Ben Brown was just about a month away from finishing his service in the Israel Defence Forces when his family in Toronto received the dreaded phone call that he had been seriously injured.
A rocket launched by Hezbollah in Lebanon had crashed into Har Dov, the army base in northern Israel where Ben was stationed. A piece of shrapnel flew under his helmet and pierced his brain. No one else was injured.
Since the attack on July 24, Zach Brown, Ben’s older brother, has been at his bedside at Rambam hospital in Haifa.
Zach, 23, also served in the IDF and is now a student at Reichman University studying business administration and working for a startup. Ben, who is 20, followed in his older brother’s footsteps as a lone soldier in the IDF, drafting into the prestigious Golani unit after a year and a half of yeshiva study in Israel.
“We speak all the time, all the time. Even as my little brother, he’s one of my closest friends. Knowing him, and I know how strong he is, we all know that he’ll pull through,” Zach said in an interview from Israel with The CJN.
Now Zach and his family are waiting for Ben to slowly wake up from his induced coma and resume the conversation.
Ben initially seemed fine after the injury, walking and joking with his friends, but his condition quickly changed and he was flown to Rambam where he underwent several surgeries. He was placed in a medical coma to allow his brain to heal, and is now slowly being awakened.
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” Zach says of the long journey his brother faces. “So every single day, a little bit more off the coma and little by little, we keep seeing movements, he’s moving himself, his eyes open a little and then they blink and we see he reacts to music and it gets better every single day.”
The family has posted videos on social media of friends playing music in Ben’s hospital room. One of the recent visitors was Shlomo Lipman, who played at Zach’s wedding and was also one of Ben’s teachers in yeshiva.
“We see his heart rate goes up a little bit when [music] is playing, and sometimes it goes a little down and up again. So we don’t know if he hears us, but we believe he does.”
Zach was supposed to get married on Oct. 22, 2023, but his plans changed abruptly after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and triggered a war in Gaza. He ended up driving to army bases throughout the country, delivering everything soldiers needed and clocking 9,500 km in six weeks.
He rescheduled his wedding and was married in January.
Ben, meanwhile, had only one month left to serve before he was injured. After he finished the army, he planned on being a madrich (counsellor) at a program called Torah Tech, a gap year program for modern Orthodox youth in Tel Aviv that combines Torah learning with internships in the high-tech field.
Zach, too, had worked for Torah Tech.
Instead, the program director for Torah Tech brought his guitar and sang in Ben’s room last week.
“The support has been, I don’t really have words for it, it’s been amazing,” Zach said.
“We’ve seen communities coming together, davening together, doing good things for each other, you know, putting a smile on each other’s faces.
“A lot of my friends who aren’t religious, aren’t really connected, have been sending me messages that they put on tefillin today, that they’re davening for Benji. All of our friends back at home and in Israel have just been sending us some of the nicest messages. People have been sending a lot of food, a lot of love.”
Even the army has been providing everything the family could need, Zach said.
In Toronto, the family belongs to Beth Avraham Yoseph Synagogue in Thornhill, where his father Jeffrey Brown served as the president. Shortly after hearing about Ben’s injury, the synagogue organized a special evening of prayer.
Rabbi Daniel Korobkin, who knows the family and celebrated at Zach’s wedding, told The CJN Daily that the Brown family are passionate religious Zionists.
“Benji is… just a sweet, kind, passionate young man, and I’ve gotten to see him grow over the years and he’s just developed into this amazing person.”
There are two WhatsApp groups, after one maxed out after 1,000 people, where people are continually saying Tehillim (psalms) for Ben’s recovery, Zach said.
Everyone loves being around his younger brother, he said.
“He loves making people smile, loves to talk to people, loves to share new insights, loves to learn things. He’s just a very energetic and enthusiastic guy, the kind of guy that you want on your team.”
In a devar Torah that Ben recorded the week before he was injured, he seemed to have predicted what was coming, Zach said.
“At the end of his voice note, he said, ‘I might be a sefer (holy book) that’s kissed and closed right now or I may have kissed and closed the sefer of HaShem right now for the time being. But even so, I’m still connected,’” Zach said.
“There’s no bad news. We still have Benji. He said it himself, he’s out for a little bit but he’s going to come back.”
