I went to Mount Herzl earlier this week to the funeral of Moshe Yitzchak Katz, a fallen lone soldier. I didn’t know him. Neither did most of the hundreds who stood there. And still they came.
I stood at the back. I’ve stood there too many times these past two years.
Two of my sons were lone soldiers. I know what that word carries.
His father and sister spoke movingly about who Moshe Yitzchak was – his joy, his love of life, his dedication to his people.
Some lone soldiers find a family that takes them in. Moshe did. His adoptive father spoke. Then he took out a glass, poured a drink, and raised it.
L’chaim.
To life.
And he drank it there, at Moshe’s grave.
I have been to too many funerals since this war began. I know the shape they take. I know the words that are said, the attempt to reach for something that might hold the weight of what has happened. This was something else.
That glass, raised at a grave, placed life exactly where death was standing.
L’chaim.
In the beginning, there is a single act.
Afar min ha’adama. And He breathed into it. Nishmat chaim. And the dust became a person. A human being who stands on his own ground. A place that is his alone. A life that is singular.
And with that breath came a claim that has never stopped pressing against the world: that a human life carries its worth before it has done anything to deserve it. Carried in the breath itself.
And this is the story the book of Shemot tells again. The book contains the becoming of a people and revelation. And yet it is not called by either name. It is called Shemot. Names.
These are the names of the children of Israel who descended to Egypt. Reuben. Simeon. Levi. Judah. Each one counted. Each one held.
And then, almost immediately, the names begin to disappear. A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. Lo yada. He turned away from knowing – from seeing the one who stood before him.
Egypt built something else. The structure stands first. The monument. The system that endures beyond any single life. The human being enters as a function. Hands that build. A body that labors. Breath that fuels the work that will outlast him.
And when a people carries something more, when they multiply, when they refuse to dissolve into their function, they begin to threaten the structure itself.
Every son born to them, cast into the river.
Because a people who carry the claim of breath, of image, of name, cannot be folded into a system built above them.
The exodus returns the human being to himself. Four hundred years of someone else’s story. Then:
Your name.
Your ground.
Your breath.
The struggle returns in every generation
Bechol dor vador. In every generation.
That struggle did not end in Egypt. It is here now. On this ground. Not as history. As the present tense of our lives.
What we are fighting for, as in every generation, is the story humanity will tell about itself. About what a human being is.
One story begins with the person. With breath placed into dust. With a life that carries its meaning before it serves anything. A face that must be seen. A name that must be spoken. A life that cannot be replaced.
The other begins with the ideal. With a vision that consumes the human being. Life measured by submission, by conformity. And when a life does not align, it is destroyed. The name erased. The breath taken.
This is the oldest question. It is being fought now. Here. In lives. In names.
By our children.
In war it is easy to speak the language of armies and enemies, of strikes and responses, of territory and power. It is easy, too, for death to flatten everything it touches, to turn a life into a number, a funeral into one more funeral, a young man into a name on a list already too long.
But not here, in this torn and beautiful country we call home. Every name is known. Every funeral fills. Hundreds stood at the grave of a boy most of them had never met.
An adoptive father stood among them. A young man who had left one life to live and fight in another. He raised a glass.
L’chaim.
This week we will sit down to the Seder. My mother will not be there. My brother will not be there. My sister will not be there. The war has scattered us.
And yet the command stands.
V’higadta l’vincha. And you shall tell your child.
Lavi Chaim David will be there. My grandson. Born three weeks ago. His eyes are still learning the world. And his three cousins, my granddaughters, will be there too. Old enough to ask the questions. Young enough not to yet know the weight of the answers.
Mah nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot?
Why is this night different from all other nights?
I will look at these four children, three girls who have grown up inside this war, and one boy who was born into it, and then I will look up. At my children. At the ones they love.
At this table, this family, this unbroken chain of people who have chosen life, in spite of everything, in every generation.
Because of you. For you. For every child who will come after you.
L’chaim.
To life.
The writer is a businessman active in communal life in Israel and abroad and an oleh from England.