"I didn't understand that I was fighting for my life": Mordechai Shnoveld on rehabilitation after being wounded in Gaza

More than a year has passed since Mordechai Shnoveld was seriously wounded during the fighting in Gaza, but his rehabilitation process is still ongoing. "Two weeks ago I was at the doctor and he told me: you have another year," he tells Israel Meir. According to him, at the beginning of the journey, improvement is felt quickly, but later new pains and challenges begin to surface.

Shnoveld, a member of a well-known family in religious Zionism, worked in high-tech and music before the war and lived in a truck he converted into a home. On Simchat Torah, he was in Jerusalem. When the sirens started and the call from the unit arrived, he understood that he was on his way to war.

On the way, he met a young Haredi man who told him that he wanted to help through the study of Torah. "I told him: we are a pair. I am going to fight and you are going to fight by studying Torah." Shortly after, Shnoveld arrived at the armored unit where he served and entered the fighting.

"I understood that I was alive"

About a week after the start of the maneuver, during an operation in Gaza, the team's tank could not start. Shnoveld went outside in an attempt to fix the malfunction.

"I finished fixing it, the driver starts it, I look at the sky and say thank you to God," he recalls. On his way back to the tank, he was hit by a powerful explosion.

"The first thought was that I was hit. The second was that I was in pain, which means I am alive, and I said thank you to God."

Shnoveld was wounded in the chest, head, and pelvis and was evacuated to Barzilai Hospital. For a long time, according to him, he did not understand at all how serious his condition was. Only later, when he asked to go to the funeral of his friend Naaran, who was killed in the war, did the doctor explain to him that his condition was still life-threatening.

"The moment the doctor told me it was a matter of three minutes, I understood that I was in a completely different story."

After about two weeks in intensive care, he was transferred to Sheba, where he underwent another surgery, and later the long rehabilitation began.

The guitar that changed the medical file

One of the unusual moments occurred already in intensive care. A person who entered the ward brought a guitar with him and offered Shnoveld to play.

Despite the serious injury, the tubes, and the oxygen, he took the guitar and began to play "Ka Eksof," the melody identified with Karlin Hasidism.

"The doctors who were in the ward came with phones and filmed," he says. "I asked them what the drama was, and they told me: basically, you are not supposed to do this. You are supposed to be sedated."

According to him, the ability to play and sing also influenced the way the medical staff related to the continuation of the treatment. "It changed my medical file, my life."

Since then, music has become a central part of the rehabilitation. "You play and the pain disappears," he says. "They put a lot of substances there so I wouldn't feel pain, but it didn't help. I felt pain. I play, and the pain disappears."

"Everyone comes to work"

Shnoveld describes the rehabilitation ward as a place with completely different energy. "You arrive at rehabilitation and everyone comes to work, everyone fights together. Every day something small happens."

Alongside the physical treatment, he also began to deal with the mental side. For the first time in his life, he turned to a psychologist, a step that he says helped him a lot. Even today, more than a year after the injury, anxiety, pain, or a physical reaction that brings him back to what he went through can suddenly arise.

But alongside the rehabilitation, Shnoveld also chose to go on missions and tell his story in Israel and the world. After the death of his friend Naaran, whom he remembered as a man of mission, he decided to take this concept into his own life as well.

And the music continues to accompany him. For him, it is already much more than a painkiller. "It is not only in my body, but in the body of our people," he says. "In our connection to faith and in our aspiration as a people for quiet days."