Yet another military funeral

I've been going to military funerals for more than 40 years. This says more about my age than anything else: people old enough have been going to funerals for 60, or 70, or 90 years. Though the funerals before 1948 weren't military, technically. So there's that. The young soldiers at the entrance to the cemetery handing out fliers explaining how to behave in the case of a rocket attack, however, are an innovation.

This was the second funeral I've joined in a week. The first was of Max Steinberg, a young American Jew who came here alone to defend us, so 30,000 of us came to thank him. Today it was 21-year-old Barkai Shorr, whose father, Yaron, I have known for 46 years. And that was the first thing I noticed about the crowd. There were thousands of us, not tens of thousands, from widely diverse social circles: People who went to grade school with Yaron, high school with Barkai, the synagogue of Barkai's grandmother, neighbors neighbors neighbors, professional colleagues of Yaron but also professional colleagues of Barkai, and on and on. Yet it was clear that people from different circles also knew each other. Maybe we really are just one big circle.

Yaron spoke on his son's grave in a clear and steady voice. He told us about his family, which has been living in Jerusalem for 180 years. He told about Barkai, whose single most important characteristic was his constant volunteering (I noted the large number of Magen David Adom staff, where he's been a volunteer for six years). He told about his name,which is a bit unusual; it's a mishnaic word for dawn, and he was born at dawn. Yaron quoted a Mishna which uses the word barkai: on the morning of Yom Kippur the High Priest started working when the barkai was bright enough to see down to Hebron. He told about Barkai's years at a yeshiva in Hebron. He told us that for the coming 180 years his family's clan in this land will have lots of descendants named Barkai. Finally, he told us all, the thousands of us, to volunteer, to commit acts of service for others, and each time to say to ourselves: Barkai. Barkai. Barkai.

That was the only time his own voice cracked.

The military cemetery sits on a high hill above Jerusalem, and as we were burying Barkai you could see the magic gold of Jerusalem at sunset, Jerusalem of Gold.

As the crowds were dispersing Hamas rockets from Gaza were being shot down over the hills to the west and one could hear the explosions.

                                                      *               *                *

Every family is different, and each funeral is unique even within the structure of a military ceremony. Five years ago I was at a military funeral, that of Nitai Stern. I went there in the name of our son Achikam, Nitai's friend, since Achikam himself was fighting in Gaza. Here's what I wrote that day, about that funeral. I can hope there won't be any further ones.

Aharon Karov, Marathon Man

Back in January 2009, when this blog was still active, I began following the story of Aharon Karov, a young infantry lieutenant who was called to his unit less than 12 hours after his wedding and sent to battle in Gaza, where he was critically wounded. At the time the doctors didn't expect him to live. (My previous post on him, with links to all the previous ones, is here).

Today's edition of Makor Rishon (Hebrew, not online), tells that he and his wife Zvia now have two children, a 3-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy, that he's studying at university, and that he's flying to New York this week to run in the upcoming New York Marathon.

David Brummer, RIP

David Brummer, author of the Seattle-based Brumspeak blog, has passed away. His most recent post was about Ari Shavit's recent interesting interview with Moshe (Bogie) Yaalon, just two weeks ago.

I never met David in the flesh, but we knew each other thru the blogosphere. If memory serves he first made contact to assure me one could live in the Jewish community in Seattle and have no knowledge of the existence of that town's most famous anti-Zionist blogger. His profile contains this explanation for his blogging:

The genesis for this project stems from my own efforts to reconcile a social worker’s worldview with a post 9/11 world. While dialogue,conciliation,and compromise continue to be necessary ingredients to any long-term resolution,it has become clear that a new paradigm is needed in the battle for decency,pluralism,and basic human rights for all. As a social worker and psychotherapist,I know that the only way to effect real change is to start with an unsparing assessment of where we find ourselves at the starting gate and why. In recent years, there has been an assault on truth which has diminished our ability to understand and define what we are struggling to achieve. These new battles must be fought in the realm of ideas as much as on any battlefield. It is my hope that this Blog can be a vehicle to explore and more fully articulate some of those ideas and worldviews that so preoccupy us today.

