Laughter and Tears Mixed Together: Keeping Perspective Before Yom Kippur (Column 670)
A few days ago I was sent a eulogy post that Alik Oster wrote about his brother, Eitan, who fell a few days ago in southern Lebanon (here is the last video he sent his family). The moment I finished reading that post (beautifully written, as is Alik’s way), with a heavy sadness in my heart, I received on WhatsApp from a friend a brilliant passage by S. Y. Agnon that had me on the floor with laughter. To my astonishment I noticed several points of resemblance between the two pieces, and beyond the open miracle and the guiding hand of Providence, as it were, that sent me these two pieces in such close succession, I discovered firsthand that the very same thing can plunge you into deep sorrow or make you burst into loud laughter—everything depends on context. I thought that in these days, when we are occupied mainly with tears, there is room to notice the brighter side as well (as the saying goes: always look on the bright side of life), and I hope you will forgive the lightness of tone that here accompanies great sadness and grief. At first I considered, in honor of Yom Kippur, bringing the brilliant and cynical passage by Agnon about the custom of kapparot (here Agnon follows the Mechaber, who—following the Tur, Orach Chayim §605, in his Shulchan Aruch—writes that one ought to refrain from it), but it is just as well that I can accompany it with a eulogy that places us more fully in the mood of these days.
As you read, note how many lines of similarity there are between these two texts, despite the sharp contrast.
First, Agnon’s passage (the story in audio is here):
And now, in a sharp transition (as they say on the radio), Alik’s post:
| When the phone rang at 10:38 on Wednesday, I actually already knew. I’ve been saying goodbye to Eitan for a whole year. Putting up the necessary defenses. Refraining from writing “I love you” just because, because we both knew what I was afraid of. Not thinking, “Why don’t you introduce me to your new girlfriend—do I have to meet her only during the shiva?” because you don’t think about such things. And if you do think, you quickly think about something else. I made funny memes out of every pre-entry video that Eitan sent to the group, to prevent it from becoming a farewell clip that would flood the internet moments after the knock at the door. We all did this, as we discovered over the last three days—and Eitan did, too, in fact. He made sure to tie up all the loose ends, all the time. To write to everyone, to leave memories for everyone, not to leave any accounts open. He sent every video to the family with the thought that it might be the last, and therefore also a testament to the nation. Eitan could be very funny, but also serious to the point of terror, and always with absolute honesty, in every field. As part of the thoughts-I-must-not-think throughout the past year, I told myself: what does it matter? We’re all going to die at some point. I’ll die, my parents will die, my children will die. I tried to calm myself: Eitan will die, too. Who says it’s better to endure another fifty years with patience, retire, and then slowly waste away from cancer or kidney disease? What’s so bad about dying in battle? A kind of end that has meaning, perhaps. For another fifty–sixty years, tops—is that the whole thing? At ten thirty-eight the phone rang. I was in the garden planting strawberries. Adam had come in with Simona on the bicycle a few minutes earlier. They’d bought cakes for Rosh Hashanah. We built a menu. Tons of guests were supposed to come. I wiped the dirt from my hand, took the phone from my pocket. My heart sank: it was a call from Dad. My father never calls. If there’s a call from him, I assume one of two things happened: either he sat on the phone by mistake, or someone died. (“Why would I call you if someone died?” he wondered the previous time he sat on the phone. “He’s already dead—it’s not urgent.”) But when I heard my father’s voice I already knew. It was cracked. “Alik, I don’t know how to say this. Eitan was killed. Come home.” “I’m coming,” I answered, and hung up. I went to Adam and said, “Eitan was killed.” “What?” Adam said. “No, no. That can’t be. No way. No.” But I didn’t have even a moment of “this can’t be.” This is the call I’ve feared for a year, and here it came through the door. I have to get home. Adam wouldn’t let me drive alone. We told the kids, called Naama, and Adam drove me from the house—home. I felt like a man who smashed full-force into a large glass wall and shattered it. It hurt everywhere in the body. It was shock. And after the shock subsides a bit, I’ll discover how many shards have lodged in me. There’s no position that eases the pain. It’s pain in the body, yet it doesn’t come from the body and the body won’t quiet it. And during the drive, even before we reached the house and saw the messengers in uniform, it became clear to me out of that pain what nonsense I had been saying: how important it is, to live. How precious life is. And Eitan knew what I didn’t understand: he was surrounded by so much death this past year, and he was determined to allow us to live. He had so many plans for the future besides being buried on Mount Herzl. He could have been an excellent company commander, a physicist, a hi-tech guy, an educator, a Yamam fighter, a surfing instructor. The entertainment manager at Club Med literally offered him an acrobatics role in Brazil. He could have been buried on Mount Herzl after two terms as prime minister, maybe even president, and then—only after finishing his memoir and his research on infantry warfare in Vietnam—be buried on Mount Herzl, in the section of the nation’s greats. He was the kind of person you simply wanted next to you whenever things were about to go wrong. If his little sister was late coming home, he would call her in a booming bass: “Tamar, what is this—who are you with? Put me on speaker!” To me he was always a seven-year-old boy who absolutely hated—hated—hated to lose at Speed. And he wanted to live. And if he were alive, he’d undoubtedly be doing this much better than all of us. This lack of life hurts in an inconceivable way. Truly surprising. Go hug your children. Go dance. Go eat something delicious. Life is a wonderful thing. Eitan would probably also recommend that you take on a task larger than this life, precisely for cases like these. Be part of something big. But I’m not Eitan. And therefore I won’t share again the heroism video he sent us a few hours before he entered Lebanon for the last time (who opens a family-WhatsApp video with the words “We must bring the residents of the north back home”? Whatever happened to “Alik, you’re an annoying fatty”?), but rather just a clip of him doing an embarrassing dance to “Prince of Egypt.” And somehow, even when he does that, he does it as well as it can be done. Who knows what miracles you can achieve? When you believe, somehow you will. You will when you believe.
