Katonti קָטֹנְתִּי : I Am Not Worthy

It is heartbreaking to absorb the daily news updates of increasingly more IDF soldiers falling in battle, each of them a world unto his own; stunning, idealistic, brave individuals in the prime of their lives, leaving wives, children, parents, siblings, friends and communities in grief and shock. Over this past week alone, twenty-four soldiers were killed, including one who on Sunday succumbed to wounds sustained earlier in Gaza. The deaths this week have left 56 children bereft of a parent.

Incomprehensibly, several times a day, the sidewalks of Jerusalem are lined with supporters carrying Israeli flags ‘accompanying’ the family car as they make their way to the funeral at Har Herzl. My physical eyes absorb the goodness and אחדות (unity) in these acts, but metaphysically, all I see is a crimson-red tributary that often feels since Oct 7 like it is leading to nowhere, that it will never empty out into clean waters till all the red is gone. The magnitude of the personal losses and our collective loss as a nation is staggering.

The rest of us go about our lives with a pit in our stomachs, in a fog of palpable desperation that is taking hold of our nation. Deliberately, I grab an extra dose of desperation and outrage for my mother, who is no longer alive. I am actually happy that she wasn’t alive to witness Oct 7 and this long year since. In fact, it was the fall of 2014, when she saw the images on TV news of the Har Nof shul terror attack, so reminiscent of her past, that her illness (we later found out was cancer) began destroying her from the inside out. That’s when she stopped eating. All her defenses were down. She was flattened. Having gone through the Shoah as a young child, robbed of everything a little girl deserves, including proper nutrition, education, stability, protection from predators, and the warmth of her family, it gnawed at her incessantly throughout her life that we finally have a state of our own, but our neighbors won’t let us live in peace. For her, the emergence of our independent state after over 3 millennia of diaspora was a balm for what the Jewish people suffered. It represented to her the only hope for our future. For me, there is a continuum between the loss of my family in the ovens and the loss of my brothers and sisters today. Was there a reprieve? Will there ever be one? This desire of our enemies to annihilate us is also familiar to me. It echoes the past seamlessly, maybe too much so, but is somehow still so jarring every day since I made Aliyah.

Indeed, with each piece of news sharing more soldier deaths, in addition to sadness and desperation, there is something more insidious that occupies my chest with its merciless groping tentacles: Shame. If I could address the soldiers who were buried today or yesterday or last week, I would cry out the following phrase verbatim from Parshat Vayislach in Genesis (where Yaakov addresses Hashem in anticipation of meeting his brother, Eisav, after a long absence):

קָטֹנְתִּי מִכֹּל הַחֲסָדִים וּמִכָּל-הָאֱמֶת אֲשֶׁר עָשִׂיתָ אֶת-עַבְדֶּךָ

I am not worthy of Your protection, due to all the acts of kindness and trustworthiness that You have already done for me, Your servant

I would tell our buried heroes: I don’t want you to sacrifice your lives for me. This is not how it is supposed to be. I am old, you are young: you are supposed to live and I am supposed to protect you. My children are grown – they can make their way in this world without me; yours, however, are just learning to walk, or ebullient about being Shabbat Ima at Gan next week, or even waiting the necessary couple months to be born. For many years they will not have the capacity to understand why אַבָּא never came home. Your picture will be the closest thing they have to your physical presence. Maybe as they grow up, they will notice the similarity of their smile or eyes to yours, proof that you were a part of them once. Your wives, angular lines with faces crumbling into a wet blur of features, carry on your mission. With their colorful מטפחות  (head scarves) fashioned high above their heads at your funerals, and eulogies graced with faith and חזוק (encouragement), they communicate a certain strength of resistance and rebellion, a message to our enemies: We will not break or fall away. You will not defeat us.

And I would say to these heroes: the legacies you have left are much vaster than I could accomplish in a full lifetime. Not just your courage, leadership and selflessness in battle, but the brilliance and beauty of your nascent contributions to this world. So many of you left original music, art, shuls/communities you built from scratch, years of Torah learning and teaching, students you have touched forever, videos of you singing זמירות or sharing everyday wisdom, or lessons on gratitude and ביטחון. Eliav Abitbol: you even donated your kidney to a 12-year-old girl you had never met, saving her life.

My sobbing abates only momentarily as I whisper my final words to the fallen: I am sorry. קָטֹ֜נְתִּי. Thank you, קָטֹ֜נְתִּי. Am Yisrael Chai.

In the merit of the safe return of the hostages בקרוב מאוד.

לעילוי נשמת מלכה בת חנוך

לעילוי נשמת יהודה בן יצחק

לעילוי נשמת רחל בת חנוך

לעילוי נשמת מרים בת חנוך

לעילוי נשמת עתיה שרה בת יצחק הלוי