A Jewish wedding, Just a part of the ceremony

Beep, beeper – no comment. Just pondering ingenuity, technology, 15 years of planning, timing. No tears shed over loss of terrorists. No joy over lives lost. As it is written in Proverbs 24: 17, we should not rejoice in the fall of our enemies. That tradition holds for me.

IDF soldiers should not be throwing bodies of dead Palestinian terrorists from a rooftop. The video clip went viral. IDF condemned and investigating.

A video clip from a colleague this week showed rampaged closets with clothes strewn across the floor and kitchen cabinets in disarray in a Palestinian home in a refugee camp, after Israeli soldiers went through every home in the camp. I fail to find justification. Not a measure to discourage Palestinians from adopting militant attitudes towards Israel. Another day, a video clip of two Jewish settlers entering a Palestinian school with clubs, teachers yelling, voices of terrified children. The school principal was arrested. Settlers undeterred.

Reminders daily – 101 hostages, dead and alive, in the hands of Hamas. The daily countdown, or is it a count-up, day by day, since October 7, 2023. Constant reminders – we are in the eleventh month.

Escape. The remote control is exhausted, switching from one Israeli news program to another looking for stories beyond October 7.  Another hostage’s parent pleas for a deal to #BringThemHomeNow, another fallen soldier, another funeral. A military analyst. A politician – tolerable statements or channel switching. Escaping and consumed.

Consumed by a sentiment. We are ready and need to visit memorial sites of October 7, 2023. To see the sites today. Videos of Nukhba terrorists running through the Nova party, partygoers attempting to flee or hide, like the people in their homes at kibbutzim adjacent to Gaza crossings and the fence of separation, will surely flash past our minds with every calm, solemn, grieving glance at sites we visit.

At Kibbutz Be’eri, we visited neighborhoods of burned homes. Enlarged photos on each home showing who lived there. I told our friend’s friend, the woman who accompanied us for two hours, my head felt like a screen with one slide placed over another. A slide of the kibbutz as a kibbutz is meant to be, as anyone who has ever visited a kibbutz knows it to be, and the slide of burnt homes, and the other slide. So, it is. She points at a shoe outside the burnt home of one of her best friends, who she has lost – and tells us they went shopping together and bought those shoes together.

But our friend’s friend talks about the future. The future the kibbutz must offer its children. The destruction must be cleared, she believes. There are diverse opinions. Appropriate commemoration, but the kibbutz is for the living. The sites where destroyed buildings at the kibbutz were razed in recent past months are surrounded by no-trespassing banners. Burned homes, neighborhoods. Memorial candles. Shots in a concrete wall. A plaque below. The name – a soldier killed there. The story of the woman escaping her home to the bushes after her husband burned to death, before she met the same fate. Another home, the succah still standing with cloth walls waving in the wind since last October.

I asked about the hostages taken to Gaza from the kibbutz who were released in the deals between Israel and Hamas in November. Her response, “They are not with us.” The kibbutz is a community. Few people like herself and her husband have returned to live at the kibbutz. Most others after months at a hotel to which they were evacuated now in temporary homes established at Kibbutz Hatzerim until Be’eri is rebuilt. But the tone, I heard in “They are not with us,” said “Do not ask.”  She shared her family’s story, her friend’s stories, anecdotes bringing alive the friends she lost. I could repeat. I will refrain. They are her stories. They are our stories. There are multiple stories. The dishes, burned, in her friend’s dishwasher. Her words of chiding, talking to her ghost. Details of every story. You imagine exchanges of WhatsApp messages in the groups that day, sudden silences from some sources, and survival tactics, that day. Survival tactics every day. Our friend’s friend. She is a survivor. She is inspiration.

We went to the Nova site. There were many visitors. Soldiers. Police. A tour as part of a course. A Jewish Federation delegation from Cleveland, Ohio. I said, “Thank you for coming at this time,” and held back a tear. I didn’t know I would say that. I have heard people who visited say that this is what Israelis say to them. It just escaped my lips.

We went to the temporary cemetery for the cars burned and spread across the roads on October 7. A sight. Several cars at the site with barcodes linked to a paragraph about the car. Example: Keith and Aviva Siegel’s car. They were driven into Gaza from Kibbutz Kfar Aza in their own car. Aviva was released in November. Keith remains a hostage. The car was later found by the IDF at Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Slide crossing my thoughts now – Hamas reported today intercepting humanitarian aid delivery rather than assuring it reaches the Gazan public.

We went to visit Sderot. The razed site of the old police station with laborers working on a public memorial that apparently will have a fountain. We drove home. We resumed our routine. This was part of our routine. This was another view of what the media shows us daily since October 7, 2023.

Yesterday, we went to a winery for a wine-tasting and cheese platter. A birthday gift to Haim from his children. A rural northern location with grape vines, olive trees, dust and sunshine. On the coastal road, we saw burnt cars painted yellow. Got it. A new environmental art installation. Burnt cars from October 7, painted yellow. War moving north – politicians, don’t forget hostages in Gaza.

We tasted wine, nibbled cheese, escaping into the calm of normalcy, hours before Israeli attacks caused more Hezbollah losses in Lebanon, more Israeli civilian anxiety anticipating retaliation. In the calm, the trickle effect of the visit to Kibbutz Be’eri took hold. Like a Jewish wedding: You break the glass at the wedding to remember the destruction of Jerusalem, of the Second Temple, above your greatest joy. I remember October 7, 2023.

Harriet Gimpel, September 21, 2024