This piece is part of an ongoing series that we are sharing from Israeli authors and authors in Israel.
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December 2023
I am out walking my dog, thinking about my twenty-year-old son, Nachum, who is going to another soldier friend’s funeral today — the second in two months. His first friend killed in this war was named Yair, meaning “he will light up” in Hebrew, and his birthday was just last month, during Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday of lights.
The second young man was named Nir, meaning a ploughed field and symbolic of new beginnings. Ironic, I think. Then I remember endings are also beginnings. At least I hope this one is. I will only know when I reach this end myself and it is too late for me to tell those I’ve left behind.
Both Yair and Nir were Israeli soldiers fighting in Gaza, and both were in Nachum’s co-ed high school grade of about seventy students. The percentage of combat soldiers in his grade who have died is already too high, and with this war raging on, no end in sight, it will likely be even higher — rising with the number of Gazans killed as well.
So much death, more and more people dying every day — not natural deaths, but deaths by human hands, the result of war and terror. Hamas brutally murdered — but first made sure to rape, torture, maim — at least 1,200 innocent Israeli civilians, wounded thousands in body and spirit, took around 250 hostage, and displaced hundreds of thousands.
And now, in retaliation, my own government is bombing Gaza, killing not only Hamas soldiers who perpetrated or supported these murders, but also thousands of civilians being used by Hamas as human shields, in hospitals, schools, and in their intricate network of military tunnels. And all of this, part of an ongoing violent conflict on this land that I, a peace activist, have been working to end. I cannot accept this is the way life, or death, is supposed to be.
Nachum’s best friend Tomer — Hebrew for a “date palm tree” — was shot in the leg yesterday by Hamas soldiers who were hiding in one of these tunnels and came out shooting. The surgery was successful, and he should be able to walk again soon, but the soldier next to him did not survive. I pray Tomer’s recovery and rehabilitation will take as long as it does for this war to end. I know it’s not fair to the other soldiers still there fighting, but I decide Tomer has done his share.
Tomer and Nachum grew up together on our kibbutz. Nachum did not serve in the army; he did national service instead. He received an exemption from army service because he has FSHD, the genetic muscular disease I live with and passed on to two of my children.
For a long time, I have done much inner work to accept natural illness, suffering, and death. Will I ever be able to do enough inner work to accept all the violent human-inflicted death around me now, too? Should that even be my goal?
I think of the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” That’s it: I don’t know the difference anymore. I continue walking.
It is a beautiful winter day in the Galilee, the first sunny day after a few in a row of heavy rains. This is my favorite time of year. All is green and lush, and the sun is no longer punishing, but soothing. So, I go left, towards the exposed fields. For the past several months, I had been turning mostly right, into the forest, to protect myself from the sun. But now I want to feel the sun’s warmth on my skin — nature’s hug.
As I walk along the path, I feel held by the early morning freshness, the carpet of green all around me, the tiny white crocuses starting to push their way up through the earth, thanks to the rains. Soon, they will open to reveal their yellow sun-like centers. A hint of new beginnings, I hope. One day, when this is all over.
The forest opens onto the fields. Olive orchards to my right, avocado fields ahead. Saplings just planted stand spread apart, supported by plastic encasings holding them upright and protecting them from the elements.
They remind me of the field where the Supernova music festival was held that weekend of October 7 — how it looks now, not how it looked then. Then, hundreds of young people simply enjoying moving their bodies to trance music in nature were murdered there in cold blood.
Since the massacre, loved ones of these victims — so full of life — have brought wooden posts with photos of the dead on them, and stuck them in the ground — like these tree supports — as if they are still dancing. On Tu B’Shevat, the families and friends will plant actual trees there as well. I cry as I walk, thinking of them. These festival goers were some of the most peaceful members of society, there just to celebrate life; instead, they were met with the most brutal of deaths.
