By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — When I heard from my brother in Israel that my mother died there very early Sunday morning, it was emotionally something like a comma. Hard to put the period down at the end of the sentence. And it was always just as hard for me to know exactly how to love a woman who was as brilliant and funny and insightful as she was brooding, moody, and given to astonishing bursts of spitefulness.
The whole thing is hard. But it hasn’t been hard to grieve and wonder and second-guess and keep coming back to the realization that she was my mother, that both my parents are now gone, and that I will never have my mother to successively blame, mimic, reject, invite, dispute, and burst out laughing with ever again.
Ruth Kamin was born in 1932 in the land of Israel while the British were still there—Mandatory Palestine. She and my father, Jeff, were locked in love as teenage sweethearts in the dusty border village of Kfar-Saba (where I was born) by the Samarian Mountains and amongst some of the most fragrant orange groves and biblically-driven breezes on this earth. Times were at once dangerous and innocent. My mother knew hunger and poverty and danger and she lived, like all her peers, in fear of Arab terrorists.
The Jews of Palestine were impoverished, intermittently despised and murdered by the Arabs, and considered by the occupying British as stepchildren in the human race.
But they were also shrewd and practical and would not compromise on their right to independence. The dark whirlwind of the Nazi genocide strangely galvanized the indigenous Jewish community of Palestine, so historically and unequivocally the heirs of an ancient and tough people who had been tied to the wooded hills of Galilee and the humid basins of the central plains and the stony bluffs of the Negev like no other people whatsoever from time immemorial.
They were ready to gather in the unwanted exiles from Europe’s mass murder of its Jews. The gas chambers and the killing forests of Europe were to be avenged in the land of Joshua, David, and Deborah.
My mother and father, a teacher and a soldier, were two of the several thousand anonymous young people who, with their hands and blood and sense of destiny, brought in the skeletal survivors, gave them Hebrew souls, and handed them bread and rifles. Within minutes of Israel’s UN-mandated sovereignty on May 14, 1948, the combined armies of the surrounding Arab nations barbarously invaded the nascent state with the full intent of completing the work of the SS, Gestapo, and Nazi racial covenant against the Jewish people.
The losses were unspeakable; 1% of the Jewish population was killed in the course of Israel’s astonishing victory. My father battled, and was wounded, against the British-trained Arab Legion of Transjordan. My mother did civilian work in Kfar-Saba but, like everybody else, had war-related duties.
She told me a few times over the years about her solitary nights as the watchperson in a high wooden tower looking out from the village. She had but a radio and a flashlight to signal the villagers of any Arab insurgents that might be spotted trying to enter and kill citizens. It was dreadful and long nocturnal duty; she was lonely, scared, and vulnerable. But whenever it was her turn to do it, she just did it, because that was the fate of the remnant Jews of the 20th century.
My mother never really came down from that nighttime tower and I believe that, sometimes, the sunlight of life blinded her more than it warmed her. I wish I had asked her more questions about it because she never found too many answers after it was safe to walk around in this life.
God give her peace now in the soil of Israel.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California, He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com