Yom HaZikaron 5778

This is an updated version of my Yom HaZikaron remarks from last May.

Michael Simon

Yom HaZikaron Ceremony

April 18, 2018

My remarks tonight are in memory of Marla Bennett, Ben Blutstein, and the other victims of the bombing at Hebrew University in 2002, and of Yotam Gilboa.

I’ll be sharing a commentary on the poem, The Diameter of the Bomb, by Yehuda Amichai.

The full poem, first in English, then in Hebrew (read by Simcha Masala)

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.

Then, back to English:

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters

I don’t know, exactly, what the diameter of the bomb was, and I don’t really care. The bomb was placed in a backpack and left, strategically, on a table under a newspaper in Café Sinatra at Hebrew University. 

and the diameter of its effective

Very effective. The open newspaper made it look like someone was just saving the table, had put the backpack there for a moment while they went, like the couple of hundred other people inside the air-conditioned café on that sweltering last day of July in 2002, to grab schnitzel or some other quick lunch before the final exams of the summer session.

range – about seven meters.

The bomb went off at 1:31 pm. 36 hours later, I talked my way past the guards watching over what was now a crime scene and a makeshift memorial site. I sat on the floor of Café Sinatra, wondering exactly where Marla and Ben and Jamie had been sitting before hell intruded. 36 hours later, 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.

And in it four dead and eleven wounded.

In Café Sinatra, nine dead and 85 wounded. Nine dead. Ben Blutstein. Marla Bennett. Revital Barashi.  David Gritz. David Diego Ladowski. Janis Coulter. Dina Carter. Levina Shapira. Daphna Spruch.  The 85 wounded included our friend, Jamie Harris-Gershon.

And around them in a greater circle

A greater circle. The people – random, amazing people – who carried the dead and the wounded into the plaza outside the café’, organizing triage for those who could be helped and maintaining whatever dignity could be held for those who were already dead.

A greater circle. Over 3000 people killed and more than 25,000 wounded by Palestinian terror attacks in Israel since 1948.

A greater circle that includes Yotam Gilboa. I was Yotam’s madrich on Nesiya in Israel during the summer of 2002, the summer when I first became a Jewish educator. The summer when Marla was killed. The day after the Hebrew University bombing, when I said goodbye to my group of chanichim (campers), Yotam – a tough kibbutznik who had little patience for me throughout that summer, hugged me tightly with tears in his eyes that said, “Now you’re one of us.” Four summers later, on July 21, 2006, Yotam was killed in southern Lebanon while fighting as part of an elite combat unit against Hezbollah terrorists. He was 21 years old.

Yotam is one of more than 20,000 Israeli soldiers who have been killed in combat. A toll that continue to rise.

of pain and time are scattered

Thousands of Palestinian casualties of war and violence related to this conflict. A toll that continue to rise.

two hospitals and one cemetery.

Hadassah Hospital – Ein Kerem:  Where I went, hours after the bombing, to try to find out if the woman lying in a coma, unable to be identified, was Marla. I went to her bedside, looked at a person with features swollen so much she was virtually unrecognizable. Will she survive? I asked the nurse. “It doesn’t look good.” I didn’t think it was Marla, but wasn’t sure. They brought me out of the room, over to a drawer that held her belongings. A ring. A watch. This wasn’t Marla. Marla, it turned out, had died instantly. This woman, Revital Barashi, would succumb to her injuries a few days later.

Hadassah Hospital – Har HaTzofim (Hebrew U.): Where I went, right after going to the site of the café, and found my way into the room where Jamie lay recovering from her horrendous injuries. She had not yet been told that her friends and lunch companions, Marla and Ben, were both dead. And I couldn’t tell her.  All I could say was, “I love you, Jamie,” and wished her the most intense refuah shleima, full and speedy recovery, that I could muster.

The cemetery is in San Diego, where Marla was born.  Where she is buried now, next to ancestors long dead, her own arrival far too early, far too soon.

