother's soul. On the 7th of Elul, they both came to me and brought me the shidduch fee, because the Torah is also called 'A Woman of Valor' (Eshet Chayil), but 'travel with this to Uman.' Until then, I had no connection to Breslov and Rebbe Nachman. Although people who saw me told me that I belonged to 'Shuvu Banim,' I still had no connection there yet. When I returned, a friend took me to the Hakafot Shniyot (second round of dancing) at 'Shuvu Banim.' I saw people drawing close to the Rav shlit"a, and I approached as well. The first question I asked the Rav was—how is it possible to draw the whole family close to Breslov? The Rav answered: 'Bring them to Jerusalem.'"