Tzav Shmone

Anyone who was in Israel on Saturday, October seventh, twenty twenty-three, and in the days that followed carries a memory that the quarrels of the years since have not managed to discredit, that of an entire country answering a call-up that in many cases had not yet arrived, with fifty-year-old men grabbing their packs before their phones rang, restaurants shutting their doors to diners in order to cook for battalions, and strangers offering rides to the bases without asking their passengers whom they had voted for. Within a few days the army had called up more than three hundred thousand reservists, and civil society, which nobody had summoned, showed up alongside them, so that for a few weeks we discovered, to our astonishment, that we were capable of acting together with a speed none of us would have predicted the previous summer, when the country was divided over the judicial overhaul.

The emergency call-up order even has a name of its own, tzav shmone, Order Eight, and there is no Israeli who does not know what it means, although no one has yet invented an equivalent order for the return home, one that would summon neighbors, relatives, and friends to receive the reservist who hands back his gear after months away and tries to relearn how to sleep in a room where silence is not a sign of danger. On Monday, September fourteenth, one of those reservists took his own life at his home in Tel Aviv, and, according to a Haaretz tally, at least twenty active-duty soldiers have died by suicide since January, a figure that leaves out at least twelve other Israelis who served in this war and died after returning to civilian life, as if the pain they carried had been discharged along with them.

In the decade before the war, an average of twelve active-duty soldiers died by suicide each year, and then came seven in the final months of twenty twenty-three, twenty-one the following year, and twenty-two last year, the highest total in fifteen years. One of those soldiers, Eliran Mizrahi, a father of four, became known throughout the country because of the fight over his burial.

Mizrahi fought in the communities along the Gaza border on October seventh, spent months in the Strip operating an armored bulldozer, came home diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and recognized as a disabled veteran, and, on a Friday in June of twenty twenty-four, received a tzav shmone ordering him to report to Rafah two days later and died by suicide that same day. The army initially said that he had not been on duty and would therefore not receive a military funeral, and his mother asked publicly why her son was good enough to be sent to war but not good enough to be recognized as a fallen soldier, until, five days after his death, a review concluded that he had in fact been on duty that day, and Mizrahi was buried in Jerusalem with the honors his family had demanded.

The generals, who are usually the first to be blamed in stories like this one, corrected the error in less than a week, and the Defense Ministry announced at the end of last year that it would begin examining, case by case, the link between suicide and service and would expand support for families, which is more than many institutions do after making a mistake. Knesset researchers found, even so, that the ministry’s prevention plan is neither public nor accessible, and the army itself began systematically recording suicide attempts only in twenty twenty-four, logging two hundred and seventy-nine in nineteen months. The question Mizrahi’s mother asked was never addressed to the generals alone, and the part that remains unanswered falls to us civilians, who in October organized ourselves within hours to get the reservists to their bases and have yet to organize ourselves to welcome them home.

We all know the reason for this delay, because we all contributed to it, and its roots go back to before the war, to the summer of twenty twenty-three, when one part of the country branded as traitors the reservists who threatened to stop volunteering for duty in protest against the judicial overhaul, while another part regarded the overhaul’s supporters as a threat to democracy. When October seventh came, the reservists’ movement that had led the protests turned its demonstration apparatus into a civilian relief network within a few hours, and the supposed traitors reported to their bases before they were even called, but the truce lasted only a few weeks, perhaps a few months, and then we went back to our prewar divisions, sorting every Israeli according to where they stood on the overhaul, the hostages, and the conscription of the ultra-Orthodox. The reservist, who in October belonged to everyone, came to be used as an argument by every side, to the point that there is now a political party bearing his name, while at least twelve Israelis who served in this war and died this year remain outside the official count.

There are those who say that, in a country surrounded by enemies, courtesy toward domestic adversaries is a luxury, and the argument deserves respect, because the fear that October seventh left behind is real and cannot be dissolved by good manners. It was precisely in that October, however, under the worst terror the country had known in decades, that courtesy between adversaries reemerged of its own accord, which suggests that it is among the few things capable of carrying a country through its own fear.

Hannah Arendt, who arrived in New York in nineteen forty-one, two years later wrote an ironic essay about the compulsory optimism of Jewish refugees, people who had lost their homes, their language, and their professions and yet insisted that everything was fine, and she observed that when some of them died by suicide, they departed without leaving behind any indictment of the world, only conventional letters that said nothing. She was writing about her own friends, and she spent the rest of her life, not least in the letters she exchanged with Karl Jaspers after the war, trying to understand how a person’s isolation, once the shared world vanishes around him, can empty even death of meaning, and, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she portrayed the camps as the extreme of that destruction, places where prisoners were stripped even of their own deaths. Nothing in today’s Israel compares to that, but the mechanism she described begins long before the camps, when a society starts treating each person merely as the bearer of an opinion.

Years later, in an essay on collective responsibility, Arendt drew a distinction that applies directly to our case, arguing that guilt is always personal and that no one can be guilty of something he did not do, whereas there is a responsibility we bear simply by belonging to a community, for what it does or fails to do in our name, and from which we could free ourselves only by leaving it. None of us is guilty of the death of the reservist in Tel Aviv, and, by the same reasoning, none of us is excused from answering for it.

I came to this country from Brazil with the custom of arguing about politics at the top of my lungs on Fridays and making peace over Sunday barbecue, and I confess, without pride, that in Israel I have preserved the first half of that tradition with great diligence and abandoned the second, like almost everyone I know, so that I, too, have helped build the narrow country to which the reservists return. The objection that suicide has clinical, familial, and deeply personal causes, which no neighbor can resolve with a dinner invitation, is valid, and it would be dishonest to ignore it, but a man who is suffering seeks help more readily when he still believes that someone wants to listen to him, and that belief is built or undone every day in the most ordinary conversations.

Eliran Mizrahi’s mother waited five days to hear the state say that her son had fallen for his country, and the state, in the end, said it, but what the reservist in Tel Aviv, whose name we do not yet know, and the twelve left out of the count needed is beyond the reach of any administrative review, and providing it depends on us. The country that, on a Saturday morning in October, turned out in full without being summoned is now receiving a call-up with no number and no name, one that reaches us in the form of a neighbor, a colleague, or a cousin who came back from the war and who, before being turned into an argument in our quarrels, was among the three hundred thousand reservists for whom the country spent those October nights waiting for news.