But the young woman who was

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

Marla loved Jerusalem. Three months before the bombing 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, Marla and I went for a walk in our beloved Yerushalayim. On our walk, Marla pointed at houses to show me the kind of place where she’d like us to live someday. We walked through a playground filled with small children. We held hands, 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 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.”

buried where she came from

At the airport, before I accompanied Marla’s body on its journey home to her family in San Diego, I was handed a bag with soil from Eretz Yisrael, to place in her grave. Which I did.

over a hundred kilometres away

Thousands of miles away, San Diego can feel a million miles away from Israel. Though on the day of Marla’s funeral, people came from thousands of miles away, from as far away as Israel, and collapsed that distance, at least for a moment.

enlarges the circle greatly.

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?

At least 20 children have been named for Marla in the years since she was killed. Memorials and scholarships and days of service exist to honor her memory. People like me try to honor her memory in words and deeds.

And the lone man who weeps over her death

The lone man who weeps, and cries out, for hours and days and months and even years. Until the weeping doesn’t quite stop, but becomes part of who he is, and he moves forward, because he doesn’t know for sure what she would have wanted, but he believes that she would have wanted him to live.

The story of how I met Marla, and where I lost Marla, takes place in Jerusalem. And so does the story of how I met Claire, four years nearly to the day after Marla was killed, a week after Yotam was killed, and about thirty feet from the very spot where I had met Marla. I met Claire Sufrin in Jerusalem twelve years ago, and we fell in love, got married, and then had Jacob, and then Ethan, and here we are. Hineinu.

in a far corner of a distant country

Jerusalem. Tel Aviv. Petach Tikva. Beersheva. Haifa. Netanya. Sderot. The list goes on, and on.

includes the whole world in the circle.

San Bernardino. Orlando. Brussels. Paris. New York City. Istanbul. The list goes on, and on.

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.

(pause)

And yet I continue to say, Baruch Hashem. Blessed is the Creator.

Blessed is the Creator for creating this beautiful, amazing, joyful, and, yes, horrifying and painful world.

Blessed is the Creator for creating Marla, though she was ripped away from us so horribly.

Blessed is the Creator for creating me, and Claire, and Jacob and Ethan.

And each of you. All of us.

Blessed is the Creator, for giving us the ability to cry, to laugh, and, sometimes, to make peace.

Yom Kippur 5778: How We Speak, and How We Listen

At Mussaf on Yom Kippur, just before the cantor leads the powerful repetition of the standing Amidah prayer, she does something remarkable. She recites the Hineini prayer, saying these words:

“Here I am, impoverished of deeds, trembling and frightened from the dread of the One Who is enthroned upon the praises of Israel. I have come to stand and supplicate before You for Your people Israel, even though I am not worthy or qualified to do so.”

This is all a prayer before the prayer service actually begins. The cantor here is, in effect, saying a prayer about speaking before speaking the particular words she is about to speak.

Jewish prayer is all about words. Yom Kippur is, in a sense, all about words. But it’s not “all talk, no action.” The words on Yom Kippur are the action.

In our world of nonstop words, nonstop language, Yom Kippur reminds us that we must weigh our words. Even if we’re not someone on whose words might rest the fate of the world (and who might tweet those words at 6 am), the fate of our relationships, the fate of our reputations, even the fate of how we understand ourselves – all depend a great deal on how we speak and what we say – and what we don’t say. And, connected with all of this, how we listen.

As I say these things to you – even as I stand before you – I feel like I should be reciting that Hineini prayer. Not only because I feel unqualified to speak before the One Who is enthroned upon the praises of Israel.

I feel unworthy to speak in front of you.

I know. I’m “the man who seems to be in charge at Hillel”. I’m supposed to convey a message that is meaningful, and you’re supposed to listen. More and more, though, and especially in recent days, I catch myself as I speak, and even before I speak. What is important for me to say? And is it important even to say it?

I sense the power of speech, and I also recognize my own shortcomings related to speech. And all of this, for me at least, and at this moment at least, is wrapped up in how I deal with anger.

I’ll illustrate with a (very) recent story:  Last Thursday, I stood on the bridge by the Lakefill with many of you at our Tashlich service. It was beautiful – a warm afternoon, more than 50 people, even a shofar blowing. Rabbi Brandon spoke a few words of wisdom, and then I walked to the railing with a few clumps of bread, and with my little guys Jacob and Ethan in tow.

Ethan is 3, and he had a lot of fun just throwing the bread. His tashlich experience amounted to “More bread, Daddy. PLEASE! More bread!”

