This one, we agreed, was particularly troubling. Suicide bombings. Hidden explosives. It’s not like the old wars, I said, with tanks coming one way, tanks coming the other.
“But, Mitch, even in this new age of horror,” the Reb noted, “you can find small acts of human kindness. Something I saw a few years ago, on a trip to Israel to visit my daughter, stays with me to this day.
“I was sitting on a balcony. I heard a blast. I turned around and saw smoke coming from a shopping area. It was one of these terrible…uh…whachacalls…”
Bombs? Car bombs?
“That’s it,” he said. “I went from the apartment, as fast as I could, and as I arrived, a car pulled up in front of me. And a young fellow jumps out. He is wearing a yellow vest, so I follow him.
“When I get to the scene, I see the car that has been blown up. A woman was apparently doing laundry; she was one of the people killed.
“And there, in the street…” He swallowed. “There…in the street…were people picking up her body pieces. Carefully. Collecting anything. A hand. A finger.”
He looked down.
“They were wearing gloves, and moving very deliberately, a piece of a leg here, skin there, even the blood. You know why? They were following religious law, which says all pieces of the body must be buried together. They were putting life over death, even in the face of this…atrocity… because life is what God gives us, and how can you just let a piece of God’s gift lie there in the street?”
I had heard of this group, called ZAKA-yellow-vested volunteers who want to ensure that the deceased are treated with dignity. They arrive at these scenes sometimes faster than the paramedics.
“I cried when I saw that,” the Reb said. “I just cried. The kindness that takes. The belief. Picking up pieces of your dead. This is who we are. This beautiful faith.”
We sat quietly for a minute.
Why does man kill man? I finally asked.
He touched his forefingers to his lips. Then he pushed in his chair and rolled slowly to a stack of books.
“Let me find something here…”
Albert Lewis was born during World War I. He was a seminary student during World War II. His congregation was peppered with veterans and Holocaust survivors, some who still bore tattooed numbers on their wrists.
Over the years, he watched young congregants depart for the Korean War and the Vietnam War. His son-in- law and grandchildren served in the Israeli Army. So war was never far from his mind. Nor were its consequences.
Once, on a trip to Israel after the war in 1967, he went with a group to an area on the northern border and found himself wandering through some abandoned buildings. There, in the ruins of one destroyed house, he discovered an Arabic schoolbook lying in the dirt. It was facedown, missing a cover.
He brought it home.
Now he held it on his lap. This was what he’d gone looking for. A schoolbook nearly forty years old.
“Here.” He handed it over. “Look through it.”
It was fraying. Its binding had shriveled. The back page, torn and curled, had a cartoon image of a schoolgirl, a cat, and a rabbit, which had been colored in with crayon. The book was obviously for young kids and the whole thing was in Arabic, so I couldn’t understand a word.
Why did you keep this? I asked.
“Because I wanted to be reminded of what had happened there. The buildings were empty. The people were gone.
“I felt I had to save something.”
Most religions warn against war, yet more wars have been fought over religion than perhaps anything else. Christians have killed Jews, Jews have killed Muslims, Muslims have killed Hindus, Hindus have killed Buddhists, Catholics have killed Protestants, Orthodox have killed pagans, and you could run that list backward and sideways and it would still be true. War never stops; it only pauses.
I asked the Reb if, over the years, he had changed his view about war and violence.
“Do you remember Sodom and Gomorrah?” he asked.
Yes. That one I remember.
“So you know Abraham realized those people were bad. He knew they were miserable, vicious. But what does he do? He argues with God against destroying the cities. He says, Can you at least spare them if there are fifty good people there? God says okay. Then he goes down to forty, then thirty. He knows there aren’t that many. He bargains all the way down to ten before he closes the deal.”
And they still fell short, I said.
“And they still fell short,” the Reb confirmed. “But you see? Abraham’s instinct was correct. You must first argue
But so many people wage wars in God’s name.
“Mitch,” the Reb said, “God does not want such killing to go on.”
Then why hasn’t it stopped?
He lifted his eyebrows.
“Because man does.”
He was right, of course. You can sense man’s drumbeat to war. Vengeance rises. Tolerance is mocked. Over the years, I was taught why our side was right. And in another country someone my age was taught the opposite.
“There’s a reason I gave that book to you,” the Reb said.
What’s the reason?
“Open it.”
I opened it.
“More.”
I flipped through the pages and out fell three small black-and-white photos, faded and smudged with dirt.
One was of an older dark-haired woman, Arabic and matronly looking. One was of a mustached younger Arabic man in a suit and tie. The last photo was of two children, side by side, presumably a brother and sister.
Who are they? I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, softly.
He held out his hand and I gave him the photo of the children.
“Over the years, I kept seeing these kids, the mother, her son. That’s why I never threw the book away. I felt I had to keep them alive somehow.
“I thought maybe someday someone would look at the pictures, say they knew the family, and return them to the survivors. But I’m running out of time.”
He handed me the photo back.
Wait, I said. I don’t understand. From your religious viewpoint, these people were the enemy.
His voice grew angry.
“Enemy schmenemy,” he said. “This was a
“A man seeks employment on a farm. He hands his letter of recommendation to his new employer. It reads simply, ‘He sleeps in a storm.’
“The owner is desperate for help, so he hires the man.
“Several weeks pass, and suddenly, in the middle of the night, a powerful storm rips through the valley.
“Awakened by the swirling rain and howling wind, the owner leaps out of bed. He calls for his new hired hand, but the man is sleeping soundly.
“So he dashes off to the barn. He sees, to his amazement, that the animals are secure with plenty of feed.