His photo fits the image: one of these kind folks who expected the world could be fixed if everyone had enough goodwill, who then came to understand over time that either they wouldn't (all have the goodwill) or couldn't, perhaps because of conflicting agendas. Indeed, that's essentially what his final post says. In politics, at least, he lived long enough to reach maturity; in all other respects, he obviously didn't live long enough.

As the traditional sephardi condolence greeting goes: may his family find solace in the rebuilding of Zion.

As for everybody else, I suggest paying respect by reading his final post.

A Land of Brutal Beauty, Humanity and Brutality

The other day the Guardian published a long, wandering, and not particularly interesting article about what they call "non-monogamus marriage", or what used to be called "open marriage". You know the Guardian approves of something when it doesn't lace its paragraphs with spurious references to "observers say this is an awful thing", as they always do when writing about Israel - so clearly the editorial line is that non-monogamus-thingies are Good Things.

When writing about faraway places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, however, the Guardian generally prefers the noble savages to the soldiers from America (or Britain). Which is a bit odd, if you ever ask yourself what the noble savages might have to say about a culture which spawns open partnerships. If you're having trouble with your pondering, I warmly recommend a short and powerful new book, The Wandering Falcon, by Jamil Ahmad.


It's actually not such a new book. Mr. Ahmad, born in 1930, was a high-ish Pakistani civil servant who spent much of his time in the less tamed parts of Pakistan, before ending up at the Pakistani embassy in Kabul. At some point he wrote a series of short stories about the people among whom he was spending his life, and put them in his drawer. Only recently someone convinced him they were worthy of being published - and how very right they were.

Have you ever read Frank Herbert's  Dune books? Well, Ahmad's is a book about the real, original. A society which ekes out a subsistence existence in a harsh desert world. Its members live by a harsh code of honor, which for all I know may help them cope with the severity of life, though I rather doubt it. You read the codes of the Torah, writen thousands of years ago for a society which also had its harsh elements, and you understand that violence is something which needs to be tamed, not only channelled. Still, the power of Ahmad's book is that he describes his wandering tribespeople, without judging them, and he does so from their own persepctive or something close to it. Some parts of his book, the first chapter in particular, are very poignant, and they're all deeply human.

Read it, and see if you can find any connection to the world of the Guardian. I wasn't able to.

Photographs which Say the Opposite

Michael Totten recommends an essay by Walther Russel Mead, who claims that America very much won the war in Iraq. Personally I think it's still too early to know, but I"m glad such a compelling and cogent argument can be made; it wasn't long ago that anyone who didn't regard the American war in Iraq as total lunacy, was assumed to be a lunatic themselves. Perspective will make the picture look different.

Michael then links to a weird collections of photos from North Korea, by Charlie Crane. Crane was allowed into North Korea to take pictures, but only the pictures his minders permitted. So he turned the tables on them by taking only pictures they'd approve of, and presents them to us confident that we'll see what he saw, not what they saw: even though it's all the same pictures. Genius. One of Michael's readers then suggests another website that does something very similar: it takes official pictures of Kim Jong-Il, adds a very thin layer of ridicule, and suddenly the pictures say the opposite of what their creators intended.

Both websites use our conditioning as citizens in democracies, to turn totalitarian photographs on their head, without tampering with the photos themselves in any way. Fascinating.

Haim on Niot z"l

Haim Watzman has begun writing about his dead son Niot.

In Hebrew, the word that means “pastures” (or “oasis” or any green place) is “Niot.” But there’s a small problem. The word is in construct form, a declension that never stands alone. It requires completion.

“He’ll complete it himself, in his life,” Ilana says.

