I am Alive
Remembering three strangers, and taking quick stock of eleven years.
My good friend Leon likes to sign his emails with “I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are”. I value Leon for many reasons, one of which is this. Quick reflection, gratitude, and understanding that our lives and our health are not things to be taken for granted.
On the morning of November 5, 2014, I was on my way to class on Mount Scopus. A terrorist, associated with Hamas, ran a van through the train station at which I was standing, through the crowd of people there, and into the street, where he was eventually shot.
I’ve reflected on this in the past, but as time goes on, I realize just how much of who I tried to be in the eleven years since reflected a deep sense of not wanting to let that event define me. I refused to let it make me angry, and refused to let it make me more extreme. Friends sometimes wonder how. How did I not let this event turn me into someone else, into someone with a worse temper, more sharp views regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, instead riding that wave to a different shore?
I think a lot of it comes from the interactions I had with people after. People’s first question wasn’t about the attack. It was about whether I was ok. That came from everyone. But that night, when my friend Jonny and I sat in the Beit Midrash at Yeshiva, he was a bit out of it. I asked him if everything was alright, and he just looked at me and said, I’m kinda getting over the fact that one of my best friends almost died today.
Guess what? Those words change a person. Someone has told you that their world was shaken not by the fact that you’re gone, but by the realization that you could have been gone. You might not have been here this evening learning with me, and what would my life look like if that was the case? Jonny and I had known each other for a year at that point. And how you must feel when it’s been longer.
How Jedan Assad’s wife felt delivering their second child on her own. How Shalom Aharon Baadani’s parents and grandparents felt burying their son and grandson, but also, how his friends in Yeshiva felt when he didn’t return to study as I did. How Abd al-Karim Nafith Hamid’s family struggled for a month to keep him alive after the massive heart attack he suffered at the site of the attack, only for him to eventually lose that struggle.
I know nothing of these people. But I know they had families, loved ones, and people who felt left behind, felt that emptiness. And none of them deserved this, none of them were the same: Jedan was Druze; Shalom Aharon was Hareidi; Hamid was Palestinian, from the West Bank.
There is a story here of a person whose hate led him to kill people, and to try and make the world a more fearful place. But there is also a story of three worlds left empty, with people trying to feel the void left.
And there are other people who were there, like myself, who are still trying to make sure that the space they haven’t left is justified, and that it is loving, and that it is felt.
I don’t like birthday wishes. Often they become a story of “man, you’re just a bit closer to losing your faculties” or, “thanks for the time you’ve spent here”. I think better birthday wishes reflect on, “I’m glad you’re here, because my life would be less great without you, and here’s how you make the world better by being in it. I hope you keep being around to do that awesome thing you do, which makes this world better, for a long time”.
All I can do to memorialize the lost (and I feel guilty memorializing Jedan, when Druze tradition believes that he was immediately reincarnated, and in some crazy way, I might have met him along the walk of life in some Druze child at the run I was at in September or some other circumstance…) is to say, let’s make sure that the lives we live justify the space we hold, and to not let the anger some might expect be the energy we give back to the world.
As Leon says, and as I love so much: I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are.
In memory of some of the others.