The Green Tatoo

Ever-Increasing Light

A Messianic Daily Devotional

“Because I love Zion, I will not keep still. Because my heart yearns for Jerusalem, I cannot remain silent. I will not stop praying for her until her righteousness shines like the dawn, and her salvation blazes like a burning torch” (Isaiah 62:1).

Side-by-side on a rickety and scarred wooden bench, we peeled potatoes together nearly every day for a year. As a young adult, I worked on a kibbutz near Petach Tikvah, Israel. Golda, my co-worker, was a Holocaust survivor.

Narrowly escaping from a concentration camp, Golda fled to Israel as a young adult. She never mentioned the war or imprisonment. But I will never forget the day she pushed up her sleeves in the kitchen, exposing her green tattoo—crudely scrawled on the tender flesh of her forearm.

My eyes fell on the numbers coldly assigned to her. I swallowed a gasp of…