Breakfast was serious business in the kibbutz dairy. Most of the people who worked there had already been working for three or four hours by the time we sat down at 9 A.M. to eat. We would take time to organize the work schedule for the rest of the day and, in any case, kibbutzniks take their small talk seriously. Like most Israelis, they are news addicts. I had been there for a few years, and still had to work hard at following the conversation. I had learned early-on that they didn’t get my warped brand of American humor. I was waiting for Hanania.
Hanania was a twenty five year-old mentally handicapped man, born and raised on the kibbutz, who would come to the dairy at 9 AM and work alongside me until lunchtime. This particular morning had been a particularly bad one for news. A truck had smashed into a busload of children from a nearby kibbutz, killing several children. The atmosphere around the breakfast table was respectfully somber, but pretty soon, we had to get back to business. Halfway through a heated discussion about a new technique for feeding dairy cattle, Hanania slammed the door open and began throwing a chair around, pushing dishes and food onto the floor. The annoyed kibbutzniks told me to calm the “retard” down and to take him outside. When I walked him outside, I gathered from his jumbled words that Hanania was upset about the bus accident. I started to try and calm him down. I thought it was my job to teach Hanania how to be “normal” and I knew that “normal” people don’t act this way when people they don’t personally know are killed. Suddenly, I stopped. I realized that, in truth, Hanania was on a much higher plane than the “normal’ people. Isn’t it right and fitting that we should scream and cry when a tragedy happens? Isn’t it a sign of mental illness that we have learned to accept such things calmly, so much so that we can say, “Oh, it’s not so bad, the terrorists only killed two Jews today?”
I want so mto be like Hanania. I have dear friends on Moshav Modi’in and go there often for Shabbos. This week, a son of the Moshav, Eish Kodesh Gilmour, was taken away from them by an Arab who shot him at his job as a security guard for Bituach Leumi in Jerusalem. I wasn’t a friend of his and my only connection was an occasional “Shabbat Shalom” accompanied by a nod. I used to see his wife and baby daughter wait for him outside the shul. I shouldn’t allow myself to be affected by the death of someone I barely knew, should I? It isn’t “normal’ and makes people uncomfortable in my presence. I’m sorry, but in truth, I don’t care. Ribono Shel Olam, I can’t help it. I want to scream and cry and make a spectacle of myself. I want to be unreasonable. I am scared of learning to accept these things quietly and politely. I hear people using reason and intellect to deal with such things, because, after all, that is the proper thing to do. It is quantified, objectified, rationalized, and sanitized. I hate it, and I will not allow the Yetzer Hara to put on the clothes of civility in order to steal precious tears from the world.
My heart and prayers go out to the Gilmours. God gave you a precious gift, and when He came to take it back, you gave him more than He had given you. You gave Him a tree that had borne fruit. You had cared for it and allowed it to grow, bringing the light of a beautiful neshama into the world. Your son’s name is also the name of a holy book that the Piezetsner Rebbe, Rav Kolonomus Kalman Shapira, wrote while he was trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto during the uprising. He was killed by the Nazis during the uprising, as was his own son. On the yahrtzeit of his son, the fourth day of Sukkot, he wrote in his book, Eish Kodesh, that the binding of Isaac was intention without action. Abraham had the intention of sacrificing his son to Hashem, but the action was halted. The Rebbe wrote that any Jew who dies just because he is a Jew is a santification of God. It is hard to believe this, because the intention that led to the killing was not so. The Rebbe continues that killing a Jew because he is a Jew is an action without intention. Such an action is the completion, the second half, of the binding of Isaac. It is, in actuality, Abraham offering another son in place of Isaac, thereby raising the Jew’s neshama up to the level of Isaac. How could it be otherwise?
Hashem, if there has to be pain in this world, why must it come to those who feel it so deeply? How can the giver of life bear to withhold His gift? O God, does the pain reach Your heart as well? If I could bless God, I would bless Him to take pain from the world so He would not have to feel it or see His creatures in pain anymore. Could it be that Hashem created everything as it is just to taste the sweetness of one of the thousands of tears a man sheds?
My God is a god that needs a man to cry. My God is a god that enfolds a man in His wings, catching every tear as it falls on His wingtips and lowers each tear gently to the ground to water and sustain the earth. My God is a god that cannot cry first but echoes the cries of every man, each echo a promise of redemption. This is how my God cries.