A few years ago, at Ramat Rachel, a beautiful kibbutz on the southern edge of Jerusalem, the kind of place that seems almost designed for healing, I sat with a group of American combat veterans, men and women who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were brought to Israel through Heroes to Heroes, a nonprofit dedicated to helping American combat veterans return to civilian life by finding restoration and healing in the Holy Land.
I taught them the Sixth Commandment — and I mean the actual words of the original Hebrew, not the translation most of them had grown up reading. Most English translations render it as “Thou shall not kill”. But the Hebrew word is retzichah, murder, not killing. There is a world of difference between the two. A soldier who kills in battle to defend the innocent is not a murderer and has not violated the Sixth Commandment. The Bible uses a completely different word, harigah, for when soldiers kill enemies in battle. The heroic men and women sitting across from me had killed many enemy combatants during their years of service in the United States military. But not once did they ever violate the Sixth Commandment.
Something shifted in that room. For many of them, this was the first time anyone had told them clearly: what you did was not the sin of murder, but rather the righteous fulfillment of God’s command to protect the innocent and destroy evil.
That conversation, in Jerusalem, between an Orthodox rabbi and a room full of American Christian combat veterans, is why I want to tell you about a bag of coffee.
I am writing this as a fragile ceasefire holds between Israel and Iran following weeks of direct military confrontation. Israeli and American forces struck Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure in one of the most consequential operations in the history of the Middle East. The men and women who fight these wars, Israeli and American alike, do not come home unchanged. The soldiers who sat with me at Ramat Rachel know that as well as anyone.
Iron Dome Coffee was built for exactly this moment.
Justin Yehuda founded the company in the weeks after October 7th, after watching open support for Hamas erupt on his Cornell campus and then, from his apartment window, in the streets of New York City. What made it personal wasn’t the protests. It was the phone call telling him that his cousin, Benyamin Asulin, had been killed defending Israel. Benny wasn’t a statistic. Benny was family.
Justin’s response was to build something: premium coffee, roasted in Israel, with 18% of every purchase going directly to nonprofits that support wounded IDF soldiers and their families.
The coffee is excellent. Jerusalem Sunrise, Sabra Spirit Dark Roast, Chutzpah Caramel, Haifa Hazelnut, Tel Aviv French Vanilla. These are not novelty products slapped with an Israeli flag. Over 20,000 Americans are already buying it. But the point is what it funds: soldiers who came home from Gaza, from Lebanon, from whatever comes next, and need real support to rebuild their lives.
What most buyers don’t know is that Iron Dome Coffee also funds Heroes to Heroes, which means it supports American veterans too, people navigating the disorienting passage from military service to civilian life, often alone, often struggling. The ten-day journey to Israel that Heroes to Heroes provides is at the heart of what the program does: veterans of all faiths engage with the land of the Bible, meet Israelis who understand what it means to live under constant threat, and begin to reframe what they experienced in uniform — sometimes, as in that room at Ramat Rachel, with the help of a Hebrew word they had never heard before.
The bond I felt with those veterans was not sentimental. It was the bond of people who understand, from different angles, that there is evil in the world that has to be fought, and that the men and women who fight it deserve to come home with their dignity intact.
As the ceasefire holds and the world waits to see what comes next, this is a chance to do something real. Not a petition, not a social media post. Coffee.
Stand with our heroic soldiers. Order Iron Dome Coffee today.