If only they had protective casings around them, like these baby trees do. Instead, the government abandoned them, sending hundreds of soldiers to the West Bank to protect settlers who had built a sukkah — in provocation — in the Palestinian village of Hawara, where settlers had perpetrated violence some months before. The government had decided to protect provocateurs instead of peaceful dancers. I literally want to vomit on the side of the path.
But I look up and see a glorious day. A sapphire-blue sky, emerald-green fields spread out before me. I want to embrace it all, to believe in the flowers, the birds, the sunshine. But it is hard now. Too hard.
Suddenly, I come upon a large crack in the earth along the whole length of the path for the next fifty or so meters, as if there had been a small earthquake since my last time here, symbolic of these times. There had already been so much division and separation in this place; then Hamas’ brutal attack hit like a lightning bolt, the shape of this crack, causing such a chasm I am not sure we in Israel-Palestine can cross it. I am not even sure I can.
I decide to continue, walking along the length of the crack. The kibbutz cemetery is up ahead. I pass it often on my walks, but I rarely go inside. A soldier named Rotem (like Tomer, a type of tree in Hebrew) was buried there a month ago, a twenty-year-old from a neighboring town that shares our cemetery.
Nachum was at his funeral, too, although he did not know him personally. So that makes Nir’s funeral his fourth since the beginning of the war. He wanted to pay his respects to this young man, his own age, who gave his life so Nachum and all the others — Palestinians, Jews, and people of other nationalities — living within our country’s borders can live more securely. Yes, Hamas killed and took hostage Palestinian Israelis, too.
I see Rotem’s grave from afar, the white and blue Israeli flag with its two stripes and six-pointed star draped over the stone. I feel drawn to enter the cemetery, to stand by his grave. These soldiers are our children. Our children are protecting us, their parents. Isn’t this against the laws of nature?
As I approach the cemetery, I notice a bulldozer, hard at work. Is it digging a grave? I enter, treading carefully past fresh mounds of dirt. It is not one grave this bulldozer is digging, but a whole group of them.
My heart drops. I had not checked the names or hometowns of the soldiers whose souls had left those beautiful bodies I saw beneath the headlines with their smiling faces this morning. Could so many have been locals? I know it shouldn’t matter; all lives are precious. But it does feel different when I know them personally, or if they live nearby. So, while I mourn all the lives lost, here and in Gaza, too, the farther away they are, the more abstract they feel. That is human nature, whether fair or not. Either way, I just want this war to end.
I ask the man in the bulldozer about the graves he’s digging. I know him. Abed, from the Arab village across the road; he does maintenance work on our kibbutz and was asked to prepare a bunch of new graves. Not for any particular people, he tells me. This is what they do when the graves already prepared have been filled, he says. They prepare more. They dig a rectangular hole in the ground and fill it with sand, so it is easier to dig out at the funeral.
I had not known this. Just like I had not known soldiers do not have taharah, the purifying ritual washing of the body before burial. I learned this when studying about Jewish burial customs as part of the process of my plan to start a chevra kadisha (Jewish burial society) on our kibbutz. Soldiers killed in combat are considered purified already by their act of sacrifice.
Soldiers are also buried in a casket, unlike other Jewish or Muslim burials in Israel. Is that to give them a special honor? Or is it because often their bodies are so mutilated, they need the box to hold the remains?
I think of all the people so brutally murdered on October 7. The forensic team had to use DNA testing to identify bodies and body parts. I was at the funeral of my acquaintance Vivian Silver, a peace activist who lived on one of the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas on that “Black Sabbath”; there was no body. We had thought Vivian was one of the hostages, only to find out six weeks later she had been murdered on October 7. It took that long to identify her remains, they had been burned so completely.
What were her final thoughts? She deserved a beautiful end. The tears well up again. I step back and look down into the empty holes in the ground, waiting for the bodies they will hold one day. Waiting for more and more death to come.