Jacob is in first grade. At Solomon Schechter Day School. So he gets it. Kinda. I asked him, “What are you going to try to do better in the coming year?” “Make better choices?” he said (or sort of asked). I led the witness: “You mean, like, doing better listening, and not arguing back at me when I tell you ‘no’.” “Yeah, Daddy.” I followed up: “Well, one of the things I’m going to work on is not getting so angry or frustrated with you when you don’t make a good choice.”

Then I threw my chunks of bread into the water. Some years, I’m throwing away a whole list of things, but last week, it kept coming back to one thing. Anger. Impatience? Anger. Frustration? Anger. Damaged relationships? Anger. Stress and a sense of impotence in the face of political issues that are tremendously upsetting. Yep, anger.

So I tossed my anger away, symbolically and metaphorically. Then I headed home with Jacob and Ethan, and we took the scenic route along the lake. It was a beautiful ending to this story.

But.

Of course there’s a but.

Not more than an hour later, Jacob was yelling at Ethan, Ethan was pulling away a toy, Jacob was half-crying/half-whining, and, yes, there was my anger again. And my voice was rising.

Here. We. Go. Again.

Why is anger so wired into us, so ever-present – yet so problematic? And what to do about it?

Maimoinides – the Rambam, the 12^th century Jewish philosopher and physician, famously echoed Aristotle’s belief that in life, and particularly in our emotional lives, we should strike a balance between too much and too little, find the golden mean. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks illustrates this idea, “Too much fear makes me a coward, too little makes me rash and foolhardy, taking unnecessary risks. The middle way is courage.

But anger is different. Even a little anger is not OK – there isn’t a middle way. Rambam explains, “Anger (is) an extremely evil tendency and it is proper for man to remove himself from it to the other extreme. One should teach himself not to get angry, even over a matter which befits anger.”

For Rabbi Sacks, “What is dangerous about anger is that it causes us to lose control….The result is that in a moment of irascibility we can do or say things we may regret for the rest of our lives.

Sacks suggests: The best way of defeating anger “is to pause, stop, reflect, refrain, count to ten, and breathe deeply. If necessary, leave the room, go for a walk, meditate, or vent your toxic feelings alone.”

Or we could try another approach, which I saw on this somewhat crudely illustrated flyer that same evening after Tashlich.

It was sent home from Schechter with five suggested steps managing your anger…if you’re about 6 years old:

(Hold it up and read from it)

What to do when you are angry:

Step #1: How do I feel?

Step #2: Take three deep breaths.

Step #3: Count slowly to five.

Step #4: Say “calm down” to yourself.

Step #5: Talk to a grownup about it.

Talk to a grownup about it.

And here we are…the grownups.

Words have the power to heal, to convey love, to build relationships. But also to destroy and tear apart. On this day, Yom Kippur, we repeat, over and over again, the “Al Cheit” prayer. Al cheit she-chatanu lefanecha. (Upon the transgressions that we have transgressed in front of You.) Over and over, throughout these 25 hours. So many words about our transgressions before God. And so many of those transgressions are about words. 11 of the 43 sins enumerated are sins committed through speech. Al cheit that we have sinned before you through gossip mongering, through oath taking, with the idle chatter of our lips, through foolish speech, through denial and false promises, through evil talk.

Why this repetition?

What are we being called to do, over and over again? Ultimately, I think, it comes down to two things:

(1) Speak more carefully.

And

(2) Listen.

In traditional Jewish practice, we say a blessing for just about everything important and quite a few things that might not seem so important. We say a blessing before we eat food because we are grateful for that food. We say morning prayers that show appreciation that we are here, alive another day, a recognition that we are living on borrowed time. We say a prayer before we head out on a journey, before we light candles to begin a holiday, and, as we saw earlier, before we pray to God.

What if we said a prayer before we spoke to another human being? What if we saw the very act of speaking as holy? If what you’re saying is holy, doesn’t that require a prayer?

I know, practically, this sounds tremendously difficult, especially in our nanosecond-response-time world of Snapchat, Facebook, and snappy one-liner responses, not to mention the 140 (or possibly 280)-character universe of Twitter. How could I possibly pause to pray each time I communicate?

