Last month, Gal Gadot was flying with her family when the plane’s captain approached her and introduced himself. Which, one would imagine, is the sort of thing that happens all the time when one is Gal Gadot. But this time was different. The captain, Ofer Aloni, wasn’t there for a selfie or an autograph; he wanted to tell Gadot a story.
In 2004, his daughter, Zohar, 24, flew to Koh Phi Phi, Thailand, with her boyfriend. Then, the tsunami hit, and Zohar went missing. Aloni flew to Thailand to search for her, only to receive the unbearable news that she had perished in the disaster.
Heartbroken, he was ready for his life to end. But then, as he told Gadot, he looked up at the sky and was struck by a profound realization: He had a wife and three sons and a duty to keep on living. “We can write our own life story,” he said. “We cannot change the past, but we do have the choice of how we live moving forward.”
Aloni wrote a song, commemorating his daughter’s life and the struggle to keep on in her absence. It’s called “Power to Choose,” composed by the band The Kin. Having met Conan O’Brien when the latter visited Israel last year, Aloni shared his song and his story with the talk show host, and O’Brien then posted “Power to Choose” on his Facebook page, helping the song go viral. Now Gadot did the same thing; you can watch it below.
“Everyone in the world has this spiritual power within them that is there to help us cope with emergencies and tragedies like this one,” Aloni said in a recent interview. “It’s part of being human. If we don’t use it, we might as well give up. And I wasn’t going to do that.”
A post shared by Gal Gadot (@gal_gadot) on May 8, 2018 at 11:45am PDT
Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.