Passover 2024

 The Fourth Child

For Marcy, with love and gratitude…

April 2024

I returned from Israel just before Passover so sick that I had to skip Seder and order in from a deli that sent matzo ball soup without the ball. I had a terrible cold I couldn’t shake and was forced to stay home for over a week.  This, I assumed, was why no one was asking about my trip.  I was experiencing Rhinovirus isolation. But it turns out to be something different.  It turns out that I can see it on someone’s face when I say I’ve just returned from Israel and they don’t want to hear about it. I can see it on someone’s face if they don’t know how to feel, or if they do know how to feel and they’re pretty sure that they way they feel is not the way I feel. 

For the past seven months, I’ve worn a dog tag for the hostages every day, and a giant star of David every day, and an arm load of bracelets to remind myself that 133 souls are still in Gaza every day.  In lighter moments I joke that I am the Taylor Swift of war merch.  I can see why it might seem like, with all that Jew junk on, I’d have a narrow, judgmental, ideologically intransigent point of view about the world in this fraught moment.  But really, I’m desperate for conversation. Really I’m bursting for the opportunity to share the stories that I’ve heard, to unpack them and understand them in the context of a world that is not so much binary, as riddled with paradox that we can only wrap our hearts and minds around by discussing over and over and over again. There is not enough conversation. We can not talk about this trauma and this problem and this moment too much. To not be asked leaves me feeling alone and unseen. 

And so on Passover, alone and without so much as a matzoh ball, I found myself thinking a lot about the meaning of the holiday, particularly this year.  I thought about not just the four questions, but more importantly, the four children.  The wise, the simple, the wicked, and the one who does not know how to ask.  The fourth child is not the wise child who doesn’t ask because he knows.  Nor is he the simple child, who doesn’t ask because he lacks intelligence.  The fourth child is avoidant - either because he knows the answer but lacks spiritual connection or because he is afraid to ask, afraid to embarrass himself or engage in confrontation.  We are, it seems to me, a world filled with fourth children at the moment.  

So let me now speak to the fourth children - the incurious, the embarrassed, the afraid, the exhausted.  You could have asked, “what was it like to be in Israel when Iran attacked?”  I would describe a night sky filled with aircraft, planes flying overhead as I lay awake, doom scrolling the news and WhatsApp, waiting for sirens and constantly checking the newly downloaded Home Front Command app on my phone.  I did a hundred mental check lists of the contents of the backpack by the door (water, nuts, phone charger plus power pack, flashlight, aspirin), the location of my shoes (next to the bed), and reminded myself to grab a pillow and blanket off the bed on the way to the shelter.  Beside me, my husband snored.

Just a few short hours before, we’d been at the weekly rally in Hostage Square when my friend Rebecca whispered, “Go back to your hotel - they’re shutting down the city by 11pm.”  By 10pm we were at the hotel restaurant, having stopped at a mini-mart for bottled water, nuts, gum, anything I thought we’d need in an emergency.  My husband ate a hearty meal.  I had a martini. I then had another as our phones lit up with texts from worried friends.  We played shesh besh in the lobby, I had my third martini.  By midnight, we learned the airport was closing in half hour, airspace over Jordan and Lebanon had closed and that the bombs were drones and would take 6-8 hours to arrive.  My husband announced he was going to sleep.  “Sleep?!  I can’t sleep,” I cried.  “You can,” he said, “Take a pill and sleep.  This is what we do.”  

For perspective:  from where I’m staying in Jaffa to Khan Younis in Gaza is 56 miles.  That’s pretty much the distance from my house in Beverly Hills to Ventura.  Its a little closer than Ojai.  The West Bank is as far from me at this moment as West Covina is to me when I’m home. Lebanon is just a bit farther from me now than Santa Barbara is to my backyard.  You get the point.  This is a tiny, tiny country.  Going to bed at night knowing that you are surrounded by countries harboring proxies for enemies, willing to fire at any moment, watching WhatsApp channels filled with news of an impending military retaliation on a country whose leadership’s stated mission is the annihilation of the land on which you rest, isn’t exactly a recipe for a good night’s sleep. But by 3am, I drifted off and awoke at 5am to read that the rockets had all been intercepted - some had hit the north and south - a few over Jerusalem - but Tel Aviv was unscathed.  

