At some point in the last few weeks, I came across some troubling comments about the "parasitic" ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel -- how they don't serve in the army and just sit around all day studying Talmud and relying on other Israelis to put their lives on the line to defend them. I've lost the reference and so can't link to it, but that was pretty much the general picture with which I'd like to take issue here.
I have plenty of problems with the "haredi" culture, to be sure. And they sometimes tend to hit home harder because my one and only brother is, well, in it up to his tefillin (that's a little higher than the eyeballs). I felt a little sick a few weeks ago when I read that a United Torah Judaism MK was threatening a vote of no confidence because an El Al plane had been permitted to land in Israel on Shabbat. One plane. A plane that had left Los Angeles a little behind its scheduled take-off on Thursday, July 4, due to an incident at the ticket counter. A plane whose passengers were traumatized and just wanted to be reunited with their families ASAP. And this story made me a little queasy, too.
But there are other stories, such as this one that appeared in last week's U.S. News and World Report. It's about ZAKA, Israel's volunteer Disaster Victims Identification team.
Koenig handed sheets of blood-drenched absorbent paper to a coworker, who placed them in a plastic bag for burial with one of the victims; according to Jewish tradition, a person's soul resides in his blood. His work done, Koenig pulled the surgical gloves–the fingertips stained with blood–from his hands, found his car, and drove himself home. After such an ordeal, he often sings a melody he knows will make him cry: a Hebrew religious song with the refrain "God will have mercy." Says Koenig: "By the time I get home, I'm calm." Who does such work? When not immersed in this ritual of death, Koenig embraces the rituals of love and life: A caterer by trade, his days are a succession of weddings and bar mitzvahs. Yet for three years he has been drawn to the grisly task that most Israelis are glad to see done but want no part of. Despite crackdowns by the Israeli government, the violence continues. Just last week there were two bombings and three shootings in a single day, killing at least 15 people. ..... For every volunteer, there is a first encounter with a scene of death. On his first job, after the March suicide bombing of Jerusalem's Moment cafe that killed 11 people, [Yitzhak] Shalita, 25, worked for five hours, well into the middle of the night. He got to the cafe a few minutes after the explosion, before the survivors could even begin to wail. The only sound was the ring of cellular phones. "The walls were covered with blood," he recalls. "There were broken tables, plates, salads all over the floor, total chaos. People were lying in a pile, one on top of the other, in a pool of blood." He saw a woman seated on a chair at the bar, elbow on the counter, head resting in her palm. A man sat next to her with his hand on the bar as if holding a glass. Their eyes were open. "They looked as if nothing was wrong with them," Shalita says. But they were frozen in death. Shalita doesn't remember thinking or feeling much during that first night, just the sensation of mechanically taking on one task after another: covering corpses with black plastic bags, using a plasterer's knife to collect parts of bodies, and blotting the blood.In this tiny nation where no place seems safe anymore–certainly not the buses or the food stands along Hanevi'im Street or even the cafeteria crossroads of the Hebrew University–more and more Israelis wander through their lives with an eye over the shoulder, looking to see if their final hour is gaining on them. Not Natan Koenig. In the near 100-degree afternoon heat at Hebrew University last month, Koenig sat on his haunches, blotting the black-red circle of blood spread wide across the hard tile floor of the cafeteria where seven people, five Americans among them, had just lost their lives. The 25-year-old is one of 604 Jewish men, all but 34 of them Orthodox, who are members of ZAKA, Israel's volunteer Disaster Victims Identification team. They collect human remains for burial, fulfilling the Jewish mitzvah, or commandment, of showing "respect for the dead."
The ultra-Orthodox truly believe that their prayer and study contribute as much to the preservation of Israel as the actions of the IDF. While the rest of us might not see it that way, that's who they are. They're also people who, inspired by those same beliefs, are honored to be able to do a job that most of us would cringe from under any circumstances.
