This seems very problematic to me.
Many, many Sabbath-observant people were killed…
Doesn’t He know how to distinguish between someone who keeps the Sabbath and someone who doesn’t?

What the Rabbi wrote also isn’t clear.
That in principle there is protection,
but somehow small things “slip through” or “get away from Him,”
and really there’s no difference between “small” things and “big” ones—
so what does He actually succeed in protecting against?
The small things slip through and get away,
and the big things—there’s simply no difference between them and the small ones…

Let our master teach us.

Since you’re not new here, I assume you know my view about divine involvement in the world. Here I wrote an explanation based on the assumption that there is such involvement.
Protection is not hermetic, and under various circumstances, with no necessary connection to whether something is small or large, it is not effective. Therefore I see no justification at all for the question raised here.
I do not know how many Sabbath-observant people were killed (on Simchat Torah in the massacre, not in the war). Generally speaking, those who were killed there were not Sabbath-observant.

Forgive me, honorable Rabbi.
The Rabbi is dodging.

Anyone who thinks that the Holy One, blessed be He, is currently intervening in reality,
and knows that the trains and crematoria in Auschwitz also operated on the Sabbath,
and that there were pogroms, terrorist attacks, and murders on the Sabbath too—yes, including against Sabbath-observant Jews,
and that on Simchat Torah as well people were slaughtered, killed, and other terrible things happened on the Sabbath—yes, including to Sabbath-observant Jews,
must admit that something is not working in this system.
The Sabbath does not really protect.
All the more so, God does not really protect.

Those are the facts.
One can argue that God is not involved in reality today,
and then the question about the blessing still stands in its place:
what is the point of a blessing that reality itself contradicts?

It seems to me that the basic premise is incorrect. When the Sages say that a certain commandment causes a certain result, the intention is that there is some connection, but not that it is the exclusive cause, or even a significant one. If the connection between a commandment and its result were clear, everyone would keep the commandments, so there is no doubt that even in the time of the Sages this was a minor connection whose meaning was mainly conceptual (they would not have said to lower the level of security protection on the Sabbath or to put less effort into fieldwork in order to invest more in ritual handwashing).

By the way, I don’t know whether even that minor connection exists in our current reality; perhaps it exists only when the nation is at a higher spiritual level, as is stated explicitly in many places in the Torah. It seems to me that this is roughly Rabbi Michi’s approach regarding divine intervention in present reality.

P.S. As I understand it, that is the plain meaning of the term “hester panim”: the connection between our relationship with God and material reality weakens or disappears.

The Sabbath protects, but if someone has a smartphone, that draws trouble onto him.

Pinchas is right.
It is well known that
Jews were not massacred on the Sabbath until the smartphone appeared in the world.

With God’s help, 1 Av 5784

On Simchat Torah, almost every community experienced the confrontation with the enemy on its own (until the army came to its senses), in the sense of “the few against the many.” The heroism of the emergency squads, police officers, and individuals who stood against the enemy almost empty-handed was full of miracles.

This consciousness of a “covenant of fate” and a “covenant of destiny,” in which each individual is prepared to give his life for his brothers, for the family, for the community, and for the entire people, was built over thousands of years to a great extent thanks to the Sabbaths, in which each person stepped out of the race of his private material life and connected to the Torah, to the community, and to the hope for the redemption of the entire nation.

The attachment to spiritual values, to the aspiration for unity and brotherhood, and to the expectation of a world over which a “shelter of peace will be spread over us, over all His people Israel, and over Jerusalem” — is the offspring of generations of Sabbath observance. Not for nothing did they say: “More than Israel kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept them.”

Even if there is some weakening in the observance of the details of the commandments, the spirit that gives a central place to values, to faith, and to consciousness of the covenant has not been lost, and at a moment of testing it awakens once again. Among many people there is more connection and understanding between the different parts of the people, more aspiration to strengthen the connection to Judaism, and more hope and faith in a better future.

With blessings, Fish”l

The source of the expression “More than Israel kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept them” — see the Wikipedia entry “More than Israel kept the Sabbath…” — is in the words of Ahad Ha’am, who meant the Sabbath’s preservation of the spirit of the nation.

With blessings, Fish”l

More on the reasons for concluding with “who spreads the shelter of peace” —
in the article by Dr. Michael Gross, “Studies in the Prayer Book — On ‘Who Spreads the Shelter of Peace,’” on the Orot Israel College website, and in the article by Rabbi Zvi Schwartz, “‘Shelter of Peace’ and ‘Shelter of Shalem,’” on the Torah and the Land Institute website.

With blessings, Fish”l