Eliezer's Handshake

We're not close friends, Eliezer and I. He's almost a decade older than my father would have been, were he still alive. Born in a small town in Eastern Europe, he was a teenager when his father sent him off to Budapest in the hope things would be better there, which in a way they probably were, since Eliezer survived and the rest of his family didn't. I think about that sometimes: The teenager sent off by his father; the survivor now twice as old as his father ever was.

After the war he came to Israel, and in the 1950s started a family, but it wasn't a happy ending. His second son has disabilites, and today, in his early 50s, you can still see this pains Eliezer. His wife, the mother of his three children, died of cancer in about 1970; I remember how her slow death was whispered at school, and can only imagine how horrible it was for her, and for him. Their oldest son, Avi, about whom I've written here and elsewhere, was scarred by his mother's death, to an extent that even we, teenager boys, could recognize. Then in 1982 he was killed in battle, landing Eliezer yet another body blow.

He's not a cheerful man, Eliezer, but he's very much alive. At our synagogue he's one of the stalwarts of the conservative branch of the congregation, the ones who are wary of some of the more liberal innovations which sometimes are mooted, yet he's always respectful of the liberalizers who could be his grandchildren, and they treat him with courtesy and accept that some changes can't be done so long as he and his group are still with us. A few years ago he was seriously ill, and it would have been reasonable to suppose he'd reached the tipping point beyond which old men fade away, but no. He lay at home for a few weeks, then determinedly made his way to synagogue with a walker, then a cane, and now he's back to normal; I often see him at the pool.

We're not close friends, Eliezer and I, but he knows I preserve Avi's memory, and this has created a bond between us. "Your husband knew my son Avi", he once said to my wife, who responded "I know". "You do? How?" "They were friends, Avi and Yaacov, and Yaacov remembers, and talks about him".

It's memorial day, and last week was Yom Hashoah, and tomorrow evening we'll begin celebrating Israel's 63rd Independence Day, and Eliezer is part of all these days. I usually make a point of going over to him after services to shake his hand. His grip is the steeliest handshake I've ever experienced.

Condolences for Haim Watzman

Niot Watzman, son of the co-author of the South Jerusalem Blog Haim Watzman, has been killed in an accident. He was 20. Haim recently blogged about a friend who lost a daughter and wrote a meaningful book about the loss and life thereafter. Haim has already written two books and translated many more; maybe he'll someday be able to craft one out of this horror, unimaginable as the thought must be today.

"If there's one thing that even slightly consoles me", he told me this morning, "it's that Niot was a happy person. He enjoyed his life".

Triangle Shirtwaist Catastrophe

100 years ago today 146 people, mostly women, mostly new immigrants, many of them Jews, perished in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York. The world has changed dramatically since then, and the horrible deaths contributed their bit to some of the beneficial changes.

The article behind the link ends with allusions to present-day political disagreements, while admitting the comparisons aren't very useful. Non-unionized immigrant women cooped up in a fire trap by rapacious factory owners a century ago don't tell us much about well-payed teachers employed by the public today. Yet this shouldn't hide the fact that a century ago the unions were on the right side of the story, and many important parts of the story still remained to be told, and people suffered - and sometimes died - because they hadn't yet been told.

It's Nice to be Safe and Powerful

The New York Times has a report by a group of its journalists who were arrested by Gaddafi forces a few weeks ago and treated badly before they were released. It's well worth reading, for what's in it - and what isn't. Mohammed, the driver, isn't. Or rather, he is, briefly, until at the first encounter with Libyan troops he get's killed, mourned for two sentences by his American charges, and forgotten. Of course he isn't mentioned in the title. "Four Times Journalists Held".

The journalists suffered during their days of captivity, they were roughed up, sometimes seriously roughed up, and the woman among them was repeatedly groped. The worst part, in their telling, was that they didn't know what lay ahead of them, though they apparently knew rather early on that their captors were taking their American citizenship seriously. It's an easy bet that 99%-plus of their readership has never been treated as badly and never will. Sadly, it's also the case that 100% of the locals, had they been in the same predicament, would have ended much worse - as Mohammed did.

