Haim Watzman
Maya pecked back and the two intelligence officers (res.) quickly established that Maya was a work acquaintance of the bride’s and Yamit a second cousin of the groom’s (“but we’re like this,” she said, wrapping a fuck finger around an index). Yamit peered right and left and Maya corrected her. “I’m alone.” Yamit grimaced. “Oh, Maya. Why haven’t you been in touch? What’s the deal this last year? I thought maybe …”
It was Maya’s turn to take in Yamit’s eyes and see where their corners pointed, but a sixteen-year-old with a tiny plate of mini-burgers ran straight into her. The burgers went flying. Maya lost not a drop of wine. The boy mumbled an apology and headed back to the burger bar. She refocused on Yamit’s eyes and followed the gaze.
“Oh,” she said to herself. “Oh my God.”
Haim Watzman
Entering the Land and Going Out into the World
This dvar Torah is an English version of one that appears in this week’s issue of “Shabbat Shalom,” the weekly Torah portion sheet published by Oz VeShalom/Netivot Shalom. The Hebrew version can be found here . Its dedicated to the memory of my father and teacher Sanford “Whitey” Watzman, who left us one year ago in the month of Av.
The modern religious public grapples with any number of challenges that our forefathers were spared, and which Jews living in more closed communities seldom encounter. One of the most frequent of these is how to recite Birkat HaMazon, the grace after meals, when one leaves the religious community and goes out into the world. It can be a problem to find the appropriate moment to say this rather lengthy blessing without raising eyebrows or causing impatience among your companions. It’s a common dilemma when one eats with fellow-Jews who do not observe the mitzvah, and when one eats with people of other religions, such as those whose custom is to thank the Lord prior to the meal but not afterward. It is also a problem when one eats with people who do not believe there is anyone to give thanks to. In such situations, I can only agree with the king of Kuzar who asks his Jewish interlocutor if his faith’s system of blessings is not more trouble than they are worth. Is the mitzvah trying to tell us to simply avoid such multicultural encounters? Is that the best way to observe it?
It is polite to say thank you, but if that is all Birkat HaMazonis about, why does it have to be so long? Why isn’t it enough to express gratitude in one’s heart? Furthermore, set blessings, like set prayers, easily become reflexive rote recitations. On a day-to-day basis, even if one wants to keep it fully, Birkat HaMazonis not an easy task—that is, it is so simple both to say its words and mean what it means. Blessings, like prayers, are meant to be “the Temple service of the heart,” and as such are supposed to demand thought and introspection. But when your head is full of other thoughts it easily becomes mechanical.
Sin Offering — “Necessary Stories” from The Jerusalem Report
Haim Watzman
After Baba Batra 10b
“Please confine yourself to discussing your own sister’s anatomy,” Yohanan said as he smeared iodine paste on the gash in Josh’s shin. He used his whole slender arm, moving it from the shoulder, where any other medic would use only his wrist and hand. Yohanan was smiling despite himself because Josh, lying back on his elbows on a scratchy slate-colored army blanket spread over the yellow grit of the Negev borderland, had mispronounced the expletive, as he mispronounced most everything he said in Hebrew. Josh grimaced and grabbed the grimy purple kipah off Yohanan’s buzz-cut scalp. He kissed it, replaced it, and gave Yohanan the finger. The sun hung heavily over the plain to the east, behind a scrim of dust, as if it had barely risen this far and would go no further. Another blanket lay behind them, not smooth but lumpy. Something small underneath.
“Holier than thou,” Josh muttered in English. Yohanan jerked his head and his kipah fell onto Josh’s belly. So did his glasses. Josh handed the glasses back to Yohanan and put the kipah on his own head, trying it out for a moment before giving it back. Intently kneeling over Josh’s leg like a penitent on a pilgrimage, Yohanan wound gauze bandage. Josh picked up the tube of iodine to examine the expiration date. “It better be good stuff,” he said. “That whore-daughter’s mouth is probably full of animalcules. Rabies. AIDS. Hepatitises A through C. Ebola and plague.”
“You’re good to go,” Yohanan said, rolling down the leg of Josh’s fatigues and slapping him on the knee.
“Until the infection sets in,” Josh said portentously. “I can’t believe she bit me. Like a snake.”
Sergeant Eliezer, the only one standing, eyed his friends as he swayed, running his left hand over his beard and then clasping it, before him, to his right.
“What do you expect from them, they’re animals, those Sudanese,” came the muffled voice of Modai. The stocky machine-gunner, lying flat on his back in the sand, had placed his hat over his face.
“And here I thought they were human beings like us,” Yohanan said, packing his medical gear back into his vest.
Eliezer, stepping back from his prayer, sat down to join them, quickly unwinding his tefillin from his arm. “A human being is not what a person is,” he said. “It’s what a person does. King Solomon says: ‘Tzedakah teromem goy; ve-hesed le-umim hatat.’”
