All Clear

Last week was a special one for Boaz Porat: The week of January 19, a day that would change his life forever.

Four years after the Lebanon pullout, the IDF was still constantly on high alert in the area of the security fence. Lebanese terrorists would often hide explosive devices and mines in areas where Israeli military vehicles were known to pass. In mid-January, the IDF learned that under a mantle of darkness and wintery fog, at least ten explosive devices had been planted in the area around the fence.

Boaz and others from his engineering unit were called up to sweep the area. While his comrades packed 60-lb. backpacks — for who knew if this would be an overnight mission or if they’d be stuck in the freezing mud for a week? — Boaz took his standard mission bag that contained his tefillin, a change of underclothes, a Tefillas Haderech, and his trademark thermos of hot tea.

Still, he had an ominous feeling when he called his wife. “I’ll be home by the evening, b’ezras Hashem,” he told her. “They’re taking the phone from me now because I’m entering a sensitive location.”

Boaz was joined by a young soldier named Ian Roshansky, a fresh recruit in the engineering unit for special operations. The two of them climbed into a huge backhoe, a digging bucket mounted onto a tractor, called a dachpor in Hebrew. Other soldiers cut the fence near the Yakinton Outpost, and Boaz and his partner crawled over the border. With hopes that the unwritten agreement not to fire at IDF vehicles would be upheld, they began clearing the explosives.

The technique that Boaz used is considered relatively safe, considering the stakes: The backhoe never gets close to the actual explosives. Rather, it buries them under several tons of earth and other materials, where the buried mines explode like a cap gun.

Still, great precautions are taken. Boaz, for his part, wore protective ceramic armor in the front and back, while Ian was surrounded in full-body protective gear.

At 4:35 in the afternoon that Monday, when Boaz was already planning how he would make it back to Karmiel in time for his shiur that evening, the devices had been totally neutralized.

“All clear,” Boaz said into his communication device. Then he turned to Ian. “Everything’s clear and smooth. We could go staking here.”

And 20 seconds later, everything went black, as Boaz’s greatest fear was realized: A Sager missile — with steel-penetrating capabilities — was aimed directly at him. It tore open the side of the backhoe and exploded in his face, parts of which, together with sections of the left side of his body, simply disintegrated.

Ian was killed instantly. His protective gear meant that his insides took the impact of the blast. He didn’t have a chance.

Boaz, with half his body smashed to bits and hardly conscious, still managed to turn the backhoe in the direction of the fence, and while his fellow IDF officers witnessed the explosion, the fact that the vehicle was coming toward them was a good sign, that maybe everything was really all right. But as the flaming vehicle got closer, they saw the turret was blown off and incinerated — and then they gaped in disbelief as the backhoe crossed the border, collided with another armored vehicle, made a sharp U-turn, drove back into Lebanon, and tipped over.

Combat soldiers dashed over to the overturned dachpor and extracted two bodies — one dead and one close to it. Clearly it was a matter of minutes until Boaz’s life would come to an end.

During those moments, Dr. Lena Koren, the chief medical officer stationed at the border, positioned Boaz in a way that allowed him to breathe. He even nodded in response to her questions, but today has no recall whatsoever — from the attack until he woke up in the hospital two weeks later.

Boaz was loaded into a helicopter and flown to Rambam medical center in Haifa, where an entire team was already waiting for him. He calls it a “miracle of miracles.”

Who Will Live?

Rivkah had just returned from work when the dreaded knock came at the door.

It was the city military officer, accompanied by a doctor. Outside the building, a few of Boaz’s friends had already huddled.

Those knocks, which have transformed the lives of so many families fortunately didn’t bear the worst news of all. “Come to the hospital,” the men advised her.

“There were two victims,” she heard on the way. “One is dead and one is critically wounded.” She had no idea which was her husband, the father of her two daughters — and if he was the critically wounded one, would he survive?

During the longest drive of her life, Rivkah didn’t stop talking to HaKadosh Baruch Hu. She cried and prayed. Then, she also promised that she would conduct herself according to all the laws of the Shulchan Aruch, and just like her husband had covered his head when he emerged safe from Lebanon, she would cover her own hair from then on.

“If you take a watermelon and smash it on the ground, that’s what my head was like,” says Boaz, still incredulous over his personal salvation. “Every part of me was shattered, from my head down my whole left side. I lost my right thumb and left finger, I lost my spleen and other internal parts. When they wheeled me into the operating theater, they really didn’t expect me to live through it.”

By the time Rivkah arrived at Rambam, they were deep into what would be a 20-hour surgery, one of countless to come.

Boaz was put into the hands of Professor Imad Abu Al Naaj, today director of maxillofacial surgery at Poriyah Hospital in Teveria. In time, he would become one of Boaz’s closest friends.

“I’ll never forget that day,” Professor Imad relates. “Although I’ve dealt with many war casualties, this was a very rare and very severe injury on so many fronts, and I knew I had to just begin somewhere.”