I've been watching the frenzied discussions in the US and Europe about military interventions, when are they allowed, when advisable, what may legitimately trigger them, what about them is all wrong. The more I watch, the more I grow envious. It must be a wonderful thing to be able to deliberate when you'll use force and when you'll lean back, shrug your shoulders, perhaps utter a few words of deepest regret, and then get on with your daily life secure in the knowledge that your daily life won't be much impacted by the whole deliberation one way or the other. It must truly be wonderful to live your life that way.

This isn't new, of course. I remember the evening we first arrived in Israel, in the summer of 1967. My parents, both of whom had lived as high-school students through World War II, and then had lived a number of years in post-war Germany where my father was an American officer, were as well educated as anyone, and were probably more aware than many Americans of what the world was like. And yet, in the cab up from the airport one of them asked the cab driver "if he knew anyone who had been in the recent Six Day War. "I was in it" he responded. Gasp. Half an hour later we reached Jerusalem and the cabbie needed directions. So he pulled over by a group of people dancing around a fire on an empty lot. A young teenager came over exuberantly and chanted "we won! we won!"

Apparently it had been a very immediate experience, not the "Middle East Crises" the media had been blabbering about for two months.

I'm not being facetious, or even particularly cynical or bitter. I'm simply pointing out a basic dynamic: the citizens of rich and powerful nations (or, in the case of most of Europe, rich and purposefully not so powerful) don't really have anything existential to worry about on the national level. True, there are rare cases of terrorism, but how many of those citizens knows anyone to the third degree of separation who was present at a terror event? And anyway, terror events don't threaten the national existence or anything like it. Unless hassles at airports can be tagged as a threat.

The rest of us live in a different world. Here's Sylvia, a regular reader and sometime commenter on this blog, in a comment she posted here about half an hour ago:

A rocket just hit I would guess maybe 20 meters or less from my house in Sderot a few minutes ago (I don't have a shelter yet).
This afternoon Grad rockets hit Ashdod the impact was heard in Kiryat Gat. This in addition to Beer Sheva and Ashkelon in the past 24 hours.
Although the area has been regularly hit by rockets from the Gaza strip in the past year, little attention has being paid to those Palestinian crimes, as if it's not worth our time, or as if those people don't count since it is neither Jerusalem nor Shenkin.
Instead we all engage in endless mental masturbation over which radical yoyo said what and how. Of that I plead guilty myself.

Yet, we should look at the lessons from the past. The world was shocked by Cast Lead because it was unaware of its context: eight-years of brutal, daily rocket assaults inflicted on unarmed civilians by the Palestinians of Gaza. And it was unaware because it didn't look sexy enough to the media including the blogging community.

Today, we are repeating that history and engaging ourselves in the same process of banalization of Israeli suffering. These things should be often, thoroughly and specifically discussed, not just mentioned in passing at best or else ignored. Context.

The Real Heroes of March

The few hundred Japanese engineers and technicians trying to head off nuclear catastrophe at Fukishima. Undoubtedly the world's top heroes this March.

The Other Oldest Profession

There's no concrete evidence that the world's oldest profession really is the oldest. There are ancient examples of it, or course, but the assumption it's the oldest is simply because it's human nature.

So here's another profession that has been around forever: dictators. Or anyway, men who use force and brutality to dominate their fellow men. This is also human nature, and has also been around forever. Both professions will also always be here, never to disappear. Human nature ensures that.

As the international community talks its way out of assisting the brave Libyans fighting for freedom from a brutal dictator and his cruel henchmen, it's worth keeping in mind that even if they did want to do anything, the only people who can are the armed and the trained. Over the past few weeks I have repeatedly noted how the international ineptitude must remind us the importance of never being weak. The flip side is that the price of pacifism and disarmament means accepting brutal dictators.

Something to keep in mind next time someone claims the moral high ground for their pacifism.

