Six years ago, Scott Dodson stood in a hospital and said goodbye to his brother, who tragically bled out on the side of an Indiana road after a head-on collision with a truck. First responders resuscitated him three and four times just to keep him alive long enough for the family to get there. It was the last time Dodson would see him.

He has never forgotten the people who made that possible. And in the years since, saving lives – not just buying time, but actually saving them – has become the animating mission of his professional life.

Today, Dodson runs Compression Works, a Texas-based medical device company that makes a battlefield hemorrhage control device. The device does one thing: it stops severe bleeding on the battlefield fast enough to keep a soldier alive until they can reach a hospital. Since October 7, his devices have been in the hands of IDF soldiers going tunnel by tunnel through Gaza and southern Lebanon, where booby traps and blast injuries have become the defining wounds of this war. The device his brother never had is now in the hands of soldiers who need it most.

It was on that subject that Dodson sat down with Rabbi Rami Goldberg on Biblical Money, the faith-and-finance podcast produced by Israel365, for a conversation that ranged from Indiana farms to Gaza tunnels to the question of what really holds America and Israel together.

Nothing about Dodson’s background would predict where he ended up. He grew up on a farm in rural Indiana, a mile from his nearest neighbor, spending springs and summers planting corn and tending cattle. He got a football scholarship to Indiana University, studied business and finance, went to work at Black & Decker helping launch the DeWalt brand, and then spent 18 years at Boston Scientific running business groups from interventional radiology to international markets.

But during those years at Boston Scientific, traveling the world and working extensively with Israeli entrepreneurs and physicians, Dodson kept noticing something. The technologies he encountered – the ablation devices, the surgical imaging systems – traced back to IDF research and development. Every Israeli presentation, he recalled with a laugh, “started with surface-to-air missiles and shoulder-fired rockets and heads-up visual displays on fighter jets, and then all of a sudden you’re talking about MRI machines.” A country under permanent existential pressure, it turned out, produces relentless innovation. That observation stuck with him.

So did October 7. Dodson speaks bluntly about that day. “The events of October 7 were a prime example of what happens when readiness slips – when you sit back and let your guard down,” he said. Since then, he has watched Israel mobilize, and what he sees deeply impresses him. He grew up in a family where military service was a given. His father, his uncles, his family members all served. He knows what it looks like when a society takes service and patriotism seriously, and he sees it in Israel in a way he rarely sees anywhere else. “There can be no peace in the Middle East without a strong Israel,” he said. “Safety through strength.”

Beyond his work with Compression Works, Dodson serves in the Ambassadors for Israel program, raising funds for lone soldiers – young men who leave their families thousands of miles behind to serve in the Israeli army, then return from weeks in Gaza or Lebanon with nowhere to go. Israel365 runs a Lone Soldier Center in Israel that gives these soldiers a home to come back to, and is currently rebuilding the facility into a permanent structure with dormitory housing. For Dodson, supporting that mission is not a business decision. It is a personal one.

Rabbi Rami closed by noting that the Hebrew name for America – Artzot HaBrit – means “the covenantal lands,” a mirror to Israel’s own covenantal identity. Dodson did not pause. “We are two people under the same God. We are all children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That bond is irrevocable.”

From a hospital in Indiana to the tunnels beneath Gaza, Scott Dodson has spent his life learning what it costs to keep people alive. He knows which side he’s on.

To hear the full conversation, listen to the episode on Biblical Money, Rabbi Rami Goldberg’s podcast exploring faith, finance, Bible, and business.