For the third year, Naftali engaged a unique band: Ensemble Tehillim, which is comprised of both religious and not-yet-religious musicians, whose music features complete psalms. A tremendous hit, attendees at the concert were surprised to hear that the band hadn’t put together a CD. “I decided to sponsor the CD in the memory of Avraham David,” says Naftali. “It felt appropriate: a band that unites the religious and the non-religious singing entire psalms and not only selected verses.” Now an annual event, the concerts have, thankfully, given Naftali a measure of solace.
This is the last column on Victims of Terror. Thank you to all the heroes and heroines who revisited their pain in order to share it. Thank you to One Family and to The Jewish Press for giving us the chance to open up our minds and hearts to the victims. May our heightened awareness stay with us and make us into people who reach out.
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The Inside Story
In his book, Mourning Under Glass, published a year after Avraham’s death, Naftali describes the horror of the attack and the agony of burying his firstborn son. He draws the reader into his own labyrinth of emotions by raising several issues about the mourning process and beyond.
Does the sanctity of a “martyr’s death” do anything to heal the profanity of vicious murder?
Naftali’s words:Although we had been there for hours already, it was nearly 4:00 a.m. when we were ushered in to a small room off to the side of the library. There, a police detective… told us that our son had died “like a hero.” I wasn’t sure what he meant then and I’ve wondered about it since. I think that usually one would say this about someone who had done something considered, well, heroic – fighting back, hitting out, sacrificing himself to save others. But my son, and four others, had been slowly hunted down in the library stacks – shot as they crouched between the holy books – listening to the shots that took the lives of those killed before them, and the cries of the dying and wounded…This was their “hero’s death.” This was their end.
For us to think about: Do we call the victims martyrs in order to help ourselves cope with the horror?
Where does private pain and public mourning meet?
Naftali’s words:For me and my family, though, this was a beginning. We were suddenly thrust into new roles as part of a select group – “the bereaved families.” This is a uniquely Israeli sub-tribe… Lights, cameras… interviews—suddenly our ordinary children were “holy martyrs” and we, somehow, perhaps by way of association, perhaps as part of some public defense mechanism unable to accept the utter horror of these cruel deaths, we became heroes ourselves…I am not a hero. Nothing in my life has ever been epic. I have striven for and attained comfortable anonymity… To the terrible weight of loss was added the oddity of a nearly macabre notoriety… I have asked myself time and again whether pain made public becomes something else: something more, something less, something better, something worse…
For us to think about: Naftali received hundreds of letters from family friends and teenage yeshiva students. “They felt my loss was their loss as well,” he writes. Can we too cross the bridge from mere sympathy to deep empathy?
Does a memorial keep your memories alive?
Naftali’s words:I am concerned about preserving my son’s memory. I worry that the public aspect of memorialization is wearing away at something better kept safe inside…His memory resides in those who knew him. And the longing and pain of loss…rests on those gossamer threads of remembrances. The gaping hole torn in my heart by my son’s death was too raw to find solace in any of the memorial events planned by others.