Sonya Levy, RIP

Sonya Levy was an archivist at Yad Vashem. I gave her a job when she made aliya from Bulgaria in 1996, and from then until shortly before her death she was in charge of the Bulgarian collection, which she also considerably expanded by bringing in additional microfilmed collections. I didn't have much daily contact with her. There were 150 people on the archives staff, Sonya was competent and needed no interventions from me, and my focus was on other things.

A few months ago she passed away, 57 years old. Her friends have now put up a tribute to her on YouTube - in Hebrew, the language she (and they) adopted. May she rest in peace.

Policy: Get Rid of Surplus People

In the years leading up to the First World War, German society was infused with the idea that diverse problems such as unemployment, urban planning and food supply would be best resolved by getting rid of spare people. This was not a Nazi idea - the Nazis hadn't been invented yet - nor was it particularly controversial; people of most political persuasions agreed on the principle. It was only many years later, in the 1990s, that a generation of young German historians looked back at the documentation and discovered that there had been a widely accepted conceptual infrastructure which was then used by the Nazis; since most people had accepted the idea, the Nazi policies encountered less resistance than they otherwise might have, and found more willing accomplices than they should have. The single best book on this was by Goetz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction, originally published in German as Vordenker der Vernichtung..

Exactly a century later, there is a different rising power which is using similar ideas in formulating policies: China. See for example the idea that if there's congestion or pollution in Beijing the solution must be to deport hundreds of thousands of people.

Now I'm not saying the Chinese are proto-Nazis, though the mainstream German intellectuals of 1911 would mostly have been horrified to hear where they were headed. History never precisely repeats itself, anyway. But nor does it end, or have permanent happy endings, or learn from the past.

The Bereaved

It was dusk by the time we reached Leora Hason's cafe in Naama, and many of us had been on the road since before dawn. The cafe was to be our last stop before heading home, and it was nice that it looked like a warm sort of place, simple, but inviting. After we had our cups of tea or coffee, Leora came out from behind her counter and began talking. "This isn't actually a cafe: it's a memorial", she began, and a total hush descended.

Her son Guy opened the place, along with his girlfriend, on June 1st 2006. By mid-July he was climbing the wall as Hisballah shot rockets at civilians all over northern Israel but he wasn't mobilized. By early August he finally was, and by mid August he was dead.

"The first year was surreal. Obviously someone had made a mistake, and he'd call any moment and laugh away the confusion. The second was worse, because he wasn't ever going to come back. The third year was worse than the second. Then, in 2009, an elderly woman told me she envied me. What is there possibly to envy? That her son, killed in the Yom Kippur war, is gone and forgotten, a mere name on a list whom no-one remembers anymore; Guy is still a living memory. So I've re-opened his cafe, and I tell about him, and about how we've got to make life in this country worth dying for. And that's what I do, here in this cafe he built which still stands exactly as he built it".

By the time we wandered out it was dark. We milled around for a few minutes, until the last stragglers got back to the bus. I found myself standing near one of the six or seven Arabs of our group, who was pacing nervously back and forth. Curious to hear how he'd responded to the event, but not knowing how to ask, we began by chatting about his town in the Galilee, where two local Arab women were killed that summer by Hisballah rockets. But that wasn't what he wanted to talk about. "You know, I lost a 16-year-old son, a bit more than 14 months ago, in a traffic accident. That's why when she talked about how it keeps getting harder and harder, it was like a flame in my stomach. I haven't been able to get back to normality, and don't know when I ever will".

We were joined by another man, a 40-something, bald man with glasses and a ponytail. "Eventually, it will get better. I lost my brother in the Yom Kippur war, and for a long time the pain was unbearable. Then I came across a comment by Rashi, our 11th century scholar. He says that the reason Jacob never managed to get over his grief about the loss of Joseph was because Joseph wasn't really dead. The dead, you see, eventually do get forgotten from our hearts (mishtakchim min halev). Then I finally knew it was permissible for me to let go. Someday it will get better,believe me".