The first thing he did was to create an airway, using a stoma in the trachea, but that was just the very beginning.

“You look and wonder where to start. What do I do?” he recalls. “It’s a critical moment. For Boaz, I didn’t really have an answer. I thought to myself, I don’t know where to start, but start we must. It was like putting together a 1,000-piece puzzle in 3D.”

While Boaz was fighting for his life on the operating table, the media was busy producing their own headlines: “Tensions on the northern border after Hezbollah fires missile on IDF backhoe near Zarit,” said one report. “Serious incident, backhoe sustains direct hit, region in danger of conflagration,” said another. Hezbollah’s channel could not conceal its glee: “The Islamic opposition published a statement saying that it had thwarted a ground incursion by the enemy forces at 16:35,” it declared, and took responsibility for the attack.

Meanwhile, hour after hour, Professor Abu al Naaj held his own in the operating room — 13 hours straight before taking a break for a drink.

“In a situation like this, you don’t look at the clock,” he says. “The adrenaline kicks in and gives you the strength to do what you have to do.”

Just Pray

But although the initial surgery was considered a success, Boaz’s suffering was just beginning. Even in the best-case scenario, recovery would require several years of surgeries at least, just until Boaz could get to a state of having a jaw with teeth that function so that he could eat and speak normally.

After nearly two weeks, Boaz opened his eyes. Over his head, someone had hung a picture of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. His face was still very swollen, with stitch lines all over. Some of his fingers were missing and his body was shattered. And Boaz knew that all he could do at that point was daven his heart out.

“I asked HaKadosh Baruch Hu to bring me to the moment where I could stand on my feet, and be able to eat a pita with olives.”

From that moment on, he realized he’d have to employ the professional attributes he had become known for — patience and persistence, slow and steady — in order to return to life. “I don’t know to what extent the doctors really gave me a chance to return to normal life,” he shares, “but the greatest Healer of all thought otherwise.”

As the left side of his mouth was blown apart, eating that pita with olives would be a long time in coming — its own medical miracle, in fact — but after just a month, he was able to stand up and take a few steps on his own. He still had no recall of the attack or the aftermath (until today he says it’s a blessing — “Why should I be tortured having to constantly relive those horrifying scenes?”), but requested to take his first walk to Rambam’s helipad in order to see where his journey to life began. But when he got there, the scene in front of him was just too difficult — a severely wounded soldier was being lifted out of a helicopter onto a hospital stretcher. He couldn’t bear to look.

Although his legs began to work, it would be many months until he could leave the hospital. The most complicated of the surgeries was putting his face back together, and the fact that his legs remained essentially intact was providential: Skin and cartilage from his legs were used for grafting back his face. And he was determined to make the new mechanism work. Every day he would take a piece of Bamba, break it into three little bites, and try to eat.

(Until today, the recreation of his mouth and jaw are studied worldwide and written about in medical journals. And medical professionals are doubly amazed that even on the section of grafted skin and bones, his beard grew in fully.)

He spreads out onto the table an assortment of metal strips, screws, and all kinds of implements that he says were part of his face for a few years. And then he opens the case that was with him that morning and takes out the tefillin. One of the batim is completely burned. The second, which was closer to him, is whole.

The bag also has the Tefillas Haderech that was in his pocket, alongside a kameia against attacks that he’d received just a few days before the attack from a mekubal in Jerusalem. “Yehi ratzon milfanecha… shetatzileinu mikaf kol oyev v’orev” were the words inscribed, still saturated with blood.

But Boaz, with his infectious smile and positivity despite all his challenges, prefers not to get dragged into soppy drama. He’d just as soon discuss the military operation as his own personal battles, which for him are just a part of the bigger picture. “So,” he says, as he lays down the items that testify to his miracle, “do you want to look at the Hezbollah angle, or the Israeli intelligence perspective?”

Every Minute in Pain

Boaz slowly moved from a wheelchair to a walker to going it alone, all the while taking mega-doses of medication to suppress his pain. He remembers the first time he went back to shul — either people ran away from his monster-face, or tactlessly photographed him. “I had a drainage pipe attached to my face,” he recalls. “When I went out for the first time after two months to recite Hagomel, within a few hours, when the medication began to wear off, the pain was so intense that I regretted the moment I’d decided to go out.”

Again and again, his face and body — which has sustained 17 different types of injuries — were put under the knife. The frightening moments before every new surgery — knowing that there would be another round of swelling and more excruciating pain — were eclipsed by his unyielding desire to return to himself..

“Do you see this face?” he asks. “Now look down — do you see this foot? This foot is what gave me my face today. My gums were grafted from my leg. Before that, there was just a hole.”

Even after he “recovered,” he once described the sensation of his new normal as “having a metal bar implanted in your face.”

But you’d never know it, meeting Boaz Porat today. And people who’ve known him for years are shocked to hear him reveal the amount of pain that follows him through life. Speak to him, and what you hear is simchas hachayim; what you see are twinkling eyes and an infectious smile.