I go to Rotem’s grave,which is in a special new section of the cemetery, for soldiers, and see someone left a word written in small stones beside it. I cannot figure out what it says. השלומגורה. Maybe it was his nickname? I hear he had many friends, a girlfriend, too. I decide it was she who left that word written in stones. I am not meant to understand it; it’s a private message to her beloved. My heart cannot take this, but I make myself stay.
Off to the side are a few old, unkept graves, covered in moss. I know their stories. One, Matan, which means “given,” was a child of kibbutz founders. He died in his mother’s arms, just short of five months old, from an undiagnosed heart defect. Matan was the first to be buried here; the cemetery was created for him. Another, Rinatel, meaning “divine joy,” was born with severe birth defects and died five months after she was born. Yael was two years old and died in a traffic accident on a trip to France to visit her mother’s family. Her mother was driving, I am told. How is she living with that? I wonder.
I walk around to the newer part of the cemetery, where the graves are well-kept, except for one unmarked grave. I stand over it, wondering whose it is. Abed comes down from the bulldozer and walks over to me. “Do you know whose grave that is?” he asks. I shake my head.
“It’s Sami’s grandmother’s grave.” Sami owns a hardware store in Abed’s village; I’ve shopped there. “She was Jewish, married his Muslim grandfather. They lived together in the village. You must have heard the story.” I nod my head.
“They couldn’t bury her in the village cemetery. So, they buried her here.”
We both look down at this stone with no writing, covered in moss. We sigh. Abed goes back to work, and I continue walking among the graves.
I spot the grave of my friend, Yonatan, who died about six years ago from cancer. He was five years older than me. I look at the dates, reminding myself how old he was when he died. Fifty-four. That is my age now. It feels younger now that I have kept living. In a couple of months, I will be fifty-five. I will surpass him. Yonatan’s wife still lives here, without him, in their big house they built together. The children are grown. Some are reserve soldiers now fighting in this war. I pray she won’t have to suffer the loss of a child, too.
There is the grave of my friend’s fetus from her stillbirth. The baby, Levav, Hebrew for “heart,” had a severe heart defect discovered in utero (they had chosen her name before they knew this — one of life’s synchronicities that makes me believe there is a Force Connecting All). Her parents, my friends, decided to terminate the pregnancy. They buried her tiny body beneath a heart-shaped stone, and the placenta behind it, with a tree planted on top.
And there is the grave of a six-year-old girl, Ofir, who died the first year I moved to the kibbutz. She had cancer. Her parents built a park next to their house in her memory; it has a huge mosaic dragon to climb and sit on that the community built together as a project. There are elf statues next to both these graves, as if they are watching over these two pure souls. Does a fetus that dies in utero have a soul? I wonder.
And another grave of a friend, Colin, who died of Parkinson’s. He was the guard outside my kibbutz’ preschool. When I used to bring my son Mishael there in the mornings, Colin would kick a soccer ball around with him. “He’ll be a professional soccer player one day!” Colin would say. Mishael is now a serious soccer player with professional aspirations, but Colin didn’t live to see that. He was in his sixties when he died.
There is the grave of my friends’ son — Daniel was his name. He was a young man in his thirties with two small children. He had brain cancer. His parents live on my kibbutz, but he lived in South Africa with his wife and children. When his cancer was diagnosed, Daniel came here because of our better medical care and socialized system. But he did not survive. He died and was buried here. I was at his funeral; his wife and children were not. I don’t know why.
There are some older folks, too — a man in his eighties who loved to dance. His gravestone has a couple dancing on it and says he was a lover of life. Another lover of life, Moti, died in his sixties. “His love of life knew no limits,” it says on his gravestone. I did not know him, but imagine he lived life to the fullest, even at the end. I see a few more graves of people who died in their fifties and sixties.
And there is June, another friend’s mother. She loved to walk around the kibbutz with her tiny dog. When she grew senile, her family finally moved her to a nursing home. When I went to visit, she was hallucinating, saying that another kibbutz member killed her dog and flayed him. I did not want to argue, but also did not want her to think that was true. I told her I had seen her son walking the dog the day before. I don’t know if she believed me, but she would forget soon, anyway, that I had even been there at all.
