It feels apocalyptic. Another terror attack in Jerusalem.
Amidst an adjacent tragedy, an epic earthquake, swallowing so much.
Upon my landing back from a wonderful visit to Israel, I checked my phone. It felt surreal, to have departed from a place, from Jerusalem, with a peaceful feeling, yet unknowingly, while I was airborne, en route to New York, that peaceful place was experiencing unfathomable tragedy, pain, suffering, carnage, terror. Jerusalem, yet again, was engulfed in grief. It was erev Shabbat, Friday, that pierced and plunged the holy day into a burst of agony.
Among the fatalities in this terror attack against innocent Jews was Alter Lederman, a newlywed rabbinic student. And two pure, beautiful children. Angelic. Brothers. Inseparable brothers, whose mother described them as “the sweetest sweethearts inseparable in death, as they were in life.” One, Yaakov Paley, was just six years old, the other, Asher, eight. These brothers, the very definition of tinokot shel beit rabban, the pure schoolchildren of Torah study.
This wasn’t a bomb, or a shooting committed from afar. Depraved though those acts are.
It was a terror attack, by car ramming.
This monstrous terrorist saw who he was about to mow down. He looked at these innocent beautiful eyes, these children, in the eye. Face to face.
Still he proceeded. Still pressed the accelerator, to flatten their living limbs, into fresh graves in the ground.
To the terrorist, these defenseless, vulnerable, sinless Jewish boys who never could have even hurt anyone in this world yet were nothing more than prey.
Yet, you see, somehow, the brutal and the beautiful intertwine in the living hell that this tapestry weaves.
A tragedy so searing, one would expect a never ending inconsolable primal scream to echo endlessly, the likes of which is depicted by Edvard Munch.
Yet, a mother, so poised, and so propelled by her valiant Jewish faith, emerges instead. An unexpected twist. Almost incomprehensible. Who is this woman, Devori Paley, who has layered this gruesome and evil brutality with her emotional and spiritual beauty?
At her sons’ double shiva, the boys no longer cradled against her skin as they once were, receiving life-giving nourishment, life-affirming nurturing — now only stillness remains. The two boys lay upon their mother in the silence of a frozen photograph in time. When not attached to her, one of the two murdered boys’ little brother can be seen holding his brothers’ photographs close to his chest, his lips quivering in pain, his eyes twitching in suffering, weeping, as he stares at his beloved brothers, now flattened, inanimate, ripped away, gone.
After the gut wrenching funeral, this doubly bereaved mother speaks in calmness, holding her family together, as her husband’s life oscillates between life and death. She speaks not of revenge, but of faith, fate, destiny and of G-d. She requests prayers for healing on behalf of her husband, still struggling. She speaks of gratitude.
As the days pass, the news of the tragedy from Turkey and Syria continues to be staggering. The numbers of lives, in an instant destroyed, is mind-numbing.
Again, it’s that brutal and the beautiful that somehow emerge, cheek by jowl, shoulder to shoulder, mixed up into one whole, one complex story.
Story after story keeps emerging, detailed stories, of Israel’s humanitarian medical aid, its role in saving lives punctured by the earthquake. Both Turks and Syrian have been treated in Israel’s pop up field hospitals, replete with cutting edge medical technology and equipment.
It is not just the emergency treatment of earthquake victims that is needed. This, of course, is the first priority. But there are sick people in need of “routine” life saving medical treatment — dialysis, for example, Without it, they too shall perish along with all the earthquake victims that already have.
While the convulsing earthquake has tragically ripped apart so many lives, there has been that beauty that lives side by side with brutality; there has been that olive branch extended by Israel, in the form of life-saving aid, which may one day tell a different story from the one that exists today — perhaps one day a story that will change how things stand today between Syria and Israel.
There is no silver lining in human beings losing their humanity to the point of devolving into satanic creatures who choose to perpetrate a terror attack on innocent children, ripping lives like a force of destructive nature; who butcher Jews just for being Jews.
A brutality so vicious, so barbaric. Yet, as it seems so often in these drastic tragedies and traumas, within brutality a certain kind of broken beauty is revealed or illuminated a beauty in the faithful Jews of Jerusalem.
Of which, I wish, had remained concealed forever, a beauty never encountered, but rather had remained a mysterious part of the Holy City, of Jerusalem, locked away forever.
Copyright © 2023 by the Intermountain Jewish News
