Simply Lowered into the Earth

One week ago Friday I spent nearly 12 hours in a hospital watching my boyfriend's father fight the cancer that took him away a few hours after the entrance of Shabbat. With Eitan, his mother, sister and brother, I watched Eitan's father, Yisrael, take his final breaths through a bag of oxygen and a telling heart monitor that we all watched in fear and a dreaded knowing of how the evening was going to end.

Having watched my own grandfather slip away from the world of the living just eight months ago, I promised Eitan that once the struggle finished, he would see his father at peace, there would be no more worry in his brow or pain in his clenched jaw. Just as my grandfather let go of all of us with a tear and a smile, so too would his abba.

The death of my boyfriend's father is not a likely topic for a blog that seeks to explore truths on the journey to resolution. But after a year of studying the history of the Middle East, I'm not so sure that resolution is an option, but the truths are still important for the hope that someday something will change. And so, after witnessing the death, burial and mourning rituals for Eitan's father, I believe that there is a truth to be told, a truth of Israel as the state for the Jewish people, to be Jewish in sorrow and in joy.

Eitan's father came from Romania to Israel in the 1960s. Much of his family was killed in the Holocaust, he was born in 1949, one year after the birth of the State of Israel. Yisrael Harod grew up in Yash, a small Romanian city, perhaps even a village. He grew up in an abusive household until his mother left his father for a better life. Yisrael and his mother were poor, very poor. Many of his meals were bread and sometimes onions that made the meal seem like a feast. As a boy at school, as a Jewish boy, he was often beat up and made fun of. He could not always play with other children for fear of his safety. I imagine the fact that he was destitute did not help the situation either. He managed to get small jobs here and there and he saved his meager earnings so that he could purchase for himself a brand new screwdriver, a shiny tool that he never actually used. He would once in awhile remove the tool from its box, admire and polish the specimen, the reward of his hard work and a glimpse into the value and respect he placed in his hard-earned belongings from unceasing work in the future.

When Yisrael Harod arrived in Israel, escaping the clutches of Ceaucescu, he was placed with other new immigrants, in tents, where he would stay with his mother until more permanent arrangements could be made. He learned Hebrew. He joined the army as was his national duty. He met Amira, Eitan's mother. He knew he wanted to marry her very early on in knowing her. She thought he was interested in her friend or her sister, but he had eyes only for her and told her as much.

Only 39 years later, a moment in time, three children later, two of them married, two grandchildren, only 60 years of life, I watched Amira gently smooth the tensed skin of her husband's forehead. His eyes had already rolled back into his head, or perhaps directed heavenward and into the abyss of eternity.

The sun began to lower onto the horizon line of Petach Tikvah, a city of Israel that dates back to the late 19th century. One of the first Jewish settlements in what was then a province of the Ottoman Empire, where Russian immigrants came to escape pogroms, to make real an ideology that sought a safe haven for self-determination of the Jewish people.

We gathered around Yisrael's bed on this Friday night, as though we were standing around the dining room table in his home in Holon, just 20 minutes south of Tel Aviv. Eitan's older brother Yaakov led us in the kiddush. Usually he pours a special grape juice into the kiddush cup. On this night he poured a glass of the sweetest Shabbat wine. We started singing together Shalom Aleichem, welcoming the Shabbat. There is a verse in this song that wishes that those who come may also go in peace. It is my hope that Yisrael heard us singing and was calmed by it and that his journey into whatever it is that comes after life was peaceful. We blessed the wine, each took a sip. Amira dipped her finger into the cup and placed the wine-dripping fingertip to the lips of her husband's mouth, struggling to lift the elastic band of the oxygen bag.

And, as every Friday night, and every Shabbat, when the prayers were finished, she wished all of us a "Shabbat Shalom U'mevurakh", a peaceful and blessed Shabbat. And as every other Shabbat, she kissed each of us, Eitan, Yaakov, Ronit, Yisrael and me, Heidi, wishing us luck on our way and more blessings. I couldn't imagine a more beautiful farewell for a loved one.

In the hallway a small table was set up for the pairs of lit Shabbat candles blessed by other family members of other hospital patients. Sometimes it is the most subtle things that remind me of where I am. Shabbat candles in the hospital corridor.

