On May 2, 1980, Arab terrorists ambushed Jews returning from the Me’arat HaMachpela in Chevron, murdering six innocent people and wounding twenty others. In the wake of this attack, a group of Jews from nearby Kiryat Arba made the bold decision to return to the heart of Chevron, reestablishing a Jewish presence that was violently erased during the massacre of 1929.
Among them was a young 21-year-old man named Yechiel Leiter – today serving as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States. He played a critical role in reviving the ancient Jewish community on land known as Admot Yishai, named for the father of King David who is buried in Chevron. Leiter later recalled spending several days on the hilltop with friends, standing on the very ground where Avraham, Yitzchak, and Ya’akov once lived, and where David first established his throne. After visiting Yishai’s tomb, they explored the archaeological excavations nearby, where they met an Arab who was puzzled by their interest. “What’s so important to you here?” he asked. With a shrug, he waved his hand over the ancient ruins and muttered dismissively: “These are just holes.”
Ambassador Leiter explains that in Hebrew, there is a word for this attitude: stam. It means “just,” “nothing special,” “it doesn’t matter.” To call something stam is to strip it of meaning, to treat it as empty, irrelevant, or random. He writes: “How wrong this Arab was! Stam? Just the place where the nation of Israel was born, where our forefathers taught the world that it is G-d who created man, and not man who created G-d? Just the place where King David established the Kingdom of Israel? Just the place where Jews lived and flourished for centuries, until they were slaughtered in 1929? Stam?” (Rabbi Yechiel Leiter, Aloh Na’aleh, 3–5).
Many among the nations treat our claim to the Land, and the mission of Am Yisrael itself, as if it were “just” politics, “just” coincidence, “just” history. This attitude is nothing new.
“And Yitzchak dug anew the wells of water which had been dug in the days of Avraham his father, which the Plishtim had stopped up after Avraham’s death; and he called them by the same names that his father had called them” (Bereishit 26:18).
On the surface, these are just physical wells – holes in the ground for water. But the Kotzker Rebbe teaches that water symbolizes Torah. Avraham’s wells weren’t only about water; they were new paths of serving G-d, new revelations of holiness in the world. When Avraham dug deep, he uncovered treasures of faith and truth (Emet Ve’Emunah, 28).
But after Avraham’s death, the Plishtim stopped up the wells. “Vayesatmum Plishtim” – literally, “the Plishtim made them stam.” The very word for closing up the wells is from the same root as stam. They didn’t just fill them with dirt; they branded them as stam, as meaningless. To the Plishtim, Avraham’s teachings were “just” words, “just” ideas, “just” the eccentricities of a man now dead. Yitzchak, however, would not allow his father’s legacy to be buried under this attitude of stam. He re-dug the wells, showing that what others dismissed as ordinary or irrelevant was anything but.
The struggle of Yitzchak is the struggle of his descendants, of Am Yisrael. Time and again, we are told that our story is stam. Our Land? Stam politics. Our survival? Stam coincidence. Our faith? Stam superstition. Our return to Zion? Stam colonialism. Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer tell us we must give away the “West Bank” for a “two-state solution” as if it were just another piece of land. But this Land is not stam. It is Judea and Samaria – the cradle of our people and heart of our identity.
The Greeks, like the Philistines before them, dismissed our Torah as “stam” – just another book, another tribal collection of laws and stories. This is the war of Chanukah. The Chashmona’im weren’t just fighting armies; they were fighting a philosophy that turned everything holy into stam. Rav Hirsch explains that “the people of Israel serve as a living testimony before all nations against the Greek heresy, which claimed that everything in the world happens by chance, with no guiding hand evident in it” (Shemot 20). To the Greeks, that tiny jug of oil was stam – random chance, a fluke. But we light the menorah each year to declare the opposite: there is no such thing as stam. Not in our survival, not in our miracles, not in our return home.
We ourselves, our very existence, are proof that nothing is stam. No nation has ever been exiled from its land, dispersed across the entire globe, survived for millennia and returned to its homeland. It defies all logic. This is why we exist – to teach the nations that life is not meaningless, that behind every event there is a divine plan.
The Arab in Chevron looked at the excavations and said: “These are just holes.” But we know better. We have come home, to dig again and restore what our enemies tried to erase. Most of all, we are here to declare: nothing is stam.
Rabbi Elie Mischel is the Editor of HaMizrachi magazine and the author of The War Against the Bible: Ishmael, Esau and Israel at the End Times (2024).