By Chloe Baker, Senior Opinions Editor
It’s been a while since the news has made me cry. Two years have passed since the atrocities of October 7, and with the world shifting toward such negativity, it’s rare that a headline evokes real, deep shock in me anymore. But the past few months have been different.
First, it was the death of Ari Goldberg, a lone soldier from Norfolk Virginia, who was a close friend of my brother’s. Ari’s dream was to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, and that’s exactly what he did. He was a combat engineer who enlisted in 2022, not because he had to, but because he wanted to. This desire was not unique to Ari. Approximately 7,000 lone soldiers, men and women who have left behind comfortable lives in the diaspora, serve in the IDF at any given time. Their reasonings differ, but they all feel that same pull to defend their true homeland.
Then, I was scrolling on Instagram, and came across multiple posts dedicated to another soldier. I let curiosity get the best of me, and dedicated time to familiarizing myself with who he was. Born in Idaho, in a town with few to no Jews, Joshua Boone stood out amongst his peers. For Boone, the desire to serve his homeland was instilled in him from a young age. Two months ago, in an interview on the podcast Boots on the Ground, Boone described this upbringing, saying there were “no Jewish private schools” in the town he lived in, and that he had to deal with “rednecks and white supremacists.” Even before enlisting in the IDF and coming to Israel, he “bled because he was a Jew,” he said. Boone’s pursuit to join the IDF was relentless. He described being turned away by the Jewish Agency and having to jump through various hoops to prove his Jewishness. When he first tried to enlist at 19, he was rejected, as the family couldn’t prove Jewish lineage through his mother’s line. He then underwent a formal conversion process at Congregation Ahavath Beth Israel in Boise, even though he had been Jewish his entire life. Even that wasn’t enough. The IDF required him to spend a year embedded in Idaho’s Jewish community before they would reconsider.
Most people would have given up. But Boone did not.
His first visit to Israel had been in tenth grade. “I just felt at home,” he said, describing the moment he arrived in Israel. “I knew I was coming back.” By senior year of high school, his goal was clear, he would go to Israel and join the army. His father, Idaho State Police Sergeant Robert Boone, had raised him with a simple creed: live as defenders of the weak and protectors of the poor. Joshua took that seriously. “From what all of our people have gone through, in the Holocaust and what my family went through in Russia,” he said, “there’s a point where it’s like, you know what, I’m going to do my part. Because evil triumphs when good men do nothing.”
He eventually made it, serving as a sniper in the Golani Brigade. When October 7 happened, he, like many, didn’t wait to be called up and he volunteered for additional units. Over the course of the war, he accumulated more than 700 days of reserve service.
And then, just weeks before his death, he made a decision. He took time off to address the post-traumatic stress he had accumulated on the front lines.
On January 6, Joshua Boone was found dead. The IDF has said it appears he died by suicide, though the investigation is still ongoing and the full circumstances have not been made public.
His friends and family asked that he be buried at Har Herzl, the national military cemetery in Jerusalem. The state said no.
According to Israeli policy, any soldier who dies while on duty is automatically recognized as a fallen soldier and receives a military burial. Anyone who dies off duty, even if their death is directly linked to their military service, is not granted that status. Joshua had taken a leave to address his PTSD. By the bureaucracy’s logic, that disqualified him.
However, we know that this is less about bureaucracy and more about symbolism. In order to explain that significance, we must look at what Har Herzl represents.
A student at Kol Torah Yeshiva in Jerusalem once approached his teacher, Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, and asked if he could leave his Torah study to pray at the graves of tzaddikim (righteous people) in the Galil. Rav Auerbach told him it wasn’t necessary to travel all the way north. Whenever he felt the need to pray at the graves of tzaddikim, he said, he went to Har Herzl, to the graves of soldiers who had fallen for the sanctification of G-d’s name.
Har Herzl, in this telling, is not simply a burial place. It is a national monument and a declaration of whom we consider righteous.
Joshua Boone’s loved ones are now asking the State of Israel to decide whether righteousness ends when suffering becomes inconvenient to classify. Josh Frish, a friend who spoke at the Knesset on Boone’s behalf, put it plainly: “They told me that my friend who fought for 748 days won’t get a military burial, won’t be recognized as a fallen soldier, and won’t get anything. Where is the respect for the man who fought for 748 days for this country?”
