Yom HaZikaron 5776

Remarks at Yom HaZikaron Ceremony, Northwestern Hillel

May 11, 2016

(These remarks are in memory of Marla Bennett, Ben Blutstein, and Yotam Gilboa)

Yom HaZikaron is a day for remembering, and, for me, so much of this remembering is connected to dates. 

And, in particular:  2000.  2001.  July 31, 2002.  July 2006.  2016.

Prior to becoming a Hillel professional, I lived in Jerusalem from 2001-2003.  But before the year 2000, I had never been to Israel. I was almost 30 years old and considered a leader of Jewish young adults in Providence, but I looked in the mirror and saw someone who had never set foot in Israel or read a page of Talmud.  So I went to Israel on a program called Livnot U’Lehibanot in February 2000, when peace seemed ready to break out everywhere in Israel and Palestine.  After a three-week visit, which I thought would enable me to check off that ‘been to Israel’ box and go back to my non-profit community development work, I cried on the plane ride home, yearning to return.  And return I did, on July 4, 2001, for my Dorot Fellow year, spent mostly at Pardes.

I often say that, in 2001-2002, I fell in love with three “things”.  I fell in love with Israel during a time when it faced an existential threat, with bombs exploding almost weekly in Jerusalem, in cafes and on buses and on the streets.  I fell in love with Jewish learning, experiencing the revelation of ancient text coming alive in meaningful ways that I had never really thought possible.  And I fell in love with Marla Bennett.

Marla was born and raised in San Diego, went to college at Berkeley, and studied in Israel at Hebrew U. during her junior year and then at Pardes starting in September 2000. Marla arrived at a moment when the elusive dream of peace looked like it might actually be achieved. Instead, the 2^nd Intifada erupted that fall.

Marla and I met in September 2001, began dating in November, and by January I had decided to stay for a second year in Israel.  During summer 2002, she needed to be at Hebrew University for ulpan, as part of her Hebrew language proficiency requirement for the Pardes Educators Program.  So I applied to Nesiya – a chance to stay in Israel, and an opportunity to try my hand at Jewish education.

Marla loved Jerusalem. In spring 2002 she wrote, “I’ve been living in Israel for over a year and a half now, and my favorite thing to do here is to go to the grocery store. I know – not the most exciting response from someone living in Jerusalem these days. But going grocery shopping here…means that I live here. I am not a tourist; I deal with Israel and all of its complexities, confusion, joy, and pain every single day. And I love it.”

On the last Shabbat of July 2002, after lunch with our friends Jamie and David Harris-Gershon, Marla and I went for a walk in our beloved Yerushalayim, a walk that began in the heat of late afternoon and ended as the cooling breezes arrived in the hills of that holy city.  On our walk, Marla pointed at houses to show me the kind of place where she’d like us to live some day.  We walked through a playground filled with small children. We held hands as we walked, beaming in joyful anticipation of hundreds of Shabbat walks – and so much more – that we imagined lying ahead of us in our future.

Marla also wrote this in spring 2002: “As I look ahead to the next year and a half that I will spend in Israel, I feel excited, worried, but more than anything else, lucky…. Stimulation abounds in Jerusalem…. There is no other place in the world where I would rather be right now.”

*        *        *        *        *        *        *

July 31, 2002 – the 22nd of Av, 5762 – was a cruel twist in the Jewish calendar. Instead of nachamu, the comfort we all needed, we had our own Tisha B’Av. Hamas terrorists exploded a bomb in the Frank Sinatra Café at Hebrew U., killing Pardes students Ben Blutstein and Marla Bennett and seven others, and wounding Jamie Harris-Gershon and nearly 100 others, Jews and Arabs alike, in a place considered an oasis of peace amid a city that had been torn for months by violence. Terror struck, and our nightmare became a reality. The year that followed, rather than a year of simcha, was one of mourning, of crying out in agony, of grasping for ghosts in the beit midrash and in the streets of Jerusalem. A year of searching for Marla, though she could not be found.

  

On July 31, 2006 – exactly four years later – the day actually began with the conclusion of my first date with a woman I had just met in Jerusalem:  Claire Sufrin.  

Later that day, still the 31st, I took the bus to Hebrew University.  I made my way to Café Sinatra, and sat at a table not far from where Marla and Ben and Jamie would have been sitting four years earlier.  I closed my eyes and remembered coming here thirty-two hours after the bombing.  The tables and chairs and bodies and blood and nails and spikes and flesh and hair and glass and everything else imaginable and unimaginable had been swept up and cleaned.  Much of the structure remained intact.  But – not the ceiling.  Panels had fallen or had been blown off, wires exposed.  The guts of the building had been ripped open.

Yehuda Amichai wrote this poem several decades before the 2^nd Intifada, but it was relevant in 2002…and in 2016:

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters

and the diameter of its effective

range – about seven meters.

And in it four dead and eleven wounded.

And around them in a greater circle

of pain and time are scattered

two hospitals and one cemetery.

But the young woman who was

buried where she came from

over a hundred kilometres away

enlarges the circle greatly.

And the lone man who weeps over her death

in a far corner of a distant country

includes the whole world in the circle.

And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans

that reaches up to the throne of God and

beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.

I concluded my visit to Hebrew U. with a memorial “ritual” and sang Tov l’hodot l’Adonai.  Without irony, anger, or anything else.  It is good to thank God.

Four hours later, I joined Claire for our second date.  At the end of that date, we said goodbye and soon began a Boston – Palo Alto long-distance relationship.  Which led to her moving to Boston, to us getting engaged, then married, then moving to Evanston, and to the arrival in March 2011 of our son, Jacob Samuel, and to the arrival in June 2014 of Jacob’s brother, Ethan Micah.

Tov l’hodot l’Adonai, indeed.

The Talmud tells us that the murder of one person destroys an entire universe.  Marla was preparing to be a teacher of Torah, with dreams of one day heading a school. How many students – how many worlds – would Marla have touched and changed indelibly? Dozens, hundreds, thousands?

Over these past fourteen years I have brought the memory of Marla with me as I have become an educator in the Jewish world, influencing dozens, even hundreds, of wonderful young Jewish and non-Jewish students each year.  And each year I help to bring dozens of these young people to Israel, many for the first time, so that they might be inspired and challenged in some of the ways Marla was, and that Claire and I have been, as well. 

The story of how I met Marla, where I lost Marla, and where I found Claire, all takes place in Jerusalem, where the patriarch Jacob (according to the Midrash) had his dream with the ladder stretching to heaven.  Our own little Jacob entered the world over five years ago, and we sang a song at the conclusion of his (and again at Ethan’s) bris.  It's a song that we sang often at Pardes in the difficult year prior to the bombing and the awful year after it.  It's a song that I often sing when talk about Marla, because it's a song that Marla loved.  It comes from the blessing that Jacob says to Joseph, regarding his grandsons Ephraim and Menashe: "The Angel who has redeemed me from all harm - Bless the lads.  In them may my name be called.  And the names of my fathers Avraham and Yitzhak.  And may they be teeming multitudes upon the earth."

“Ha-malakh ha-goel oti mi-kol ra yevarekh et ha ne-arim…”

This is Jacob's lullaby prayer for his children and grandchildren - who will go on to become b'nei Yisrael - for their safe keeping and safe journeys.  It was Marla’s song.  It’s our song.

History and memory provide the context for my story – and for Yom HaZikaron itself – a story filled with connections that don’t necessarily make sense.

Until they do.