A Near-Death Experience Led Lior to Shabbat

“It started with a sudden sweat,” Lior Lev begins, recalling the Friday evening that changed his life forever. “Then I felt this deep burning in my chest, spreading through my body. I’d taken a military first aid course, so I knew right away I was having a heart attack.”

It was a hot summer Friday. Lior, then 32 years old and completely secular, had just come home from a long shift working with the local police. He was tired, but had promised his wife and kids he’d take them to the pool that afternoon and he kept his word. Afterward, they came home to prepare for Shabbat. Although he didn’t keep Shabbat, Kiddush on Friday night was a family tradition he never missed.

“I told my wife I needed to rest, and she promised to wake me for Kiddush.” But when she came to wake him, he couldn’t move his arm. “It started as a small pain in my left arm,” he remembers, “but within minutes it turned into something sharp and unbearable.”

Cold sweat covered him, and pain spread across his chest. He couldn’t speak. His wife panicked and reached for the phone to call a doctor. But Lior stopped her. “There’s no time,” he said. “We need to go to Magen David Adom (Israel’s emergency medical service) now.”

Despite the pain, he somehow got behind the wheel and drove to the nearest MDA station. When he walked in, a doctor was helping a religious couple with their son. But the doctor saw Lior and immediately asked permission to treat him first. “She hooked me up to an ECG, saw the results, and called an intensive care ambulance on the spot.”

In the ambulance, paramedics connected him to monitors and a defibrillator. “They called my wife to say I was having a heart attack and had to go straight to Soroka Hospital.” She arrived within two minutes, and they made the drive together.

“I’m floating through a tunnel but I have no body”

As the ambulance raced through the streets, Lior’s pain became unbearable. “I was screaming, crying, banging on the seat in front of me, but nothing helped. The morphine they gave me only made my legs tingle, it didn’t ease the pain.”

Amid the fog, he heard the paramedic speaking to the on-call doctor. “Later I learned that Hashem had done a kindness, that Shabbat, all the top doctors and heart specialists were on duty.”

The paramedic, sensing how serious Lior’s condition was, told the doctor not to bring him to the emergency room, but straight to intensive care. The doctor hesitated. “He didn’t believe someone only 32 years old could be this critical. He thought the paramedic must be mistaken.” But the paramedic refused to back down.

“I’ll never forget his words,” Lior says. “‘I’m not risking this man’s life,’ he told the doctor. ‘I’m bringing him to intensive care. If I’m wrong, you can send him back.’”

Lior was taken straight to ICU. “They hooked me up to machines, gave me medication to dissolve blood clots and then it happened. I felt dizzy, closed my eyes… and everything went black.”

He describes the moment with haunting clarity. “I was floating through a long tunnel of darkness. I had no body. I couldn’t see my hands, my legs, nothing. Just this endless black space. I was flying, weightless, completely disconnected from everything.”

The mezuzah held the message

While doctors fought to save his life, Lior had no idea that his heart had stopped. He had entered clinical death. “They shocked me three times. I came back for a moment and asked, ‘Am I dead?’ The doctor smiled and said, ‘Not yet but you’re trying.’” A few seconds later, Lior’s heart stopped again.

This time, the doctors rushed him into the operating room. He underwent emergency catheterization, and two blocked arteries were opened. Bypass surgery was avoided. “They sedated me so my heart could rest, and I woke up Saturday night.”

When he opened his eyes, the doctor stood beside him with a smile. “You’re a miracle,” she said. “Not everyone wakes up after cardiac arrest. You’ve been given life as a gift.”

Hearing those words, Lior’s wife called the rabbi of their city, Netivot, and told him everything. After Lior returned home from the hospital, the rabbi came to visit and asked to check the mezuzah in their bedroom.

What he found was chilling.

In the word levavkhem (your hearts), the letters lamed and bet had been smudged and connected, the very word for “heart” in the verse. “Is it any wonder,” Lior says, “that my heart was the one to suffer?”

He no longer sees what happened as a coincidence. “Hashem had mercy on me. He gave me back my life. My heart isn’t perfect, but Baruch Hashem I’m alive. That same year, we were blessed with another son. If that’s not a miracle, what is?”

“Hashem wants the heart don’t wait for Him to take it”

“At first,” he admits, “I couldn’t process it all. I didn’t really understand how great the miracle was. But slowly it became clear this was a sign. A wake-up call. I needed to stop living disconnected from Hashem, and especially to stop violating Shabbat.”

Since then, Lior has accepted the yoke of Shamayim (Heaven) with joy. He not only observes Shabbat, but strives to fulfill mitzvot with love and meaning. “I accept the heart damage, because I know everything that happened was for a reason. And now I know that Hashem doesn’t just want perfection, He wants sincerity.”

As our sages say, Rachmana liba ba’i, “Hashem desires the heart.”

“Don’t wait for Him to take it,” Lior says. “Give it to Him now willingly.”