It is a question that some Jews never have to ask. There is a kind of Jewish experience that never has to explain itself. It is built on Hebrew day schools, frequent trips to Israel, summer camps and the quiet certainty of always being surrounded by other Jews. Israel, in this scenario, is not a distant dream. It is simply there, woven into the fabric of daily life.
And then there is another Jewish experience. One shaped by distance, isolation and choice.
Joshua Boone grew up in the second world. In Idaho, being Jewish wasn’t something you inherited seamlessly — it was something you defended. There were no Jewish private schools. There were “rednecks and white supremacists.” Israel wasn’t a place you visited every Pesach. It was the place — and the feeling — you had to discover on your own.
For Jews like Joshua, Israel isn’t a destination. It’s an answer.
It answers the question of where you belong in life, when you have spent most of it standing out. It answers what it means to be part of something larger than yourself when you’ve grown up isolated from your own people. And for Joshua, it answered the question his father had raised him with: What does it mean to be a defender of the weak and a protector of the poor?
“I knew I was coming back,” Boone said of crossing into Israel for the first time. There was no ambivalence, no need to weigh options or debate. By his senior year of high school, his goal was to enlist in the Israeli army.
This clarity is what separated Joshua from many others. He didn’t serve because he was obligated to. He didn’t serve because his friends were serving or because it was culturally expected of him. He served because he had chosen to understand what Israel meant, and that understanding compelled him.
Even when the Jewish Agency turned him away, even when he had to undergo a conversion process for a faith he had practiced his whole life, even when he had to spend a year proving himself to a community in Idaho, he came back. He served with everything he had, and sacrificed immensely.
The State is now being asked to recognize that sacrifice. And so far, it has refused.
The irony here is striking. Joshua took time off because of what his service did to him, and now, that decision is being used to deny him proper recognition.
The crisis here is twofold. The state asks soldiers to give everything, and then when the weight of that sacrifice becomes too heavy to bear, it tells them their suffering doesn’t count.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog understands this. Days after Joshua’s death, he wrote about an “emotional conversation” he’d just had with Joshua’s parents and partner. “I’m sorry to say, with great pain,” he wrote, “that in recent years I’ve spoken with many parents of lone soldiers, who left their families and their countries to serve and defend the State of Israel, and the unbearable personal cost overwhelmed them.”
Herzog called on the IDF and security establishment to “deepen the effort to emotionally support, to accompany and bolster the mental resilience of soldiers and reservists, with a particular emphasis on the lone soldiers who have left lives of comfort and come from far away without the support of family here in Israel, and for whom the burden is especially heavy.”
There is a question at the heart of this story, and it is not a legal one.
The question is not whether or not Joshua Boone technically died in combat. The question is whether we are willing to properly honor how he lived.
How do you honor someone who gave up everything? Who fought relentlessly to make his dream — of defending the Jewish people — come true? How do you honor someone who, instead of giving up after being turned away, came back with twice as much determination? How do you honor someone who didn’t have to make this choice, but did?
Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach went to Har Herzl to pray at the graves of the righteous. If that is what Har Herzl represents — not just a military cemetery, but a place where we declare who among us lived and died as tzaddikim — then the state must answer a harder question than the one its policy asks.
Joshua Boone’s loved ones are asking Israel to make a choice. They are asking whether the state believes that service ends when the uniform comes off, whether sacrifice only counts if it happens on a battlefield in a way that’s easy to categorize and commemorate.
They are asking whether we mean what we say when we call Har Herzl a resting place for the righteous.
The policy says no, but Joshua’s life and legacy say otherwise.
That tension, between what we ask of people and what we are willing to give them in return, between the sacrifices we demand and the ones we’re willing to recognize, is not going to resolve itself. It will outlast this particular bureaucratic decision. It will outlast the investigation into Joshua’s death.
Because the question is not really about him anymore.
The question is about us. About whether our definitions of honor and sacrifice are wide enough to encompass the lives we ask people to give up. About whether righteousness disappears the moment it becomes difficult to classify.
Joshua Boone believed with all his heart that Israel was worth defending. He proved it for 748 days.
Now, Israel must decide if he was right.
Photo Credit: Unsplash