The immediate threat was past.  But my seminar - the reason I’d come to Israel - was cancelled.  All El Al flights to LA were cancelled or full until Friday.  I’d come at the invitation of my brilliant, philanthropic friend who had put together an amazing group of women coming to Israel on a listening tour with a focus on combatting the denial of gender based violence on October 7th.  With a looming security threat and cancelled flights, the trip was postponed to a later date in May.  But I was here - on the ground - having lived through a direct attack from Israel’s greatest enemy.  And the sun was shining.   I sent a WhatsApp to my friend, “So, should we still go to Sheba today?”  We’d planned to visit wounded soldiers at the rehab center of the biggest hospital in Israel.

The Fourth Child might ask, “Why go visit wounded soldiers?  Wasn’t it hard to see them and why do they want to talk to you?”  Dar picked me up at a traffic circle near Sheba and we laughed in the car about her 2am stress-eating and waking up with Bamba in her hair and Oreos on her bed.  We made our way to the balcony of one of balcony of the rehabilitation center, which is really a place for families and friends to visit, a place for the injured to avoid their rehab appointments, share food, cigarettes, stories. There we met Didi and Ben and Shlomi and Mendel, each of them eager to tell their stories, the moment they fell recorded by body cams and played over and over on their phones.  Re-living the trauma, they tell me, is part of their therapy.  They range in age from 21 to 55.  Twenty-one year old Mendel, whose family made aliyah from Chicago when he was 7, shows off his scars and asks me if I think he could be a model.  He’s a handsome kid.  He could for sure, I tell him.  Ben was in the K9 unit.  A the lone soldier from South Africa, his gorgeous Dutch Shepherd was killed in Khan Younis, but saved all thirteen men in his unit with a warning bark.  Ben was injured later - shot seven times and nearly bled out.  He spent a month in an induced coma.  His recovery journey will be long and slow.  He says he has no hate in his heart.  And then tells me he wouldn’t think twice about killing the terrorist who almost killed him.  “That’s not hate,” he says, “its retribution.”  Didi has no feeling in his right inner thigh and left calf.  He fell ten feet from the vehicle his unit used to move refugees from Northern Gaza to the South.  His legs crushed as the truck backed over him.  “Like Pitas,” he tells me - both legs were flattened but somehow no bones were broken.  His ligaments and nerves were mixed like a bowl of spagetti.  He’s in a wheelchair, has no feeling in his left calf and right foot.  Every day brings something new.  Yesterday, after months in rehab, he lost feeling in his left forearm.  Shlomi is soft spoken, just out of a wheelchair and working hard for a future where he can walk unaided.  He tells me he’ll come to America next month to speak at a fundraiser.  His English is halting and I promise to help with his speech if he sends it to me.  Ben says he’s going too.  “I’ll help you, bru,” he says in heavy South African lilt.  

And then there’s Maya.  Maya Regev, whose story I know so well from months of hearing stories from family members of hostages.  Maya Regev, who was released as part of the first group of women and children who came home in late November.  Maya had been shot and her foot severed nearly off.  After eight days of heavy bleeding, her captors took her to a hospital where she received a botched surgery, her foot reattached at an angle from her leg.  The pain, she told me, was mitigated by her fear for her brother.  Small but fierce, Maya demanded of her captor that she get proof of life of her brother.  So she was allowed to write him a note.  And then she received a note back.  And in that way, the two communicated back and forth before their release.  Maya and Itay had gone to the Nova Festival with her best friend, Omer.  Omer Shem Tov, whose parents along with one other family started the Hostages and Missing Families Forum out of a desperate need to create order out of a chaos the government would not step into, to create action in a void.  Omer’s story I knew well from his brother, Amit, who was part of a delegation of families we worked with when they came to Los Angeles in December.  Omer with the piercing blue eyes.  Omer who took care of Itay, kept him calm while they were held together for the first 54 days.  Omer who still remains in Gaza and whose mother, Shelli, I met at the Forum headquarters.  Shelli walks through life shattered.  How could she not?  