For the world is split, for it is two, and doubled is the murmur of its lament; for there is no house without a dead upon its hands, and no dead who forgets his home.
And without end, toward the cities of our mourners, dwellers of darkness and heaps gazed upon: Wondrous—wondrous are our lives, filled with thoughts of the dead. (Alterman) |
The motif of life’s transience—of the inescapable death that puts everything in proportion—creates a proportionate view of ourselves that is very fitting for Yom Kippur. If we are honest, our lives are, all in all, a rather paltry affair. Each of us is a small, insignificant creature on a small, neglected patch at the edge of a small planet set somewhere, lost within a small galaxy that itself goes unnoticed in the Almighty’s vast and ancient (yet finite) universe.
Our days are like grass—here today and gone tomorrow. So how different are we really from that rooster who thinks he is the center of the universe? And yet, somehow, we are meant to take our lives seriously—just like that bold rooster among the birds.
To live a double life of seriousness and lightness, of sorrow and laughter—this is something that grants us some healthy perspective about ourselves and the world. Sometimes we need to step into the point of view of the mouse standing off to the side, poking a hole in our balloon. True, we all stand before an end like that rooster, but on the other hand, this is what we have. If we don’t take this seriously, then what will we take seriously? In these tumultuous days—of inner and outer war, of lost hope and lack of horizon—perhaps such an Agnon-like gaze, alongside our usual one, gives us a fresher, more optimistic angle.
Gmar Ḥatimah Tovah, and Shana Tova to us all.
Discussion
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There was once a rooster living in the house of a Jew, and his livelihood was readily provided for him, lacking nothing at all. Even so, he lived in anxiety, and no laughter was seen on his beak. When Elul arrived, his sorrow doubled, and when he crowed he would bellow in weeping. A certain mouse lived there as well. The mouse asked the rooster, “Choicest of birds, why are you so sad? If it is livelihood—your livelihood is at hand; if it is lodging—you dwell among human beings. Yet in the end I see you sad, frightened, and trembling like a man without strength.” He said to him, “Did not Jeremiah say (Jeremiah 17), ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in man,’ and it says (Job 33), ‘If there be for him an angel, an intercessor, one among a thousand… to declare unto man his uprightness’? None of this avails me whenever I see the master of the house taking his prayer book in hand. Why? Because there is one prayer in the prayer book, and it is called by the name of ‘humans’; and when he recites this prayer, he takes a rooster and circles it over his head and says, ‘This rooster shall go to death,’ and hands it over to the slaughterer to slaughter it. Concerning myself Jeremiah laments (Lamentations 3), ‘I am the man who has seen affliction.’” The mouse said to the rooster, “King David, peace be upon him, already said (Psalms 89), ‘What man can live and not see death?’ and so too Job said (Job 14), ‘But a man dies and is laid low.’ Even so, as long as your time to depart from the world has not arrived, by your life, you are alive. Therefore gird your loins like a man and trust in the Lord, as it is said (Jeremiah 17), ‘Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,’ and it says (Psalms 34), ‘Happy is the man who takes refuge in Him,’ and it says (Psalms 40), ‘Happy is the man who has made the Lord his trust.’ And for you there shall be fulfilled the verse that is written (Job 10), ‘Are your years like the days of a man?’ And if you give me permission, I shall rescue you from the corruptions of human beings, as it is said (ibid. 32), ‘Deliver him from going down to the pit; I have found a ransom.’” He said to him, “How will you save me from the hand of man?” He said to him, “Have you never heard what my father did to a lion that was imprisoned among humans? My father gnawed through the ropes and freed the lion. What my father did for the king of beasts, he will do for us, the mockery of birds. But there is one thing I ask of you: listen to me, as Job said (Job 34), ‘Hear me, you wise men.’”
The rooster said in his heart, “Let the miracle come from wherever it may; I will hear what he has to say.” He said to him, “How will you act to save me?” He said to him, “Choicest of birds, the nights of Selichot are approaching, and people rise early for the synagogue. I shall go and eat the prayer book before even a single letter remains of it.” The rooster said, “In Your salvation I hope, O Lord.” When the nights of Selichot arrived, the members of the household went out to the synagogue and left the house with no one in it. That mouse came out of his hole to eat the prayer book. The cat sensed him, pounced on him, and ate him.
True, this isn’t typical Talmudic analysis, but it seems important to me that posts like this also appear here.
You didn’t copy the Agnon passage.