When Senior Citizens Minister Uri Orbach went into critical condition Sunday evening, his doctors did not expect him to make it through the night – but Orbach loved upending people’s expectations.

Orbach died at age 54 on Monday in Shaare Zedek Medical Center of a chronic blood disease. He left behind his wife, Michal, and four children, and was buried in Modi’in.

A bespectacled man of slight build with a thick mustache and crocheted kippa, Orbach never looked like he could pack as hard a punch as he did whenever he took the podium, but words were both his weapon and his plaything.

He had an unparalleled ability to string them together in a way that was simultaneously entertaining and effective.

Before Orbach entered politics, running on the Bayit Yehudi-New NRP list in 2009, he was best known as a humorist, radio host, columnist and author of books for children and adults, whose talent for word play and wit was unmatched.

Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett posted a video of a 1994 political TV program on Facebook Sunday night, in which everyone participating praised then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin for shaking PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s hand, and Orbach was the only one to say – managing, as he did in the Knesset, to be both witty and serious at the same time – that just because his fellow members of the press were throwing a victory party, and just because Rabin shook his hand, Arafat didn’t turn from a murderer into a statesman.

Orbach wrote the 90s political slogans-turned-ubiquitous- bumper-stickers; “The Nation is With the Golan” and “Hebron From Time Immemorial,” to oppose territorial concessions.

Yet of all the puns and digs at the Left he made over the past decades, perhaps the most influential phrase turned by Orbach was “Send the Best to the Press,” a take on the wellknown Hebrew phrase “Send the Best to the Air Force.”

Read the article in full at the Jerusalem Post.