When a king of flesh and blood goes to war ,
he sends his soldiers to kill and to be killed.
He may love his soldiers or he may not .
He may have regard for them or he may not .
Even if he has regard for them,
he regards them as dead,
for the angel of death is on the  man who goes to war,
and accompanies him to kill him.

When he is slain by an arrow or a sword,
another man is put in his place.
The king does not feel that someone is missing.
After all, the nations are many and their troops are many.
If one of them is killed,
the king has many replacements.

But our king,
the King of Kings, the Holy one, Blessed Be He,
wants life and pursues peace and loves His Israel.
He chose us,  not because we are  large ,
for we are one of the smallest of nations.
We are few, and He loves us,
each one of us is, for Him, an entire legion.
He does not have many replacements for us.
If one of us is missing,
then the king’s forces are diminished,
His kingdom is weakened.
One of His legions is gone
and His greatness is lessened.

For this reason,when a Jew dies,
we say  Kaddish
.
"God’s Name will be magnified and sanctified ",
so that there will be no loss of strength before Him…
and sanctified so that we need not fear for ourselves,
but only for the splendor and the pride of His Holiness.

If this is what we say for every individual who dies,
how much more we pray for our brothers and out sisters,
the  dear children of Zion
who were slain for  Israel,
whose blood was spilled for His people and His land of Israel
everyone of them is one of the legions
of the King of Kings, the Holy one,Blessed Be He,
And when one of them is killed, |
He has no one to put in his place.

And so my brothers and sisters,
all of you who mourn in this mourning,
let us lift out hearts to our Father in Heaven,
the King of Israel and its Redeemer,
and pray for ourselves and for His, as it were:
   ‘Magnified and sanctified
His great Name shall be…”

S. Y. Agnon ;Translation by Leon Wieseltie

לעברית