Josh looked uncomfortable.
Icks Factor — “Necessary Stories” from The Jerusalem Report
Haim Watzman
Dear Bibi,
But after a month on the job, I now understand the great wisdom you displayed in bringing all your government’s efforts to disgrace our great nation together under a single roof. While your piecemeal efforts to make Israel the laughing-stock of international diplomacy have been effective to a large degree, you are certainly correct in resolving, in your new government, to make shame a national priority.
My first step as minister of national embarrassment has been to embark on a tour of European and North American capitals and Jewish communities to assess just how disgusted our allies and compatriots are with us, and to formulate a master plan for transforming this antipathy into something more akin to loathing. Kudos to you for jump-starting my ministry’s efforts with your election-day message warning against a high voter turnout among Israel’s Arab citizens and your pre-election insult to President Obama in the form of your speech to Congress. These two strokes of genius were cited again and again in each city I visited. Here is a sample of the comments I received:
Next Summer’s War — “Necessary Stories” from The Jerusalem Report
Haim Watzman
The Jerusalem winter that kept coming back had finally come to an end, or perhaps it was just taking another break. Whatever the case, the clouds had gone from dark and low to scattered and high, the wind had slowed from gale force to tickle, and the temperature had risen from ski gear to light jacket. It was the first Shabbat in weeks that you could go out without an umbrella. Ori and Dudi had gone to play with friends, so Ronen and Gali grabbed the opportunity.
“It’s too cold,” Gali objected. She was half-reclining on their couch, being kicked from inside.
“But it’s warm today!”
“It’s still cold.”
“We haven’t been there for months.”
“No one goes there anymore. It’s like a ghost town. It gives me the creeps.”
“Well, then,” Ronen asked, “where should we go?”
“You know I hate making decisions.” She took Ronen’s extended hand and allowed herself to be pulled up slowly, so that she could keep her balance. “Why can’t you make up your mind?”
Since they had been married for nearly eight years, nothing in the previous exchange really meant anything.
What the Breaking the Silence Report Says about the Gaza War–and Doesn’t
Excerpt from my new op-ed in The Forward In its most recent report , Breaking the Silence does something different — it points its spotlight at the haze of a full-scale military operation, last summer’s Protective Edge incursion into the Gaza Strip and tries to draw from its testimonies bigger lessons about an Israeli army … Read more
Fireflies — “Necessary Stories” from The Jerusalem Report
Haim Watzman
Fireflies, forgotten for many years, reappear one summer evening.
Shabbat, Riverside Park, along the Hudson. Under the shelter of tall trees, runners race by. Couples stroll, families with small children sprawl on the grass. The first flashes, as the sun drops low over New Jersey, catch me by surprise. Then the tears begin.
illustration by Avi Katz
It is like a dream. Niot’s look of pure delight and wonder when he sees fireflies for the first time. He is twelve years old, or perhaps ten. We are in Silver Spring, at my parents’ home. I am sitting in an armchair reading a newspaper. Twilight falls. Niot appears behind the frame of the large sliding glass door that separates the family room from the backyard. He catches my eye, then turns his gaze to the yard. Points of weightless brilliance as day slides into night.
“Specks of living light / twinkling in the dark,” Tagore calls them. The picture is clear and present to me in the park at dusk, as clear as if I were again in that armchair and Niot beyond the sliding door.
When Niot first began to appear in my dreams, he was far away, visible for an instant, then gone. I wept in my sleep.
How could light make me cry? How could a creature showing itself to the world make me feel that world as empty? The firefly’s light is a cold light. It startles but it does not warm.
Winged embers mark trails along the river, like comets flying close to the sun, tails aimed at me.
Eulogy for Niot by his Brother, Asor– Four Years — הספד לנאות מאת אחיו עשור אחרי ארבע שנים
Asor Watzman
גרסת המקור בעברית למטה
Grappling with the loss of Niot is not easy. Each time I have come to this period in recent years, and especially on the day of the memorial service, I think about the fact that the time we most feel the loss is during the course of the year, as each of us proceeds with his or her life. During each long year we all cope with the loss in different ways. This difference is evident within our nuclear family. But on this day I feel that our feelings unite as we together confront the fact that Niot is not with us. I see this as very important. It is a sort of calibration point that takes place each year, dividing the loss into segments and preventing it from being a single infinite moment. In doing that, it provides some relief for the pain we all feel. The importance of this day for me finds expression in the community that took form around Niot, along with the stories that remain in our memories.
For that reason, I want to share with you some memories I have of Niot. I will do that using a story from the Talmud:
For that reason, I want to share with you some memories I have of Niot. I will do that using a story from the Talmud:
Rabba bar bar Hanna said: When Rabbi Eliezer fell ill, his students came to visit him.
