Monday, 9 p.m., Ramat Hasharon. This evening it was announced that seven IDF soldiers were killed today, but from the yard of the Siman-Tov family, loud waves of laughter rise every few minutes.
Two women walking down the street peer in in surprise. Who exactly is gathering on such an evening for a stand-up show? They discover that Miriam Peretz is standing on stage. The woman who lost her son Uriel in Lebanon and her son Eliraz in Gaza insisted on holding this evening, even at the height of the fighting.
A few months ago, when we arranged for me to interview her at a home group in Ramat Hasharon, we didn't know what the timing would be. We couldn't imagine that Peretz would come to the event after visiting bereaved and injured families.
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I thought we already knew everything about her, but throughout the evening it became clear that her choice in life began long before she encountered bereavement.
The woman who became one of the symbols of Israeliness in general immigrated from Morocco at the age of ten. There she did not attend any school, and here in the transit camp she went through a path that could have made her resentful of deprivation for the rest of her life. She turns the tragedy of her absorption into a comedy in front of the audience: "My father would come to a parents' meeting in his jalabiya and not understand a word. When they said they were putting me in a vocational class, he thought it was good, because you were leaving with a profession, not like an academic major. But I decided at a young age to say thank you to the state for everything it gave me, and not to look at the difficulties and the gaps.".
After her marriage, she moved with her husband Eliezer to the settlement of Ofira in the Yamit region, where Uriel and Eliraz were born. "We were the only religious family there. My husband even tried to include Natan Zehavi, who was walking around in a swimsuit on the beach, in the minyan. When they evacuated us from Yamit, it was difficult, but I decided one thing: I will not tell the children, 'The country is gone to me.' After Rabin's assassination, I heard people say this terrible sentence. I knew that my message could not be one of fracture and failure.".
She activated this exact mechanism after Uriel's fall, and even more so after Eliraz's fall. Choosing life with all her might, with lots of humor and awareness.
Peretz knows how to demonstrate, for example, at exactly what point in her speeches on behalf of the IDF at prestigious fundraising evenings in Jewish communities in the US, Americans pull out a napkin to wipe away tears of excitement. Sharon's supporters, in response, wipe away tears of laughter.
This is why she was called out to the newly bereaved families this week.
At the entrance to the house of the late Rubel of Holon, for example, she saw his brother's girlfriend crying. "She told me that she and her brother's brother were supposed to get married in September, but now it would probably be postponed. I immediately went into the house and looked for the brother. Even before I approached the bereaved mother, I stood this couple together in front of me and told them: You are getting married in two months, did you hear me? And you are also inviting me to the wedding. You will start a family and tell your children about their uncle, and you will not stop living. On the contrary.".
If we were to summarize an entire evening and a whole year of life into one word, Miriam Peretz tells us to speak, as much as possible. The Book of Job contains the phrase: "I will speak and it will benefit me." Faced with her own personal Job, she decided that she would speak and speak, so that it would benefit her.
""My husband of blessed memory didn't speak," she tells the audience. "He kept everything inside. He held back and suppressed everything after Uriel fell. He surrounded himself with pictures of himself, and only at night would I hear him sigh and say, 'May I die instead of you.'" After a few years, he fell ill and passed away.
""On the contrary, I never stop talking and telling my story, which is part of the story of an entire people. It gives me strength and meaning. It's not just that they tell us, 'And you told your son.' We have to speak, say. I also live out 'And you told your grandson.' I go to Eliraz's children, who didn't have a father, and tell them about him.".
And she doesn't just tell her grandchildren. Every month she lectures to more than 1,500 civilians and soldiers.
"These are the journeys of the children of Israel who left the land of Egypt," begins this week’s Torah portion – the "My Journeys" portion. Leading up to the entry into the Land of Israel, the portion describes in detail all the stops along the way, in the desert. Many Torah commentators write that these journeys have not ended. We are still on our way to that destiny. The truth is that this week we did not need commentators to explain this. We can simply listen to the news.
But there were no open waves on the Sinai Desert journey. Here are some conclusions from managing many hours of rolling transmitters:
• It is difficult for us to grasp the gap between us and our enemies. Experts on the left and right explain that Hamas's goal is not to lift the siege on Gaza but to destroy the State of Israel. We, on the other hand, really need to change a diskette (diskette? Disk-on-Key) to internalize that someone does not share our democratic-Western or traditional Jewish perception of the sanctity of human life and the preference for peace over war. It is amazing to look at the gap between what we have done since '48 and what they have done since 2005. .
The people of Israel after the Holocaust built entire worlds of content and action here. The Gazan people after the disengagement invested more in Lower Gaza than in Upper Gaza. Nathan Alterman wrote to Moladet at the time: "We will make you very beautiful / We will clothe you with a solid foundation of concrete and cement." Gaza was also clothed with a solid foundation of concrete and cement – underground.
• The man who was actually supposed to be the main interviewee this week is the late Ariel Sharon. Suddenly, no one understands what he did. The right, rightly, is in an atmosphere of "we told you so we'll say we told you so." But even the left, which supported the disengagement, suddenly remembers how much it didn't want a unilateral move and how much it thought Gaza should be handed over to an agreed-upon entity and not just leave. But Sharon, who didn't count his party, his voters, and his camp, didn't count the Palestinians either. After him, the flood.
• The most common sentence these days – and it is said by both a grocery store owner and a mayor – begins like this: "Look, I'm not in a position to give advice to the Prime Minister and the Chief of Staff..." Then, in the second half of the sentence, the speaker, of course, begins to give advice to the Prime Minister and the Chief of Staff.
• Hamas opened a score with Israeli children this summer. As a child, I lost weeks of school during the Gulf War, which raised Saddam Hussein's prestige a bit in my eyes. This week, little children spoke in heartbreaking interviews about the cancellation or reduction of summer camp, and about the long-awaited trip to an amusement park or a movie theater that didn't happen because of the situation. I don't know what revenge a little child gets for having a visit to Superland canceled.
""All the journeys of the Israelites in the desert are journeys that every person goes through in their lifetime, and some even say every day. In this way, the Torah seeks to indicate to man the desired path of life – he must be constantly on a journey, in a constant movement of ascent and progress" (The Baal Shem Tov)
• From the weekly column in Yedioth Ahronoth'
