One Day, When This Is All Over

Even in Israel, this land of the living, there is so much death. Even in every pure soul, there is the potential for evil.

The ancient Jewish monument, Masada, in Israel

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This is a guest essay written by Rabbi Haviva Ner-David. You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

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I am out in our kibbutz in Israel, walking my dog, thinking about my 20-year-old son, Nachum, who is going to another soldier friend’s funeral today — the second in two months.

Both of his friends were fighting in Gaza.

Since October 7th, death has not been a gentle hand tapping on the shoulder of those around me when their time has come, but a violent fist ripping them from life in a way that feels so cruelly before their time.

So much death, more and more people dying every day — not natural deaths, but deaths by human hands, the result of war and terror, part of an ongoing bloody conflict on this land “from the river to the sea” that I, a Jewish Israeli peace activist, have been working together with my Palestinian Israeli friends to end. I cannot accept that this is the way life, or death, are supposed to be. And yet, this is my reality.

Nachum’s best friend, also fighting in Gaza, was wounded yesterday. The surgery was successful, and he will survive. The soldier next to him, when the Hamas soldier came out of the tunnel shooting, was not so lucky. The doctors let my son’s friend out of the hospital to go to the shiva (Judaism’s seven-day period of mourning following a death).

Nachum did not serve in the IDF; he did a volunteer program called “national service” instead. He was exempt from army service because he has FSHD, the genetic muscular disease I live with and passed on to him. I have done much inner work to accept natural illness, suffering, and death. Will I be able to do enough inner work to accept all the violent human-inflicted death around me now, too? Should that even be my goal?

I think of the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” That’s it: I don’t know the difference anymore. I continue walking.

The forest opens onto the fields. Olive orchards to my right, avocado fields ahead. Saplings just planted stand spread apart, supported by plastic encasings holding them upright and protecting them from the elements.

They remind me of the field where the Nova music festival was held that weekend of October 7th — how it looks now, not how it looked then. Then, hundreds of young people simply enjoying moving their bodies to trance music in nature were murdered there in cold blood, chased down by Hamas militants and bands of armed Gazan civilians.

Since the massacre, loved ones of these victims have brought photos of the dead and stuck them in the ground, as if they are still dancing. Ahead of the Jewish holiday Tu Bi’shvat three weeks ago, they planted actual trees there, too — a memorial.

I cry as I walk, thinking of them. These festival-goers were some of the most peaceful members of society, there just to celebrate life; instead, they were met with the most brutal of deaths.

If only they had protective casings around them, like these baby trees do. Instead, the government abandoned them, sending troops to the West Bank to protect settlers who had built a sukkah — a provocation — in the Palestinian village of Hawara, where settlers had perpetrated a pogrom some months before. The government had decided to protect violent provocateurs instead of peaceful dancers.

Our friends’ son tried to escape. His arm was blown off while throwing back a grenade at his attackers. The last time his parents saw him was on a video Hamas filmed and publicized on social media during the massacre. He is boarding a truck at gunpoint to be taken across the border into captivity. There are many videos like that one, some with much more horrific footage — of rape, murder, torture, and maiming of corpses and live bodies.

I want to vomit on the side of the path.

But I look up and see a glorious day in the Galilee — blue skies, a carpet of green before me, the first sun after heavy rains. Tiny white crocuses are pushing their way up through the earth, thanks to the rains. Soon, these buds will open to reveal their yellow sun-like centers. A hint of new beginnings, I hope.

One day, when this is all over. I want to embrace it all, to believe the flowers, the birds, the sunshine. But it is hard now. Too hard.

Suddenly, I come upon a crack in the earth along the length of the path for the next 50 or so meters — as if there had been a small earthquake since I was last here, symbolic of these times. There had already been so much division and separation in this place; then Hamas’ attack hit like a lightning bolt, the shape of this crack, causing such a chasm I am not sure we, as a society, here in Israel and the Palestinian territories, can cross it.

I continue walking along the length of the crack. The kibbutz cemetery is up ahead. I spot from afar the grave of a 20-year-old soldier from a neighboring town, who was recently buried here. The Israeli flag is draped over the stone. These soldiers are our children, protecting us, their parents. Isn’t this against the laws of nature?

photo credit: Haviva Ner-David

As I approach the cemetery, I notice a bulldozer digging a grave. I enter, treading carefully past fresh mounds of dirt. It is not one grave this bulldozer is digging, but a whole group of them. My heart drops. I had not checked the names or hometowns of the soldiers whose souls had left those beautiful bodies I saw beneath the headlines with their smiling faces this morning.

