By Rabbi Ben Kamin
TEL AVIV—They were two anonymous young people born in the British mandate of Palestine about twenty years before the British quit and the UN unsuccessfully partitioned the territory into two projected states. They were among just several thousand faceless heroes that created the State of Israel and miraculously fought a regional onslaught from the neighboring Arab regimes—which obviated the declared Arab state that Israel recognized in 1948.
The two of them, my father and mother, lost an alarming number of their school chums in the one-year war that ended with ceasefire lines and predicated more than sixty years of conflagration and terrorism. But they were already pledged to one another and remained life mates till his sudden and dreadfully premature death in 1976. My father was a soldier of Israel, and he wrote haunting poetry in Hebrew about war and fleeting youth and flames that consume trees and life and that burn people’s hopes. He embraced America as a fervent immigrant when we formally arrived in 1962 and he loved baseball and Chevrolets and the privilege of voting in polling stations located in the simple halls of public schools.
He was complex and brilliant and volatile and, though bulky, remained fiercely athletic—from his days as a star collegiate soccer player to the night he dropped dead playing handball in a Cincinnati court. This week in Israel is a bittersweet milestone for me and my large and extended family—although the family here includes my second daughter (now living in the hip metropolis of Tel Aviv), my younger brother and his family, and my mother—who returned here, with my father’s disinterred bones—after some 50 years in the United States. Yesterday, I visited my father’s final resting place for the first time; tomorrow the family will celebrate my mother’s 80th birthday.
When we lighted upon the memorial field, and I saw the stone, and the copper slate of some of Dad’s poetry sealed on the tomb, I wept into the head and hair of my elder daughter, who has arrived here from New York. My tears were the salty waters of relief and acceptance. My father, perpetually restless, appeared to have found a place to sleep at last. Torn between his American citizenship and his Israeli blood (some of which he shed,) my father finally rests in the soil of Israel), his soul lingering comfortably above the field. His long-traveling bones mingled with a number of the family elders; my mother’s plot laid next his, like an eternal bed that makes her feel safe. It was all, well, okay.
I walked over to my mother, the cross-currents of life and healing thoughts lifting our spirits and softening the harshness of the realities—his absence, her age. We embraced like we hadn’t in decades. My daughter watched and learned a lot. And it was evening and morning, a new day. And it was good.
*
Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com