A few hours after Eitan's father passed, we sat with his body in a room until the family was ready to leave him. Eitan went to look at his father and called to his sister to show her the smile that had appeared on his wan and weary face. There was no more struggle, his ever-thinning face in that past months revealed a very noble bone structure that gave him much dignity throughout his illness and into his death.

As it was Shabbat when Yisrael left his family, the funeral was held on Sunday morning. We gathered at a cemetery in Rishon LeTzion, where Yisrael's mother was buried, where Amira, one day far from now, will rest beside him.

In Israel, the Jewish funeral is simple, as is the burial, it is a humble admission of the frailty and brevity of our human experience. Friends and family gathered at 2:30 in the afternoon on Sunday, June 21, 2009, the first day of summer, to honor the memory of Eitan's father and to support the family, because that is the job of the Jewish community in times of death as well as celebration.

Yisrael was brought out on a simple black stretcher, carried by Eitan, his father's co-workers and friends. His small, emaciated, frail shell was wrapped in a tallit, a prayer shawl. I was indescribably moved by this simple shroud, so symbolic in its form. The tallit helps to bring one, in prayer, to a place of concentration, to help one elevate the spirit to the Creator, to arrive at a place of reflection, redemption, wonder and atonement. When we say the Shema and the V'ahavta, two of the most quintessential and beautiful prayers of the Jewish liturgy, the four corners of fringes, tzitzit, of the tallit are wrapped around the index finger of the right hand, symbolizing the four corners of the earth, that we gather everything and everyone in our prayer, as we are reminded that we are commanded to love and know the unity of creation, of humanity, with all of our hearts and all of our souls.

The rabbi officiating began his chanting. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away...He took an exacto knife to the shirts of Eitan and Yaakov, creating a tear to indicate the loss of a loved one. A woman did the same to Amira and Ronit. They were officially in mourning. Eitan gave a moving eulogy about his father, who came to Israel, who struggled throughout his life, who wanted to have a family with a Jewish identity, freely and safely in this land, where his children would never be beaten for being Jewish. Would not be hungry from the deprivations of life under Communist rule, and could achieve the dreams he could not realize for himself.

The pall bearers carried Yisrael's body to his grave site. His body was lowered into the grave. And two by two or three by three, friends helped the Harod family to bury their father and husband in the rust-colored dirt just unearthed to make space for Yisrael's body to rest. They were not alone in this shattering moment. Gathered around were friends and superiors of Eitan from the army, in a variety of uniforms and ranks, friends of his from high school and from childhood. They came from the North and from the South. Yaakov's friends and teachers from the Haredi yeshiva that he attends in the black hats and dark suits. Ronit's friends and old boyfriends. The small and intimate sides of the family of Yisrael and Amira. My international friends and their Israeli boyfriends who came to support me as well as Eitan. All of us young people, dressed in our youth, in our dresses and tank tops, our shorts and our flipflops, our lives ahead of us, the child inside of us taking a moment to imagine ourselves in Eitan's place.

The rabbi continued his blessings...The Lord gives and the Lord takes away...the Mourner's Kaddish was recited. Rocks were picked up off the ground and placed on the gravesite with memorial candles and wreaths of flowers from Eitan's army colleagues and his father's co-workers from the electrical engineering plant that he worked at for decades.

Amira insisted that we leave, it was time to leave Yisrael alone. "He told me so!" she said, as she handed out coins for all of us to give to the man collecting charity as we exited the cemetery.

For the past week, the Harod family household has been in strict mourning. The mirrors are covered, there has been prayer three times a day, a Torah has sat in a holy ark in the living room for the shacharit (morning) service and Torah reading. The family has not changed its clothes, nor washed, nor left the house. A time to reconnect, a time to mourn, a time to allow the community to serve and comfort them.

Eitan has not had to worry about work. Nor Ronit, nor Yaakov. It is understood in the state of the Jews that in times of rites of passage, caring for the soul, carrying out the rituals of over 5,000 years of history is the most important thing to do. We can do this here, without penalty, in perfect observance according to our own needs, from the most fanatic and finicky, to whatever comforts the bereaved. We can immerse ourselves in the practices of the ancestors and find solace in the cycle of life, that death happens and when it does, we have methods to attend to our grief, to our loss, to the most permanent thing that happens in our impermanent existence.

May the memory of Yisrael Harod be for a blessing...