And there are my friend’s parents, buried side-by-side like twin marriage beds in a film from the 1950s. It warms my heart to see them buried this way. I make a note: this is what I want, although with the graves closer together. Cremation is out of the question, not because I believe my body will be resurrected, but because of its associations with the Holocaust, the violence it connotes for me. But because of my love of water, I had considered looking into whether burial at sea is allowed in this country. Jacob wants to be buried, however, and I like the idea of our final resting place being together like this.
There is a grave with a hole carved into the rock, so that it fills with water when there is rainfall. It is full now. There is a poignant dedication, carved into the grave, describing the deceased, Noga Or (meaning “luminosity of light”), who died at age fifty-one, as loving to rough it in nature. I did not know her or how she died, but in my imagination, she drowned swimming in the Sea of Galilee, which is only half an hour from here.
As a daily swimmer for most of my life and a rabbi who runs a mikveh (a ritual immersion pool filled with rainwater), I like the idea of this tiny mikveh on my grave. I make a note of it, too. My family would get a kick out of that. “Burying her with her pool,” they’d say. “Even in death, she can’t be without it.”
My family has made allowances over the years for my commitment to my daily swim, and sometimes think I care more about it than I do about them. I insist this is not true, but I won’t be around to defend myself after I die. This bothers me, makes me want to insist on no eulogies at my funeral, no jokes for people to snicker about my shortcomings, or speeches praising my virtues. I’d rather they just let me be. Or no longer be. To just be what I wrote about myself in my memoirs and not what people made of me in their own minds and memories.
There is a beautiful grave with a bench next to it, and an olive tree planted at its head instead of a headstone. I do not know this person, Ayelet, but I see she was fifty-eight when she died — only three years my senior — and there is a bird and flowers carved into the base stone. She was a nature-lover, too, for sure.
On my way home, I try to take in more nature, for both Ayelet and myself. I try to see the world as she must have if she knew she had only a little time left — taking in every flower, every bird, every tree. I imagine she knew all their names.
I think of my son at Nir’s funeral at this very moment. I decided not to go to this one; I’ve been to others since October 7. I did not know Nir well, and I’d rather not subject myself to another funeral just now. The world is letting me down, bringing me closer to despair. I want to cling to hope.
I reach that crack in the earth again. It is like the flowers and the grass — it, too, is a result of the rains. I can’t have one without the other. I cannot choose only rejuvenation. There is degeneration, too.
Death and cruelty. They are part of life. Even in this cemetery, there is so much life. And even in this land of the living, there is so much death. And even in every pure soul there is the potential for cruelty, although we must fight against it with all our will and power. Destruction, whether by nature or by human hands, it’s the other side of the rain.
Back home, I sit at my computer to compose an email advertising a death café (a gathering of people to discuss death and dying, a way of leaning on one another and gaining perspective) I have decided to facilitate during this walk. An offering in the face of all the horrible death around me. I can demonstrate, do social action, work for peace, but I cannot change human nature. This offering is something I can do, at least, to ease some suffering and hold others as they face their mortality.
The views and opinions expressed above are those of the author, based on their observations and experiences.
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Haviva Ner-David is a writer and rabbi who lives in northern Israel on Kibbutz Hannaton, where she runs Shmaya: A Mikveh for Mind, Body and Soul and has a thriving spiritual companioning practice. She is the author of three memoirs — Life on the Fringes, Chanah’s Voice, and Dreaming Against the Current – and two novels — Hope Valley and To Die in Secret. She is also the co-author of one published children’s book, Yonah and the Mikveh Fish, and another on the way to publication, Sabi Couldn’t Find His Car: a modern Hanukkah miracle. Ner-David is an activist building a shared society of partnership between Jewish and Palestinian Israelis in the Galilee. She parents, with her spouse Jacob, seven children, and lives with a degenerative neuromuscular disease that has been one of her greatest teachers.