Netanel’s shofar: A soundscape of heartbreak and resolve
It’s Friday. Yom Kippur is almost here. Normally I’d be in my kitchen right now, chopping vegetables for the meal before the fast.
But not today. Today, I am here at Mount Herzl with my son, walking towards the funeral of yet another fallen soldier. A man I did not know.
We pass by the lots where we buried our dead earlier in the war. Each name on each grave stone is familiar. Amitai Tzvi Granot, whose funeral was the first I attended since October 7th. I remember his mother screaming over his grave back when it was but overturned soil under a dark night’s sky. “There is still a chance for love,” she yelled, quoting the name of her father’s book. “We have lost our private war,” added his father, Rabbi Tamir Granot. “But as a people, we will win.”
Familiar name after familiar name but the funeral is not even in sight. It’s so much farther now. There are so many new graves to pass by, first.
As we draw near, the first sounds we hear are the cries. The body is being covered in dirt, and Netanel’s family is crying. His parents. His siblings, His wife. His three little children.
His father has to work hard to chisel a kaddish out of the incessant weeping that chokes him. His grandsons’ voices, young — too young — and lilting, rise alongside his cries.
“God wanted to lechaper — to atone — for his people,” the father cries as he tries to eulogize his son. “I don’t understand, but I accept the g’zera – the judgement.”
When the army representatives came to tell the family that their loved one was gone, the father tells us, he asked them to find his son’s tefillin. “I knew he always kept them close to him,” he weeps. He wanted to keep them for his grandson, to use once he will attain the age of adulthood. “I didn’t want them to get lost.”
The army located the tefillin and delivered them into the father’s hands, alongside Netanel’s tallit bag. In the bag, wrapped in the tallit, were a Yom Kippur machzor (prayer book) — and a shofar, ready for blowing at the end of the fast.
Netanel will never blow this shofar.
“Who goes to war, to fierce battle, and thinks of every detail? Of a shofar,” Meir chokes out.
The voices of the shofar are likened to a mother’s cries over her fallen son in our tradition, specifically — the cries of the mother of one of our national antagonists, cruel Canaanite general Sisera. Perhaps a grieving parent’s pain is such a universal experience that it renders the identity of the mourner irrelevant. Priam’s pain snaps Achilles from his righteous fury. Sisera’s mother’s cries pierce our own soul, and find their way into our own tradition.
And Meir’s cries do to, cutting, tekiah-like, through our defenses.
Around us, everyone cries.
“I want to declare here,” says Netanel’s brother, “in the presence of Netanel’s soul, and all these circles of people: we will not surrender. We will not surrender. We are an eternal people, and we are not afraid from a long road, even when it is long, and so hard.”
His voice, too, breaks often. His eulogy is wept more than said. But these words are clear, a shofar-blow in their own way. I feel as if my very soul stands at attention, and answers with the salute of an ‘amen’.
We sing, then. We sing a song of prayer, begging God to have mercy on his creations, declaring that it befits him to be sanctified by holy people. We sing, and I think of Netanel, who served in reserve duty for 183 days this year, and died protecting his soldiers. I think of the many, many Israelis like him, serving now, even as we bury Netanel. Serving even though they have done more than their fair share. Serving even while their family struggle under the strain. Serving for us all.
Netanel’s brother speaks of a forward-facing heroism — the heroism of choosing to go on.
I look around me. I look at the gravestones and think of the mourners of all the young men and women buried here.
We are surrounded by so many heroes. So many people whose lot is to go on.
God, we will strive to be worthy of this sacrifice, I vow as Netanel’s shofar is blown over his grave.
Tekiah. Shvarim Truah. Tekiah.
But please, God, strive to be worthy of it too. Strive to seal our people to a fate worthy of everything so many of us sacrificed this year.
And please, please, I beg you, God.
Let this be the last funeral.
Let no parents, no children, nor spouses, no siblings, ever know again this horror of grief.