“What was it like to go South,” a Fourth Child might inquire, “to be on one of those kibbutzes in the aftermath of October 7th?”  Two days after the attack by Iran, Rebecca and her husband, Gideon, picked me up.  I shared the backseat with Daniel Lifshitz who spent most of the drive on zooms, looking up only once when Gideon worried about a flat tire and Daniel said, “its the road - from the tanks.” We rolled on, towards Nir Oz, the kibbutz where Daniel was raised, the kibbutz his grandfather, Oded, founded; Oded, who fought for his country and then dedicated himself to taking care of others, including Palestinians in need of transportation from Gaza to Israeli hospitals for healthcare; Oded, who was shot and kidnapped on October 7th, at the age of 83, along with his beloved wife Yocheved, age 85.  Yochoved was released after 54 days as part of the first group of freed hostages.  Oded remains in Gaza, without his blood pressure medication, without his wife of so many years, without his children and grandchildren.  

Daniel,former footballer turned wine merchant, father of an 11-year old girl, walked me through his childhood - where he slept in the kibbutz, where his first teacher lived, where he and his cohort built a fountain for their bar mitzvah project. It sits on the edge of the kibbutz overlooking the fields that separate the homes of Nir Oz from the border of Gaza.  We stopped in the cactus garden his grandfather cultivated from a tiny Haifa bulb to a world famous botanical miracle punctuated here and there with bicycle wheels and ironing boards - refuse transformed into art. Daniel took us from the garden to the house of his grandparents, the house that was his solace, his home, after his parents’ divorce.  We walked through a burnt out shell, heavy with the acrid stench of fire and desecration.  My eyes blurred with halo vision - that strange partial loss of sight - and thought “if I don’t sit, I will pass out, which will be embarrassing at the least and wildly inappropriate overall given the context.” I was overcome - panic, anxiety or maybe just the heat of the day.  I managed to stand as long as I did out of sheer embarrassment - what was my episode compared to what Daniel endured, what his grandparents suffered, what an entire country was feeling? Miraculously, an unburnt chair sat in the middle of the Lifshitz home and I asked Daniel if I might take a seat.  “Of course,” he said, and motioned to the chair - both of us acting, absurdly, as though proper etiquette for a host and guest applied.  I sat for a minute, angry at my weakness, thinking about Oded in captivity, Yocheved without her husband, the other victims of Nir Oz and beyond, families I knew now by name and photograph: Bibas, Gonen, Shem Tov, David and on and on…

Daniel asked if I had a pen.  We had walked a short distance and stood outside a house with a hostage poster hanging to the right of the door.  “This,” Daniel said, “is my best friend.”  Dolev Yahod was 35 years old on October 7th.  He was kidnapped from Nir Oz.  He has a wife.  He has children.  Daniel and Dolev grew up in Nir Oz, slept in the communal room for children, went to school together, were separated for being unruly together.  They are brothers in every way but blood.  I handed Daniel a pen and watched as he crossed out “35” on Dolev’s kidnapped poster and marked it as  “36”.   And then he wrote, “Love you brother.  We’ll keep doing everything to bring you back home 💗 Daniel Lifshitz”.   Daniel handed the pen back.  “There we sat, the weekend before,” he pointed at the plastic flowered cover on a picnic table on the front porch of the Yahod home.  A “Happy Birthday” celebration banner was strung from post to post, punctuation of a past with children and love and barbecue and hugs.  A loud BOOM rattled our bones, Rebecca flinched, we all stopped for a beat - ordnance fired not far away - a reminder that this war is far from over. 

Hours later, we returned to the car, parched and sweaty.  Gideon cranked the AC and we headed north, back to Tel Aviv.  Daniel pointed to bus stops as we drove.  They serve as bomb shelters along Route 232 - all are decorated with cheery murals - all are now riddled with bullet holes from October 7th.  We passed a sign for Re’im - the site of the Nova Festival.  We had no choice but to turn left off the 232, bumping along the dirt road to a parking lot with two buses, a dozen cars and us.  Walking toward the festival grounds - the place where 3000 peace-loving festival goers were targeted, leaving 364 massacred and 40 kidnapped - was surreal.  A voice boomed from beside one of the shelters - the very specific kind of voice that is easily identified as a midwestern pastor - in this case, Pastor Paul from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.  He asked if he could interview Daniel who graciously told his story - then Pastor Paul prayed with Daniel for the safe return of his grandfather and all the hostages in Jesus’ name.  Daniel said Amen.  The men hugged.  This must happen to Daniel a hundred times a week.  He tells the story of his grandparents.  Strangers hug him.  Daniel, Rebecca, Gideon and I walked the grounds of Nova in silence, going from one memorial to another, from one photograph to the next - this one murdered, that one kidnapped, flowers, flags, small personal items.  Most are decorated.  Some are bare sticks in the ground, waiting for a family member or friend to visit.  