“Of course,” he says, “because the simchah of life, and the brachot that surround me — my six amazing daughters, my devoted wife, the fact that I can learn Torah and have a connection to Hakadosh Baruch Hu — are so far beyond the pain.

“Every person has his package and needs to cope,” he explains. “Is life tough for you? HaKadosh Baruch Hu gives you your time on earth and you have to figure out how to deal with the package you get. I love life,” he laughs. “What kind of life is it to lie in bed and complain? True, sometimes it’s an effort to be happy, but it’s also a gift from the Creator.”

Farewell to the OR

After three years in and out of the OR, it was time for Boaz’s final surgery. He said farewell to the operating room, but not to the surgeon.

“Boaz and I have become close personal friends, and I’ve become a part of the joyous occasions as well — the births of his daughters, the wedding he recently made … It’s hard to describe this bond that was forged between us,” Professor Amad says, referring to the countless hours he’s devoted to working on Boaz. “We’ve known each other for 17 years now, but every time I see Boaz, I get excited all over again.”

The next stage could have also been the aesthetic rehabilitation for his fingers, which Boaz decided to forego. That was his boundary — even for someone who has crossed every border. Even today, he doesn’t always wear his thumb prosthesis. “Enough,” he says. “That’s it. There’s a point where you can’t anymore. I’m finished with operating rooms. What I need for my quality of life I did above and beyond, but I’ve decided to forgo the aesthetics.”

When he finally said goodbye to the hospital, although he had years of rehabilitation ahead that’s still ongoing, Boaz declared that he was returning to the Engineering Corps. He wouldn’t let something like a missile strike put his life on hold.

At first, the IDF agreed — albeit with raised eyebrows. They gave him various “easy” jobs, like supervising inventory in military warehouses or working with maps, but that wasn’t for him. With characteristic determination, he wouldn’t be sidelined, and managed to take back his old position — a heavy equipment officer for the northern region, with full responsibility for heavy military machinery and complex missions. At one point, he even traveled to the US as head of a military delegation for IDF weapons acquisition.

Boaz had always been an early riser, getting up at 4:30 to beat the traffic and get to the office on his military base, and in Chapter Two, he still rises before dawn — but for years it’s entailed much more than just a quicker drive to work. First there’s a Gemara shiur, then minyan, and after that, a half hour of exercise before heading to work on the base.

A military career doesn’t last forever, though, and just last year, Boaz decided to retire and take his skills and experience to the private sector. Today he’s the director of a regional vocational college, and while he’s still careful to maintain his early-morning schedule, he’s added one more thing — a morning kollel seder, something he’s dreamed of since taking on Torah and mitzvos, but which had eluded him until now.

Over the years, he’s also become a sought-after speaker, especially for injured soldiers whom he understands so well. The emunah and hope that never let him give up is a prize he wants to propel forward. “There are professionals,” said a military rehab therapist, “and there is Boaz, the national mechazek, the one who gives strength. He goes to soldiers who’ve lost the will to live, and is able to touch them in a place where no one else can.”

Slow and Steady

Boaz remembers the day he was ordered by his commander to take a wide swath of land and make it impassable, so special units could undergo training in challenging territory.

“It took days — I created all kinds of obstacles, traps, and huge dirt embankments,” he describes. “I didn’t leave until it was clear to me that even the best unit would struggle to pass through — it was irreversible.”

Two days later, just before the training commenced, the commander called him back. “You were supposed to make it hard, but not impossible. Now go back and make sure that the forces can get through.”

Boaz was stymied. He knew only too well that there were no weak links in the barriers he’d built. If he had the slightest thought that he would have needed to get through those obstacles, he would have left areas that could have been broken through. But now it was too late.

Boaz loves to retell this incident, because it became a resounding life lesson: The person with the most power to stop you from advancing is your own self.

The two keys to moving ahead, Boaz has learned, are emunah and patience. “Patience prevails,” he says. “I’ve been called into Gaza, to Khan Yunis, to Rafiach, Shechem, spent ten years in Lebanon, and I’ve succeeded in all those missions, thanks to the patience Hashem blessed me with. Now, here we are during the coronavirus pandemic, and I wish I could share that gift with everyone. We’d be so much happier if we could muster a bit of patience, to just appreciate life while we wait for this thing to end — even if it means putting something over your mouth and keeping a bit of distance.

“I’ve learned over the years that nothing is instant. Slow and steady. Focus on the light at the end of the tunnel and keep your eye on it. Whoever saw me 17 years ago wouldn’t believe where I am today, but it’s all about the kochot hanefesh with which Hashem blessed all of us.”

One bag with burned tefillin and a bloody Tefillas Haderech are a silent testimony to this remarkable man who returned from the ruins and davened from the depths of his heart — and then stood up to be able to thank his Maker. “The pain? That’s just part of the package. But nothing’s more fulfilling than reaching the point where you appreciate standing on your own two feet. And nothing’s sweeter than finally being able to eat that pita with olives.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 846)