Eulogy for Niot — Four Years — הספד לנאות אחרי ארבע שנים
גרסת המקור בעברית למטה
Niot:
On Sunday I found comfort, as I often do, in music. I listened to Franz Schubert’s piano sonata in B flat major, a work he wrote just before his death at a young age. At the end of the sonata Schubert placed a measure with a whole rest. In other words, the pianist plays the final notes, which come at a dizzying, furious pace, and then, according to the composer’s instructions, there is a moment of silence before the performance is really over. Perhaps Schubert intended for the pianist to remain with his hands in the air as the sonata echoes through the room.That same evening your friends came to visit us. Two of your wonderful teachers, Gabi and Re’em, joined them. At the end of the evening Gabi said that he still hears your voice. Re’em said that he still hears your laugh. I related dreams in which you have appeared, sometimes so close that I can touch you, sometimes beyond my reach.
Peripheral Vision
In an earlier age, perhaps, privacy would have won out, but in an earlier age he would not be gazing at a photograph of his girlfriend on an electronic device in the crowded waiting room of the Terem all-night emergency clinic in Talpiot. Were he, say, a member of Trumpeldor’s Labor Brigades back in pioneering days, one who had been taken on muleback to a doctor’s home in Yavna’el (had it been founded then?), because of, say, a burn on his shin from a misaimed bucket of hot asphalt, he would have had to conjure up Yael’s bare limbs in his mind’s eye and no one would have been able to peek. That body would have been his alone to see. But then no one else would know what a treasure he had and, face it, part of the enjoyment of a treasure is the admiration of those who don’t have it.
But it took only a fraction of a second for his peripheral vision to make out that the invasive but welcome gaze came from the eye of a small person dressed in a long-sleeve shirt, plaid with very wide blue stripes, tucked into brown corduroy trousers with an elastic waist. Above the eye was a black velvet kipah, and the head to which it belonged leaned lightly and lovingly on the forearm of a lean and tall man in a black suit and clipped beard with an open book on his lap from which he was reading to his son.
The boy dutifully turned his eyes to the book, but not for long. Hanan gave him a smile. The boy shifted in his chair and smiled cautiously.
“Tomorrow this sign shall come to pass,” the father intoned, pointing to the page and glancing at his son. “The Ben Ish Hai is talking here about a verse from the story of the plagues in Egypt. But we know that the word ‘sign’ doesn’t have to be a bad thing, a bunch of flies that got in the Egyptians’ beds and food and noses. A sign is also the mitzvot, the commandments that God has given the Jews, which are a sign of the covenant between the Holy One, Blessed be He, and his people.” And he explained how if you rearrange the Hebrew letters of the word “tomorrow,” which are MHR, you get RMH, which is the number 248, which is the number of limbs and organs of the human body, and also the number of positive injunctions in the Torah.
“How do we know there are that many?” the boy asked his father.
“We can count them in the Torah, like our Sages did,” the father replied.
“No, I mean the parts of the body.”
“Well, if you look at a person’s body, if you could see everything about it, you could count that many,” he explained.
“Let’s count,” said the boy, pointing to the photograph on Hanan’s phone.
Niot and the Niot Project — Update, Pesach 2015
Dear friends, This coming Friday night we will sit down to our Seder, once more without our son Niot. Four years ago, the Seder was our last night together with him. He died a few days later, in the middle of the Pesach holiday, and we miss him very much. A number of memorial events … Read more
The Question of Questions
Haim Watzman
Seder night four years ago was my last night with my younger son, Niot, who died in a diving accident a few days later. Each year I write a dvar Torah for “Shabbat Shalom,” the weekly Torah portion sheet published by Oz VeShalom-Netivot Shalom. The Hebrew version can be found here.
The Four Questions appear in the Hagadah as a preface to the Maggid, the telling of the Pesach story. They stand as prototypes of the questions that are meant to be asked during the entire Seder night. The evening’s unusual observances are intended, in part, to elicit questions, especially from the young people sitting around the table.
Some two decades ago, when my children were small, I was able to observe any number of times how effective this strategy is. One year we decided to adopt a custom with its source in the Talmud—to clear the table of the Pesach plate and matzot immediately after yahatz, the breaking of the middle matzah. The source of the custom comes from the school of Rabbi Yanai: “Why is the table cleared? Said the school of Rabbi Yanai: so that the children will see it and ask [why].” At that Seder, my younger son, Niot, who was preoccupied with his own affairs during the previous stages of Kadesh, Urhatz, Karpas, and Yahatz, suddenly noticed that something was happening and asked in a loud voice: “Why are you doing that?” By asking a spontaneous question, he had fulfilled his duty and we thus did not require him to chant the official Four Questions, an honor he happily passed on to someone else.
Niot’s question is, in fact, the question of questions, and is a much harder one to answer than the prescribed kushiyot.