The dance that never stopped
“Live every day as if it were the last,” declares the sign. Liron Barda, who chose to stay and treat the wounded right here, at the Nova site, on October 7th, smiles at us from the sign like starlight: by the time we see her smile, the star she was is gone.
So many last days and starlight smiles are squeezed into this limited space, into this finite piece of land. So many faces, explanations, stories — the guy who was too badly wounded to leave the car, the girl who was wounded but managed to start a different car and drive her friends to safety, but couldn’t save herself and died here, right her, together with Liron and so many others. More and more and more of them stare at us from every direction. Names and quotes and loving memories, packed into this narrow strait of a place. This space that is too small to contain so much loss and headache.
“I recognize some of the smiles,” I tell my children. “I remember them from Facebook posts in the early days, from people asking, ‘Have you seen my daughter? My brother? My wife?’ So many of them were replaced with death notices, in time.”
My older children are attentive, solemn. My 7-year-old doesn’t understand, though. He runs ahead to look at the young trees that were planted to commemorate the fallen. He wants to touch them, smell them. His arms and heart are open, eager to experience reality.
Everyone who died here was a child, once.
Everyone who died here wanted to experience life.
* * *
“We drove from Haifa,” says the smiling young man who wants to borrow our binoculars. Like us, he climbed up to this hill in Sderot to view Gaza. But his day started with a siren. Not to worry, though, he assures us, he is used to it all by now, and knows exactly how to lie down by the side of the road if rockets catch him on his way back, so he’s all set, really. “Besorot tovot (may we hear good news), and thank you,” he says cheerfully when it’s time to depart. His easy smile seems to belong to a different reality, a more optimistic place.
When we look through the binoculars, Gaza’s ruined homes loom large, bearing witness to what Sinwar’s “flood” brought upon his own people. Without the binoculars, all I can see is a distant city, a bit of sea, a pastoral, open space. Maybe if I could view our reality from such a distance it would be easier to feel relaxed and optimistic, to smile with abandon. As it is, every shred of hope is an act of choice instead.
* * *
“One of the Thai workers hid here in the cowshed, he buried himself in dung,” says my friend Stanley Kay. We are walking through Kibbutz Alumim, where the green grass and quiet lanes hide stories of battle and carnage. “Here the other Thai workers were murdered,” Stanley adds, pointing to what’s left of their dwelling — a lonely, singed façade, with some dried-up wreaths below it.
“This is the street that Barak, a member of our Kitat Konenut (local response team), covered on his own on October 7th to stop the invasion. The others covered the perpendicular street but he worked alone. When the army arrived they told him to split his forces three ways and rendezvous with them at three points, and he said, ‘It’s only me! I can’t split myself!'”
My friend keeps talking and pointing. Here is where the Slotki brothers, who came to help the kibbutz, fell in battle. Here is where the four soldiers from the Shaldag special unit hid and tried to get a helicopter to come and help them. Here is where the helicopter, which they finally got a hold of through friends instead of through official channels, shot at the packing facilities and killed numerous terrorists. Here and here and here.
All is peaceful now, and beautiful, and quiet. I listen to my friend while a young calf licks and licks my hand with the stubborn optimism of a young creature, wholly convinced that if he only tries enough, my hand will, in fact, yield sweetness.
* * *
“Lift up your heads, O ye gates,” the crowd sings around us. The members of Kibbutz Alumim are gathered to celebrate the completion of two new scrolls of Torah, dedicated to the memory of their fallen members. The lives and deaths of Oriya Mesh and Nitai Omer, Stevie Marcus and Shachaf Bergstein, are now forever woven into the ancient story we finish and begin every Simchat Torah, the same ancient story that, like the Nova site, seems too finite, too small, to contain what lies within it.
Like a portal to infinity, each Torah scroll contains the memory of countless encounters between individuals and text and the countless possibilities of others. It contains the countless life journeys that grew out of such encounters and the journeys that are still to come. And it contains our shared journey – the grand national journey that encompasses all the individual ones and yet transcends them, the journey that brought us to this day.
The journey we continue.
A year ago, Shachaf danced with the Torah here in Alumim on the eve of Simcaht Torah, before leaving for his home in Kfar Aza, where he was killed the very next day. The people who loved him remember this, remember him dancing. And tonight, they will dance with the Torah scrolls that commemorate him, continuing his dance. They will bring their memories into the dance, and with them — Shachaf. He will dance with them, in their motions, in their hearts.
Liron will be here too. And beautiful Bar, whom Liron treated before they both were murdered. And Tiferet and Aner and so many others, who can never dance again, but whose dance is now ours to carry on.
They will live on within us.
They will shed their own light on our journey with the Torah and beyond it.
They will forever be part of our song.
* * *
I don’t know what we will feel tonight and tomorrow over the Simchat Torah holiday. I don’t know what it will be like to dance on the very day when a year ago so many beautiful people were killed in cold blood. How does one feel when the time of dancing and the time of mourning from Ecclesiastes are one and the same?
But after watching the people of Alumim gather themselves to commemorate through celebration, after exchanging smiles with a young man from Haifa and watching reservists’ wives rise to the occasion and soldiers finding faith through their fatigue and parents of the wounded and the fallen finding it within themselves to offer others comfort and us, all of us, fighting so hard for a whole long year to keep hope alive in ourselves and in others, I do know that the true dance, the one that underlies all others, will continue.
Whether we physically dance or not tonight and tomorrow, the eternal dance of a people whose sons and daughters hold each other’s hands through the dark times and find the strength to keep on going, keep on going, keep on hoping – it won’t stop.
We won’t let it stop.
Because Liron’s dance, and Shachaf’s, and ours – it deserves to – it must – go on.
* * *