Last Friday, November 8, I awoke to the dreaded message on my phone, received overnight from my friend Lior in Israel: Our friend Guy Shabtay had passed away. He also included a link to a live broadcast of the funeral, which was already underway on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem. I tuned in and caught the end of the service, hearing some of the speakers laud Guy’s character and his many accomplishments during a life cut short by a terrorist’s bullet.
Over the next few days, I was in shock, unable to process that Guy was really gone. I tried to go about my daily routine, but it all felt meaningless. I couldn’t fathom that this vibrant, full-of-life man was no longer with us. His wife of ten years, Reut, was now a widow, and his three precious daughters, Gefen, Halleli, and Chana, orphans.
I met Guy and Lior for the first time in the fall of 2009, when I heard that a nearby community college had recruited a group of Israeli soccer players. I reached out to the coach and he gave me a phone number for one of them. I called and invited them for dinner in the sukkah with my family. They had all finished their mandatory military service and were starting college in their mid-20s as student athletes. Guy had previously played for Maccabi Tel Aviv.
What followed was a years-long friendship, during which most of them began keeping Shabbat and even moved into our house every week to observe it properly. A moment of pride for both me and them was when their team scheduled a game on Yom Kippur, yet they chose to spend it with us in the synagogue rather than on the pitch.
Guy spent close to four years here, and in his final year the dramatic change in his life was apparent to all. He was wearing a kippah and tzitzit at all times, spending his spare time studying Torah and learning about living as an observant Jew. And after he graduated with an engineering degree, he returned to Israel and took the next obvious step — he enrolled in yeshivah, where he entered the tents of Torah, studying and becoming proficient in our ancient yet most relevant texts.
His secular parents, especially his academic father, were originally concerned about their son adopting a religious lifestyle. They felt that spending time in yeshivah—rather than utilizing his degree in a more productive manner—would force him to lead a life of dependency and living off others. But Guy proved that concern to be unfounded. Parallel to his yeshivah studies, he taught English and math at a local yeshivah high school, a job that he took great pride in and kept until his last day. He had hundreds of students over the last decade, all of them touched by his unique teaching style, imbued with patience and care for each individual under his tutelage.
We visited Guy on one trip to Israel shortly after he had enrolled in yeshivah, but then with me leading my community in Munster, Indiana, and Guy settling down, marrying, and starting a family of his own, our contact was sporadic. Every once in a while he would call, email, or text, just to catch up, update us about his life and hear how things were going with us.
One such call happened three years ago, in November 2021. My phone rang out of the blue and it was Guy. After some pleasantries, he got to the reason for his call: He was studying the weekly Torah portion, Parshat Vayetzei, and remembered that it was the first Torah portion I had taught him, and therefore most likely the first time in his life that he had actually studied Torah. Feeling indebted to me for that, he immediately called to share his appreciation for helping set him on his extraordinary spiritual journey, which had brought him to his current station in life.
We continued to stay in touch over the last three years. I texted him to check on him after the October 7 attacks. His brief reply: “I’m in the army. Pray for us.” As a former soldier, he was called up for reserve duty and served a tour in Gaza in the initial stages of the war. He then returned home and resumed life with his family and at work.
Over the last year, we talked more often than we had in the previous decade. Our conversations focused on the war, obviously, and Guy felt strongly about every Jew’s duty to stand up for their people and their land. Whether a Jew in America or in Israel, we all have an obligation to each other, he stated emphatically. In our final conversation, after we shared updates about our families and what our children were up to, he said to me: “I have a strong desire to always be on the path of teshuvah.” Although he had already been living an observant lifestyle for more than a decade, he acknowledged that a Jew can never rest and must always be moving and growing.
After being home for several months following his tour in Gaza, with hostilities heating up on Israel’s northern border, Guy volunteered to serve again; this time as religion coordinator on behalf of the IDF’s chief rabbinate, in the Alon combat unit fighting Hezbollah. Members of his unit shared that during the week prior to the ambush, which coincided with the holiday of Sukkot, Master Sergeant Guy ensured he had his lulav and etrog with him at all times, making an effort to offer everyone he encountered an opportunity to recite the blessing and perform the mitzvah.
May the memory of Harav Guy ben Menachem be a blessing, and may it inspire us to live with courage, integrity, and faith, carrying forward the mission of the Jewish people with strength and hope.
Top: Guy and Reut Shabtay, with their daughters Gefen, Halleli, and Chana.
Bottom- L: Guy performing the mitzvah of lulav and etrog during his final deployment, days before he was wounded. R: College student Guy performing the mitzvah of lulav and etrog for his first time on Chabad of Northwest Indiana's sukkah mobile, Sukkot 2010.
