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United Hatzalah

Matisyahu’s concert on Sept. 17 will benefit United 
Hatzalah, an organization that hasn’t been around 
as long as he has but that’s made significant 
contributions globally with its humanitarian work. 
By its own description, United Hatzalah is 
“a community-based volunteer emergency 
medical services (EMS) organization committed 
to providing the fastest response to medical 
emergencies across Israel.” 
It uses a network of more than 7,000 volunteer 
doctors, paramedics and Emergency Medical 
Technicians (EMTs) who are on-call at all hours, 
every day, with a reported average response time 
of less than three minutes — moving faster than 
ambulance services in many cases.
United Hatzalah has also journeyed outside of 
Israel to provide aid after hurricanes in Haiti and 
the United States, earthquakes in Nepal and war 
in Ukraine and Moldova. Its Psychotrauma and 
Crisis Response Unit was also on the ground after 
the Tree of Life Synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh 
and the Surfside condominium collapse in Miami. 
Led by president and founder Eli Beer — who 
will be attending and speaking at the Matisyahu 
concert — United Hatzalah was founded in 
2006 after the Second Lebanon War. Beer, an 
EMT himself, recognized the need for quicker 
responses than Israel’s heavily trafficked, narrow 
streets often allow, and consolidated more than 
50 independent Hatzalahs into an umbrella 
organization. The group uses more nimble 
“Ambucyles” and advanced GPS technology to 
bring aid more quickly and efficiently.
United Hatzalah was, of course, called into 
service after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas and has 
continued work throughout the hostilities. 
More information about United Hatzalah can be 
found via israelrescue.org. 

the core of who the Jewish people are, that the 
Jewish people don’t really have an existence 
without the Torah or Israel. Even though I’m 
not very religious at this point, I still believe the 
Torah and Israel are the two fundamental pillars 
that have kept the Jewish race in survival for all 
these years. 
“If you get rid of either one of those two 
things, basically what will happen is what you 
see happening now in the world and America. 
The Jews will come under so much pressure 
they won’t understand why they’re Jewish or 
what it means to be Jewish. Being Jewish means 
being part of a people, and I believe that will 
fade away. People will be afraid and assimilate 
completely without either the Torah or Israel. 
“
And I think a lot of Jews, in America in 
particular, are unaware of that idea. They’re 
unaware of their connection, what it means to 
be a Jew. So now you see this kind of a split; in 
the past it was more a split between religious 
and non-religious. Now there’s a paradigm shift; 
it’s more of a journey for every Jew to do a bit of 
a vision quest or a bit of a learning kind of deep 
dive into what it means to be Jewish. 
 “
At the end of the day, if that’s not complete 
or rich or full or real, then none of it really 
matters. Then what does it matter if we have 
our homeland or not? It no longer becomes 
about religion; it becomes about Jewish and 
begs the deeper question of what is Jewish.”

MATISYAHU’S BEGINNINGS
Matisyahu’s own journey, spiritually and 
musically, began as Matthew Paul Miller, born 
in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and raised 
primarily in White Plains, New York, in a 
Reconstructionist congregation. Music “has 
always been my passion and my love,” and 
he became an acid-dropping teenager who 
dropped out of high school to follow the band 
Phish on tour. 
 An autumn 1995 program in Hod Hasharon 
led to a deeper connection to his Jewish 
heritage, as did a wilderness program in 
Oregon, where he began writing music and 
developed skills as a rapper, adopting the 
handle MC Truth. Returning to New York, he 
studied at The New School, began attending 
the Carlebach Shul on Manhattan’s Upper 
West Side and studying Torah at New York 
University’s Chabad House. 
“I’ve changed a lot since I started,” says 
Matisyahu, who was signed by JDub Records in 
2004. He drew attention as “the Jewish rapper” 
although the mainstream embrace for his 2005 

album Live at Stubb’s, which topped Billboard’s 
Top Reggae Albums chart and spawned a hit 
single in “King Without a Crown,” transcended 
any perceived gimmick. 
He became a welcome performer at secular 
music festivals and opened for Sting and other 
mainstream artists. His second studio album, 
2006’s Youth, was nominated for a Grammy 
Award for Best Reggae Album. 
“When I first started, I was freshly out of 
yeshivah and was thinking in, as much as I hate 
to say it, a little bit of a missionary kind of way, 
like, ‘I’m gonna try and teach people Judaism 
through the music,’” says Matisyahu, who’s 
released a total of seven studio albums and six 
EPs, the latter including this year’s Hold the Fire.
“But as time’s gone on, I got back into my 
own kind of nature of the mystery of everything 
— the mystery of God and the mystery of what 
we’re all doing here and not having any answers 
to offer people. 
“Some people want me to put the message 
out there in a more clear-cut kind of way, but 
I’ve kinda gotten more turned off by that kind 
of thing.”

AN EVOLVING JOURNEY
Matisyahu caused a stir in 2011, when he cut 
his hair and shaved his beard, announcing 
on social media that was “reclaiming myself. 
Trusting my goodness and my Divine mission.” 
“I’ve had my journey within,” Matisyahu says 
now. “I’ve never pulled away but certainly had 
my moments where I’ve felt sort of out of touch 
with the religion. I put in a little bit of time, like 
a decade of Orthodoxy and really exploring 
within that time. There is some core thing there 
that seems to be the truth.
“
And I wasn’t there five years ago. I might 
have said, ‘OK, I don’t necessarily buy into it 
all. But I’ve kind of come around since then. It 
doesn’t make me more religious. It doesn’t make 
me want to wear a yarmulke or put on tefillin.”
Now, he says, “When it comes to God, I 
believe it’s a Hail Mary,” referring to the football 
play. “Everyone has their own perception of 
God, and as much as you try to destroy your 
own ego and kind of become nullified in 
the face of the unknown, part of the Jewish 
tradition is to humanize God in some way. 
When you do that, you personalize it, you 
make it part of your ego, and so it remains an 
unanswerable question mark of who and what 
God is.
“That to me is a creative space, and not one 
of rules or rigidness. That’s, like, the ultimate 

RAPHAEL POCH

A United 
Hatzalah 
ambucycle

OUR COMMUNITY

