The Blogs: Three Simple, Very Horrible Words.

Almost two hundred years before Telegram was an app where you could send furtive messages or order sketchy things without getting caught, the telegram was an instrument of communication. One could use the services of a telegraph to send a telegram, which was typically very brief. As a radio operator during WWII, my late father was extremely proficient in sending Morse code messages via the telegraph, and he tried to teach us how to use the code when we were young. He churned out those signature staccato beeps far faster than our untrained ears could possibly interpret them.

The reason that telegraphed messages were kept short was because of their high cost. Words had a limit on how many letters they could contain, and messages generally had only as many words as absolutely necessary. The word “STOP” was used to denote the end of a sentence, because the charge was higher for punctuation than for letters.

When my grandfather received a telegram sent from Palestine in the early 1930s, it contained three words. From what I can figure, it cost over $50 in today’s value.

The message read: “YOUR FATHER DIED”.

Those three words must have come as a shock, but perhaps not a great one. My great-grandparents had made Aliya (though I wonder if that was even what they called it 100 years ago) several years prior — in their very senior years — to an undeveloped Holy Land. She had passed away perhaps a year after their arrival, followed by his demise a short number of years later. Their graves on Har Hazeitim were restored after Israel reclaimed that area in the Six Day War. The weather in the subsequent decades was not kind to those monuments, and they were refurbished once again in more recent years.

So while those three words, “YOUR FATHER DIED,” were undoubtedly very sad, we are able to visit his resting place, and his legacy lives on in hundreds of descendants, some of whom carry his name a century later.

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I was checking my LinkedIn feed a month or two back, when I saw that a colleague of mine had given birth. Although I don’t know her in real life, our paths crossed once, decades ago, when she was a student in Bais Yaakov, and came to our office for Career Day, to see if she might want to consider graphic design as a profession. I take not the slightest bit of credit for her estimable success, mind you, but I do hope that day was helpful in her eventual choice of profession.

She explained her recent, uncharacteristic silence on social media by saying that she prefers not to announce a pregnancy until she has the baby to show for it. Now the baby had arrived, and her absence could be explained. Fair enough.

The first line of her announcement, though, stopped me in my tracks:

“Cleared for Publication”

14 months ago, I probably would have thought that to be a very cute way to break the news of her newborn to the world. But today we live in a different, post-October 7th world. And for those of us living in Israel and consuming the English-language news, those three words cause our stomachs to fall and our hearts to misfire.

“Cleared for Publication” are the introductory words followed by the announcement of a death of one, or two, or five, or six of our soldiers.

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The Israeli army, unfortunately, has all-too-vast experience in notifying families of soldiers’ deaths. Whenever possible, they send teams to every family member, timed to knock on their various doors at the same moment, so that no one has to receive the dreaded news second-hand from a different family member, or from the news. No names are publicized in the media until this notification has taken place.

“Cleared for Publication” means that the family members have all been notified.

“Cleared for Publication” means that the military censors have released this information to the public.

“Cleared for Publication” means that there will be yet another funeral in a military cemetery. That another widow will somehow have to put aside her searing pain, and muster the strength to get out of bed to get her kids off to school every morning, with no one to help her. And that those kids’ lives have just been irreparably torn asunder.

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I messaged the mother of the newborn, wishing her a sincere Mazal Tov and good wishes, but also informing her that her innocently-chosen words, while clever and cute to her audience in the U.S., were a serious trigger here in Israel. A great supporter of Israel herself, she was shocked by my explanation and her inadvertent faux pas, and quickly deleted those words from her post.

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“Your father died.” A tragic part of every family’s lifecycle. There’s no denying it, and no escaping it.

“Cleared for publication.” The horrible reality that’s been imposed upon us by those whose sole aim is to see us all dead and gone. Our nation is valiantly and ceaselessly battling to put an end to this collective nightmare.

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Cleared for publication.

Maybe if we whisper it enough, the horror will dissolve away. Maybe our gut will stop tightening, and our breathing will remain steady.

For now, probably not. But we can hope. We can pray.

May we soon see the day when those three simple, currently-horrible words can once more grace witty birth announcements, and never again be the harbinger of heartbreak and sorrow.