Dolev Davidovitz, an Israeli media personality and lecturer, shared a deeply personal and dramatic life story in a wide-ranging interview with Yossi Avdo on the popular Israeli program Hashem Echad, describing an extraordinary transformation from militant atheism and open hostility toward religious Jews to a life of faith and purpose that he now describes as becoming an “ambassador of God.”

Davidovitz, who grew up in the heart of Kiryat Gat in a thoroughly secular environment and went on to compete as part of Israel’s national boxing team, spoke candidly about a past defined by contempt for religion. He said he was convinced that science had disproven faith, spent his days training, partying, and socializing, and derived particular enjoyment from provoking religious Jews in public spaces.

He described his childhood as happy and full of friends, but intensely secular. “An amazing childhood packed with good experiences and good friends,” he recalled, adding that it was “more secular than probably the average secular home,” to the point that Yom Kippur and Shabbos were entirely absent from his life.

Davidovitz said his attitude went far beyond indifference. “I hated chareidim, I hated Judaism, I hated anything holy,” he admitted. He described deliberately harassing religious Jews on trains, confronting them with taunts about military service, the existence of God, and the Holocaust. He also recalled intentionally taking selfies with seminary girls in the street to disturb them. “I would come back from school and go take selfies with seminary girls. They would run away from the selfie. I was just bothering chareidim for fun,” he said.

On Yom Kippur, he said, he and his friends would deliberately eat sandwiches in front of traditional Jews to provoke them. “On Yom Kippur we would go out with sandwiches to annoy people. We did it especially near more traditional Jews, because they were more observant, so we would annoy them,” he said.

Academically, Davidovitz said he viewed himself as part of an intellectual elite. He studied in a gifted program and immersed himself in physics, mathematics, biology, and chemistry. That environment, he said, reinforced a sense of superiority. “You automatically create this feeling that I’m an atheist, there is no God, and anyone who claims there is a God is stupid. He’s stupid and his whole family is stupid. We were the enlightened, rational secular people who don’t believe in God,” he said.

Despite that worldview, he recalled an early childhood question that lingered in his memory. At around age five, he asked his mother how God could see people if there was a ceiling. “My mother told me that God sees even through the ceiling,” he said.

The first crack in his certainty came unexpectedly through one of his confrontations. Davidovitz recounted stopping a Gerer chassid and asking him deliberately rude questions, only for the encounter to turn into a friendship. “Something went wrong for me,” he said. “I stopped a Gerer chassid, asked him some cheeky questions, and we became friends.”

Their late-night arguments unsettled him. “Those debates made me realize that Judaism actually has answers,” he said. “There were many questions he could answer, and that scared me.” One explanation struck him in particular: “He told me that scientists discovered that the highest level of blood clotting is on the eighth day. Whoever wrote the Torah already knew the mechanisms of clotting.”

Davidovitz said his military service along the Gaza border provided the space for deeper reflection. Standing guard alone under the stars, far from the noise of daily life, he began to question everything. “You’re on guard duty, on the Gaza line, just you and the stars,” he said. “Suddenly I started asking questions and realized one thing: It can’t be that I came into this world for 120 years of ice cream, schnitzel, girls, parties, and drugs, and then you die and worms eat you. There has to be something beyond.”

He read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning but rejected the idea of inventing purpose for himself. “I said, wait, am I fooling myself? Either there is meaning and I need to discover it, or there is no meaning,” he said.

After becoming intellectually convinced that there was a Creator, Davidovitz asked for a sign. “I said to myself in my heart, Creator of the world, if You really exist, do a miracle for me. I’m starving,” he recalled.

What followed left a lasting imprint. “Not even half a minute passed,” he said, “and on my left there were bushes, and inside them was a blue bag — a huge bag of potato chips — just sitting there, waiting for me. I understood. There was a kiss from God. God was showing me the way. I exist. I want a relationship with you.”

Before committing to change, Davidovitz said he examined other belief systems. “I put Buddhism aside. I was left with Christianity and Islam,” he said. “And I understood that they are based on Judaism. If Judaism is true, they can’t be true, because Judaism claims exclusivity.”

That realization initially filled him with fear rather than joy. “My life was ruined,” he said. “I said, wow, this is a bummer.” He explained that he was afraid of returning to religion because he believed it meant giving up who he was. “Today I understand that returning to religion is not giving up who you are — it’s upgrading who you are,” he said.

He described emotional final drives to the beach on Shabbos in his old car, a 2001 Renault Megane, caught between belief and habit. “One of the last Shabbasos, I remember driving to the sea, and Avraham Fried’s song ‘Ribbon Ha’olamim’ was playing. I was just driving and crying. That dissonance between knowing there is a God and still driving to the sea on Shabbos because it’s hard for you.”

His first visit to a beis medrash shocked him. Seeing young men shouting questions at a rabbi, he initially thought it was disrespectful. “I didn’t understand — is this how chareidim speak to elders?” he recalled. “They told me, no, this is the fire of Torah.”

Asked how he would respond to a secular young man emerging from war who accuses Torah students of parasitism, Davidovitz answered bluntly. “As someone who felt that way in the past, I understand him,” he said. “But with all due respect, you’re standing here a complete atheist, without Torah and without Jewish identity, and you’re calling me a parasite? I’m a Jew in the land of the Jews who refuses to enlist in an army that wants to uproot my Jewish identity. Before talking about parasitism, what about your last Shabbos? Did you keep it?”

In closing, Davidovitz stressed that influence should come through example, not coercion. “Spread the light you were exposed to, but not through preaching or forcing — that only pushes people away,” he said. “Just be yourselves. When people see how good your life is, that’s what brings them closer. Understand that you have responsibility. You are ambassadors of the Creator.”

{Matzav.com}