As I turned to get on the bus, the bereaved Arab father was discussing the impossibility of his ever forgetting his dead son with the bereaved brother from a long-past war. Leora was clearing up Guy's cafe and shutting down for the day.

Technology and the Internet Do Not Promote Freedom (Alas)

That, in a nutshell, seems to be the thesis of Evgeny Morozov's new book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. The book is reviewed here, and what I'm getting from it is that human nature, once again, trumps technology. Dictators and other nasties can use technology just as well as freedom fighters, and increasingly, they do.Technology can change the world in many ways, but utopia is no more likely to happen than it ever wasn't.

The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives

I spent part of the afternoon with Doug Merlino and his wife. Doug's book The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White just came out this week, so we talked about it. It's the story of a school basketball team in Seattle in which comfortable white students played with poor black ones; years later Doug went back to see what had happened to them all and found that the experience had played out differently for the members of each group.

Since the book only just came out I can't pretend I've read it, but it seems interesting, and Doug had interesting things to tell about it, so it may well be something you'll want to look at. Or at least visit the website and see if it interests you.

Wieseltier on Richard Holbrooke - and on America

Leon Wieseltier has a moving obituary for his friend Richard Holbrooke, America's top-notch diplomat who died suddenly this week.

Wiesetlier's description of Holbrooke evokes what some of us still think of America itself, at least when it strives for its best. So: Rest in peace, Richard Holbrooke; and strive for your best, America.

The Unadulterated Joy of Beethhoven

No words I might add would make it any better.

Fire on the Carmel - Followup

Ever heard of California? Australia? Greece? Russia? I ask because they all spring to mind when talking about gigantic fires which rage uncontrolled for weeks, causing loss of life and enormous economic damage. Nature is often greater than Man's ability to control it.

The public recriminations in Israel are already starting, and can be expected to get worse. Harshly lambasting the government is a national pastime. There's probably a lot of truth to the allegations that the fire-fighters are underfunded, under-equipped, lack a national command structure, and generally were near the back of the line of issues crying out for government funding. Moreover, if the political fallout includes some harm to Eli Yishai, the head of Shass and perhaps the Neandethal-in-Chief of the present coalition, who's going to complain.

Yet having said all that, I doubt there's much connection between the complaints and what just happened. Look at the four snapshots taken by Dan Oren, a coincidental observer to the worst part of the story, the incident in which 41 people died, pole-vaulting the fire to an international story and calamity.
 
Flames that size can't be stopped, not by any force humans can wield; if you follow the entire sequence, taken within seconds, you'll see the speed with which the fire raced forward.

Nor is the growing chatter about how predictable the whole thing was, serious. The final bout of rain last winter was early, at the end of February. Then we had the hottest summer on record, and so far, the driest and hottest autumn ever; 2010 is apparently the first year since records began in the late 19th century in which there has been no effective rain by early December. In 2006 Hezbullah shot thousands of rockets at Israel, and there were no major fires; this one seems to have been started by one campfire light by two young idiots, then fanned by unusually strong, hot and dry easterly winds, in an area which normally has westerly winds which would have blown the fire away from the forest.

In the meantime, the rescue efforts included a reasonably efficient and orderly evacuation of some 20,000 people from their homes; there have been no reports of looting; and officialdom seems confident the damage payments will be paid out fairly and soon.

I'm all in favor of learning lessons from failures so there will be fewer of them next time, or they'll happen in unexpected places. I don't see how this event could have been prevented, no matter how much preparation there had been.

I'm also not going to join the chorus of fundraisers. I appreciate people's willingness to donate money in the aftermaths of calamities, but the situation in Haiti remains vastly worse than anything we've got here; Pakistan, too, though it's not clear your well-intentioned donations will reach their targets in Pakistan. Israel is a sovereign country with a functioning state, and we'll deal with whatever needs to be dealt with. Lost lives are lost forever, but all the other parts of the story will fixed; even the charred forest will eventually recover, though it may take a generation. (Goldblog is saying the same; he's often right).