But conceptually – before you go to speak with someone, before you respond to an email, send a text, or post….what if you said a prayer?

Maybe it would sound like this (with appreciation to Roy Lessin, a poet of Christian devotional prayers; I’ve adapted his language a bit):

Omnipresent One, guide my thoughts before they become my words. Place a guard over my mouth and a watchman over the door of my lips.

When I open my mouth, I ask You to fill it with right words, good words, true words, loving words.

Use my words this day to heal and not harm, to restore and not separate, to extend mercy and not judgment, to build up and not pull down, to comfort and not injure, to bring sunlight and not shadows, to encourage and not quench, to mend and not wound.

May my words herald good news, be seasoned with salt, and bring grace to the hearer.

If I am to speak correction, may it be with compassion; if I am to exhort, may it be with humility; If I am to instruct, may it be with brokenness; if I am to guide, may it be with wisdom; if I am to inform, may it be with clarity;

Guard my tongue from murmuring and my voice from complaint. In all things, may my mouth be filled with words of gratitude, expressions of praise, and proclamations of faithfulness.

Maybe that prayer would work for you. Maybe other words would work. Or maybe just taking a couple of seconds to pause.

Speaking is one part of the puzzle. But sometimes it’s better to Talk less, smile more.

Or to paraphrase that line from Hamilton:

Talk less. Listen more. And listen resiliently.

Judaism has a central guide to this kind of listening: Shema

Shema yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.

Listen, Israel. Adonai is our God. God is One.

The program Encounter, which has enabled me and other North American Jewish leaders to visit the West Bank and East Jerusalem to meet and learn from and with Palestinians, operates under seven core values connected with Jewish tradition. (You should Google Encounter’s Core Values – it’s worth a look). But I want to mention just one:

Shema / Listening / שמע
Encounter cultivates resilient listening and curiosity, for Jews toward Palestinians as well as between Jews and other Jews with divergent worldviews.

Here at Northwestern, you may or may not engage with Palestinians and the issues connected with Israel and Palestine, so permit me to broaden this statement:

Let’s cultivate resilient listening and curiosity for Jews toward all non-Jews as well as between Jews and other Jews with divergent views.

Let’s broaden it further – let’s model resilient listening and curiosity for everyone. Let’s be willing to engage in the most challenging issues that we find politically unsettling, highly problematic – and let’s do so in a way that demonstrates respect. That demonstrates that we’re willing to listen resiliently – we do not have to give up that which we hold dear, our strongest values, but we’re open to the possibility that learning from another might actually enhance our self-understanding, might actually broaden our perspective – might actually impact our own values.

When I traveled on Encounter, it was about being willing to listen even when what I was hearing made me uncomfortable, frustrated, angry. Angry enough to feel I needed to take deep breaths, and maybe even talk to a grownup.

When Maimonides discusses anger he also points to this kind of listening:

“The conduct of the just,” Rambam writes, “is to take insults but not give insults, hear themselves flouted but make no reply, do their duty as a work of love, and bear affliction cheerfully.”

Resilient listening reminds you that it’s not about you. Or, at least, it’s not only about you.

As Brenda Ueland puts it in The Art of Listening

“When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand….Listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role….So try listening. Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your children, your friends, to those who love you and those who don’t, to those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And perhaps a great one.”

And miracles do not happen on their own.

Can we listen resiliently…

            To a parent

            To a colleague

            To a friend

            To a roommate

            To a partner

To a stranger

            To an Other?

At the end of Yom Kippur – we stop saying Al Cheit.

We stop saying nearly all words. We end with all of us, together, saying:

Shema yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad

Listen, Israel, Adonai is our God; God is One.

We end with this statement of unity – all transgressions wiped away, a clean slate, clear language, and one action step:

Shema.

Listen, resiliently.

And that’s exactly what we do at the very last moment of Yom Kippur – the shofar is sounded.

We stand in a place of no words, where we listen to whatever cosmic message comes through.

Throw away the anger. For real.

Say a prayer before you speak. Sometimes, really say a prayer.

And listen. Resiliently.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

On behalf of my wife Claire and our sons Jacob and Ethan, and on behalf of Northwestern Hillel, I wish each and every one of you a Shana Tova and g’mar chatima tova ~ may you be sealed for goodness in the Book of Life.