Twenty years since the helicopter disaster, and I am with my family near She’ar Yashuv. I tell the children the sad story, which I remember well, and they are so interested. In the evening, at a falafel place in Katzrin, a newspaper lies beside me with the faces and the names — a reprint of the front page from the year of the disaster. I show the children: here, these are the ones we talked about today.
As we eat our fries, one of the workers, a man with kind eyes, turns to me and says, “Good for you, raising your children to remember this story.”
Did you know them? I ask, and invite him to sit with us.
All of them. One by one, he answers, pointing at the faces in the newspaper.
On the night of the storm I was sitting at home in She’ar Yashuv. Suddenly we saw flashes and heard a roar. The helicopters crashed right above us, right inside the community. We were the first to arrive. All that night and the next day we searched for our heroic brothers and gathered them up one by one. I know them all. He opens today’s paper and shows us a photograph of the men who recovered the fallen. He points to a picture of a young man with long hair carrying a soldier’s body. That’s me, he says.
My children are riveted by this living encounter with a story that only a few hours earlier had seemed to them like prehistory.
And here he turns to my little children — do you know what an atheist is? That is what I was. I believed in nothing. But right after the disaster, a friend showed me the haftarah of the weekly Torah portion read on the Shabbat before the disaster (Yitro). The haftarah in which, chillingly, the name ‘She’ar Yashuv’ appears: “Seraphim stood above Him, each one had six wings, six wings…” The burning Yas’ur helicopters, six wings each (Yas’ur helicopters have six rotor blades). “And the Lord said to Isaiah: Go out now to meet Ahaz, you and She’ar Yashuv your son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool, on the highway of the fuller’s field. And say to him: Take heed and be calm; do not fear, and do not let your heart be faint because of these two tails of smoking firebrands… Ask it in the depth below, or in the height above.”
The two tails of smoking firebrands in She’ar Yashuv… the fragments that fell into the pool and the old laundry… Isaiah chapter 7, verse 3 — 73. I read it and wept for a whole day, he told us with emotion. Then he added: I still drive and smoke on Shabbat, but ever since, I make sure every Shabbat eve, every single Shabbat eve, to make Kiddush.
More than that he did not wish to add.
On the drive afterwards, my son asked me: Abba, why didn’t he become religious if he was so moved by the verses of Isaiah?
My dear son Levanon, the people of Israel is not divided into religious and secular. Whoever sees himself as part of his people’s destiny — he is our brother. Every tribe and every stream in the people of Israel has the mitzvot it cherishes most: one cherishes the mitzvot of tzitzit and Torah, another cherishes acts of kindness toward others, another cherishes love of the stranger and the downtrodden, and another cherishes the mitzvot of the Land — and we do not know the reward given for each mitzvah, or who ranks above whom. But one thing I can tell you, my beloved son. The man who just sat with us has gained himself seventy-three angels to plead on his behalf. Seventy-three burnt seraphim, six wings, six wings each one, who join him — together with the ministering angels — at every Kiddush he makes on Shabbat, and when the day comes they will carry him up to the height above. May our portion be with his.
And to myself I say again — keep telling the children everything. Sometimes I hear of people trying to hide disasters and wars from children. There is no need to shield them. They are stronger than we are. We will touch every realm of life — the beautiful and the painful alike, the Land’s flowers and its thorns.
