Tribute: Memories of Moshe

A father remembers his son who was killed in combat in Lebanon in 1975.

By ELIEZER WHARTMAN
yom kippur war 224.88 (photo credit: AP [file])
yom kippur war 224.88
(photo credit: AP [file])
Time is no healer. Any bereaved parent can attest to that. Time may assuage the grief, but the wound never heals. Memorial Day, when the nation remembers its war dead, is the worst. Though you sense the sympathy of those around you, you are isolated, wrapped in your own anguish. You see your son everywhere. And nowhere. You grasp at shadows. Could that soldier with a jaunty gait be Moshe? Could that snatch of laughter be his? We lost Moshe in 1975. He fell in a clash while leading a patrol inside Lebanon to seek and destroy terrorists before they could enter Israel. He paid with his life so that all of us could live free from terrorism. The pain of his death is something that only a parent who has lost a child can comprehend. But beyond that pain, Moshe - and many like him - has given us a perspective which in these dark days we desperately need. For sometimes, looking about at the moral disintegration, the rampant materialism, the cynicism and despair, we tend to see only isolated stumps and fail to perceive the forest. Through our son and his comrades, we can still retain the pristine vision. While we sit comfortably in our homes and talk of the need for bridging the gap between the "two Israels" and creating a bond between the haves and the have-nots, the educated and the near-illiterate, that bond is being sealed in blood by men on patrols, who come from all backgrounds and all communities. For them, the gnawing away at the national dream is as irrelevant as it is incomprehensible. They do their task without seeking compensation or recognition. Perhaps one can find some clue to the character of this generation in a letter Moshe wrote just before he was due to be released from the army after serving three and a half years. Seeing the situation in the North, he had agreed to the army's request to stay for nine more months. "By nature I don't have to struggle too hard to make decisions," he wrote. "If I think something is worth doing, I don't hesitate. But this time I'm torn by indecision. On one hand, everything in me cries out for Iris [his girlfriend], for a chance to study and do all the things I love. Often in this lonely outpost my thoughts reach out to my beloved bookshelf. My mind's eye wanders to the now mute guitar, the unused tennis racquet and swimming trunks, and a pang goes through me. I feel the fatigue of these last few years, the awful, unending responsibility and the grayness of life. But on the other hand, I understand that without me and my friends being here along this border, I shall never be able to enjoy the pleasures of that room. These are two polarities, and there's no bridge between them. It's as simple as that." I have been trying to think how I can explain Moshe and his generation to people who live far away. THAT challenge was brought home to me while we were sitting shiva. A journalist from Finland called and said he wanted to learn about the human element behind the dry press report of the clash. He told me that in Finland (as in most countries), clashes between Israelis and terrorists are reported as brief snippets. He wanted to give his readers a more in-depth picture of the Israeli soldier.. Curious to know how Israel appeared to the Finns, I asked him what image the papers conveyed. Israel, he said, resembled a little Spartan state in the Middle East, armed to the teeth, determined to swallow up its weaker neighbors - an obstinate, belligerent nation that posed a threat to world peace and could bring about a confrontation between the two superpowers and possible world destruction. How could I tell him in words he could understand what is involved in Israel's struggle for its very existence? Then it came to me. "Israel today," I said, "is Finland in 1939, when the Russian juggernaut moved in to destroy its small neighbor. A handful of brave Finns stopped the Russians with their bodies, determined to preserve Finnish independence. "Israel today," I went on, "is like England in 1940, when another monstrous apparition was bent on its destruction. The only thing standing between Britain and annihilation were a few courageous pilots who took to the skies daily to combat the Nazi air fleets. With desperate courage, they halted the carnage and defeated the murderous foe. In the case of Finland and Britain, the challenge was to remain free; in Israel's case the issue is to remain alive," I said. "In a much broader sense, Israel is not only struggling for its life but is protecting the entire free world. If Israel were to go under, the military dictatorships of the Middle East would slide into the Soviet orbit. If the Middle East goes, so does Europe, for that continent lacks the inner fortitude to stand up to the Soviet Union. Then we would be faced with the specter of an irresolute America, forced to stand up alone to a gigantic dictatorship. The implications of such a confrontation stagger the mind. Never - in our day as in 1940 - have so many owed so much to so few." The Finn began to comprehend what is involved in what appears to be simply an "interminable, squalid, regional conflict." Moshe was one of 137 men - olim or sons of North American olim - who fell in the defense of Israel since 1948. We who fought in the War of Independence little dreamed that our children would be called upon to fight - and fall - in future conflicts. They lie in a score of military cemeteries, with the dead of the Sinai Campaign, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Litani Campaign, the Lebanon War, the seemingly endless wars of attrition, border skirmishes, and the toll of military accidents. We, the bereaved, are taught by our tradition that excessive grief is harmful. We dare not give ourselves over to self-commiseration, to ceaseless longing for our beloved dead. We must live a double life - one for us and one for them: meaningful lives, each in his own way stretching out his hand to those who need help. We have a sacred duty to speak out about injustice, intolerance and indifference. For the sake of our sons, we must not be silent. In our hearts there will always remain the image of our young sons stepping out into the danger, sure of their faith in Jewish survival in a world completely disinterested in it. Hannah Senesz, the paratrooper who sacrificed her life attempting to save Jews trapped in Hitler's Europe, put in words what our sons mean to the Jewish people - to free men everywhere: "There are stars whose light reaches the earth only after they themselves have disintegrated and are no more. And there are men whose scintillating memory lights the world after they have passed from it. These lights, which shine in the darkest night, are those that illumine for us the path."