I can easily visualize the scene.

Fifty-four years ago, at the end of October 1956, during the Suez campaign, I was lying in a shallow dugout at the perimeter of our position just west of the Jordan river, facing the Golan Heights. We were on guard against a possible attack by Syrian commandos. At two or three in the morning, after hours of boredom, I froze, sensing a rustling in the nearby thickets. I reached out to my sergeant to alert him. After a moment he chuckled. “It’s only a wildcat,” he said. “Welcome to the Holy Land.”

No war broke out in the North that year, and we sang victory songs on the way home; but we fell silent when we learned that a couple of friends had been killed in the battles in the South.

Are we a military family? I don’t think so. But my father spent four years in the British army in WWII. (I only served a couple of weeks, and contracted polio immediately afterwards.) Two of my older children have served in the IDF, one during the first Lebanese war. And now my granddaughter Enya has just begun a period of voluntary national service before her formal enlistment in the army.

When will this ever end?

Shall I list the names of friends who died in Israel’s wars? Shall I mention the sons and daughters who also lie in the dust of our military cemeteries? Can I talk of our apprehension as the next generation, our beautiful young grandchildren, prepare to do battle?

O God, when will this ever end?

Our backgrounds were similar, Jewish English middle class, and we shared many values and sensibilities — born in part of good education received in horrible schools — which he expressed with a clarity that I could never aspire to. After teenage explorations of European revolutionary ideologies, his leaning was to Marx, mine to Kropotkin, we each found our way to socialist Zionism, in different kibbutzim in Israel. His disillusionment was far more rapid and radical than mine; he came to reject the very idea of a unique and separate Jewish state, and appeared detached from its destiny, whereas I, while often abhorring Israel’s policies and actions, continue to love it deeply.

In the last few months of his life, while contending with the progressive neurological disease that ravaged his body but left his mind intact to the very end, he wrote a series of remarkable memoir pieces that appeared in New York Review of Books. It was in those final essays that he become my teacher and guide. His depiction of the cultural and intellectual forces and institutions that formed him, his bemoaning the degradation of language and the decline of excellence, his account of living, and dying, with A.L.S., all touched me profoundly. In them he seemed to embody the virtues of compassionate analysis and unsentimental passion.

I mourn his passing.

2. It’s June, and our regular summer guests have arrived, a pair of albino ferruginous hawks. First we hear the harsh kaa-kaa of their rasping calls, and then spot them, perched, side-by-side, on a high branch of the 50-foot eucalyptus tree in our neighbor’s yard. They spend hours circling and hovering over the meadow beneath us, occasionally swooping down and immediately soaring up again, grasping in their bloody talons some wriggling prey, usually a small mammal; last year one of them caught a snake.

3. A Midrash: After Adam/Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden the Holy One of Being prepared for them garments of rawhide. Now these are understood as representing the leather straps of the tefillin, the phylacteries, those instruments of ritual that bind us and direct us with good laws and rules of right living. This is the way we Jews are to worship on this mundane plane of exile. But before the Expulsion, while still in that place of wondrous innocence, how were Adam/Eve garbed? In cloaks of light, we are told.

Oh that I may offer my orisons wrapped in that white light from Eden! It beckons me, but today I cannot reach it. Meanwhile, those leather ribbon-straps lie before me on my desk, demanding, summoning.
Jonathan Omer-Man ©2010

no they said
tell us first why you don’t eat
pork or prawns or lobsters or shrimps
or german blood sausage and do you really think
god hates people like us who eat oysters and frogs’ legs
and creamy beef stroganoff

my problem with praying he tried to explain
no they said
tell us first about the origin of evil
about who made hitler and pol pot
and were there quarks in the garden
of eden

my problem with praying he began once again
but still they scoffed
my problem with praying
he finally shouted
is that there is too much noise
everywhere

Jonathan Omer-Man ©2009