Back in Tel Aviv, Gideon dropped me at Icholov Hospital in Tel Aviv.  I was there to visit a soldier.  “It must be hard to listen to these stories,” might say the one who does not know how to ask.  And I would answer, “it can never be harder than it is for them to tell them, or to have lived them.”  

Barak is one of five sons.  Three of his brothers were at the Nova Festival on the 7th of October.  Barak was sent to Be’eri where he was lightly wounded, but recovered quickly and was deployed with the first teams to enter Gaza.  There he remained until mid-December when he was part of a mission to rescue Noa Argamani.  But the IDF intel was a trap - he and his men walked into an ambush of twenty terrorists in a building.  They were only six.  Four fell back, one was shot immediately and Barak held off the twenty on his own.  A grenade blew up his legs and a barrage of fire knocked the rifle out of his hands.  He was left with one grenade of his own and a pistol.  Down on the ground, bleeding out, he decided he would throw the grenade, and then use the pistol to kill himself - death being preferable to being taken hostage.  He managed to toss the grenade just before passing out, and the next thing he knew he was waking up after five days of a coma, and what would become a year ahead of surgeries and rehab to put him back together - a heroic Humpty Dumpty of steel rods and pins and trauma he works out by telling his story over and over again.  We talked about his battle, we talked about politics in America, being Jewish out of Israel.  He asked about what was happening on college campuses and I told him the truth: I can’t explain it. We were silent for a moment and then Barak said, “I feel sorry for them.”  I was struck, as I had been at Sheba, by the sharp contrast between these young men who put their lives on the line for their country, who felt pride in being Israeli, and young men and women on American college campuses screaming support for Hamas, calling for the eradication of Israel.  

The next day was my last.  I ran the requisite errands in the shuk - bought white knit yarmulkes for my daughter’s upcoming wedding, gifts of local olive oil and a small bag of dates for myself.  I made a last journey to the headquarters of the Family Forum to say goodbye to Rebecca.  On my way out, I shared the elevator with a man who pulled out his phone.  He wanted to show me a video.  “This was pesach last year.”  The man was Gilad Korngold and, though I’d never met him, I knew his story well.  Six of Gilad’s family members were kidnapped on October 7th, including his son, Tal Shalom.  Tal and his entire family were taken from Kibbutz Be’eri.  Tal’s wife and children were returned after 54 days.  Tal remains in Gaza.  Gilad pointed out each family member and when the video ended, he put his phone away and said, “We will not have a seder this year.  We are not free.”  

Gilad is not the only person in Israel who told me they would have a seder. I heard the same from the manicurist who lives with the dread of her 16 year old’s son upcoming conscription.  I heard it from the cab driver who thanked me for coming from America and said aloud what I felt in the air: “The whole country is sad.”  I was surrounded by a nation of people who, whatever their political or religious or cultural differences, have been bound together by the collective trauma of October 7th, a nation of people whose freedom is inexorably cleaved to the plight of 133 hostages still held in Gaza.  

In the diaspora, even talking about the hostages is something many do not feel free to do.  In Israel, the community is held together by common pain.  In the diaspora, our community has been shattered by adversity and moral confusion.  Gilad Korngold is right in so many ways.  We are not free - no Jew is free unless all Jews are free.  In Israel, families are held in limbo, waiting for news of their father or son or grandfather or sister, waiting for news of a hostage or a soldier, many are refugees in their own homeland.  In the diaspora, we are simply not free to be Jews.  We are not free to send our children to university without fearing for their safety, we are not free to put on our Star of David necklaces without thinking twice about judgment, we are not free to talk about Israel and defend her without fear of retribution.  We are not free.  We are surrounded by the children who do not know how to ask.