Could so many have been locals? I know it shouldn’t matter; all lives are precious. But it does feel different when I know them personally, or if they live nearby. While I mourn all the lives lost, here and in Gaza, the farther away they are, the more abstract they feel. That is human nature, whether fair or not. Either way, I just want this war to end.

I ask the man in the bulldozer — Abed, from the Arab village across the road — what he is doing. The already-prepared graves are full, he tells me, so he is preparing more, digging rectangular holes and filling them with sand, so they are easier to dig out at the funerals.

I had not known this, like I had not known soldiers do not have the purifying ritual-washing of the body before burial in both Judaism and Islam. Until I decided to start a burial society on our kibbutz after the war began, and I started to learn the customs.

According to Judaism and Islam, soldiers killed in combat are considered purified already by their act of sacrifice. They are also buried in a casket, unlike other Jewish or Muslim burials in Israel. Is that to give them special honor? Or is it because often their bodies are so mutilated, they need the box to hold the remains?

I think of all the people so brutally murdered on that October 7th “Black Sabbath” as it’s called in Hebrew. The forensic teams had to use DNA testing to identify bodies and body parts. At the funeral of peace activist Vivian Silver, there was no body. We thought Vivian was one of the hostages, only to find out six weeks later she had been murdered on October 7th. It took that long to identify her remains; they had been burned and mutilated so completely.

Vivian, all the others murdered on that day, and all the innocent people who have died because of this war, deserved beautiful and intentional deaths. The tears well up again. I look down into the empty holes in the ground — waiting for more and more death to come.

I approach the soldier’s grave and see someone left a word written in small stones beside it. I cannot make out what it says. I hear he had a girlfriend and decide it was she who left that word written in stones. I am not meant to understand it; it’s a private message to her beloved. My heart cannot take this, but I make myself stay.

photo credit: Haviva Ner-David

Off to the side of his grave are a few old graves, covered in moss. I know their stories. All were children when they died; their parents have since left the kibbutz, perhaps to get away from the place of their grief.

One child, only five months old, died in his mother’s arms from an undiagnosed heart defect. The cemetery was created for him, the first to be buried in the kibbutz. The grave next to his is of a child who was born with severe birth defects and also died five months later. One was two years old and died in a traffic accident. Her mother was driving, I am told. How is she living with that? I wonder.

I walk around to the newer part of the cemetery, where the graves are well-maintained, except one unmarked grave. I stand over it, wondering whose it is. Abed comes down from the bulldozer, approaches, and asks: “Do you know whose grave that is?” I shake my head.

“It’s Sami’s grandmother’s grave,” I answer. Sami owns a hardware store in Abed’s village. “She was Jewish and married Sami’s Muslim grandfather. They lived together in the village. You must have heard the story,” says Abed, as I nod my head. “They couldn’t bury her in the Muslim village cemetery, so they buried her here.”

We both look down at this stone with no writing. We sigh. Abed goes back to work, and I continue walking among the graves.

There are my friend’s parents, buried side-by-side like twin marriage beds in a film from the 1950s. I make a note: This is what I want. Cremation is out of the question, not because I believe my body will be resurrected, but because of cremation’s associations with the Holocaust. Because of my love of water, I had considered looking into burial at sea. But my husband Jacob wants to be buried, and I like the idea of my final resting place being by his side.

There is a grave with a hole carved into the rock, so that it fills with water when there is rainfall. It is full now. A daily swimmer for most of my life, and a rabbi who runs a mikveh (a ritual immersion pool filled with rainwater), I like the idea of this tiny mikveh on my grave. My family would get a kick out of that — “burying her with her pool,” they’d say. “Even in death she can’t be without it.”

On my way home, I think of my son at his friend’s funeral at this very moment, as I reach that crack in the earth again. It, too, not only the flowers and the grass, is a result of the rains. I can’t have one without the other. I cannot choose only rejuvenation. There is degeneration too. Even evil.

Death and evil. They are part of life. Even in this cemetery, there is so much life. Even in this land of the living, there is so much death. Even in every pure soul, there is the potential for evil, although we must fight against it with all our will and power. Destruction, whether by nature or by human hands, is on the other side of the rain.

Back home, I sit at my computer to create an ad for a death café I have decided, just now on this walk, to facilitate. An offering in the face of all the horrible death around me. I can demonstrate, do social action, work for peace, participate in dialogue and reconciliation groups, practice sacred listening, and help others heal through spiritual companioning, but I cannot change human nature.

And I cannot fight death, whether beautiful and intentional, or horrific and sudden. This offering is something I can do, at least, to ease some suffering and hold others as they face their own mortality.

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