Question

I listened to the Rabbi’s lectures on dogmas, among other things regarding the death of a Jew because he is a Jew, and right afterward I saw this, so I couldn’t resist sharing it (published on the website of Yeshivat Har Etzion):
A halakhic tradition has been handed down in Israel that a Jew who is killed violently by gentiles is called holy. And in this regard no distinction is made from one person to another: whether that person was God-fearing all his life, meticulous in minor commandments as in major ones, or whether he had cast off the yoke of Heaven and the yoke of the commandments. Nevertheless, once he has been killed, he is called and considered holy; and not only that, but his sins are not mentioned or counted against him at all, and regarding such a person they say, “No creature can stand in their section [in Paradise].”.
The idea of sanctifying God’s name, when a Jew allows himself to be killed for the sake of the holiness of the Torah and faith, is as ancient as the Jewish people itself. But apparently, what is the reason and meaning of this expansion of the concept to every Jew in all circumstances? What is the idea behind calling “holy” someone who had no such intention whatsoever, and did not think at all about the sanctification of God at the moment he was killed? In order to understand these matters in depth, one must understand the words of the Sages, who interpreted in this way the shocking verses in Psalm 44, and especially the verse, “For Your sake we are killed all day long.” And the essence of the matter is this: when a Jew is killed by gentiles, it may be that immediately the thought was not specifically about his being a Jew, and he himself, the person who gave up his life, neither imagined nor thought of it. But at the root of things, at their primary source, no Jew is killed except because he is a Jew, and his being a Jew expresses in its deepest essence—after all the concealments, which sometimes he himself desires—the essential eternal bond between the Jewish people and the Holy One, blessed be He. And therefore, in the final accounting, this is the truth: “For Your sake we are killed.”