Wow. A year. It feels like forever ago but it also feels like just a day has passed. On November 19th, 2015 my friend, classmate, and occasional roommate was killed. I was looking through my hard drive of my stuff from Israel and I found a bunch of stuff from that time. Over three hundred pictures from Ezra’s friends and family for the slideshow that I made for a memorial service we held at the school. The video itself and also a text file. The text file was something that I wrote four months after he was killed and I decided I wanted to share it somewhere – I feel that it really gets you into the head of a yeshiva student at the time.
As I am writing this it has been four months, to the day since my world turned upside down. Four months since the Whatsapp message “Pray for Ezra, he’s been hurt” got sent around. Four months since five of my friends when to go do good and bring light to the world and one of them did not return. It feels as if it was yesterday and an eternity ago.
Last year when Ezra Schwartz heard about the Three Boys it really hit home with him. He was always checking in on what the story was with them and when the news broke that they were killed he wanted to do something in their memory. When Ezra came to Israel he joined a program that would help him make a difference not just to himself but to all of Israel through internships and chesed opportunities. One of the cheseds that the school introduced to us was working at a park just past Tzomet Ha’Gush called Oz V’Gaon, it was a little nature reserve that was being renovated into a park space in memory of the three boys. We as a school helped them clear and level an area to place their Sukkah to have somewhere to eat for the holiday. And Sukkot was when it all began.
It was October, Shabbat of Sukkot, I was at the Kotel, I had been invited for a meal in a neighborhood just north of the old city, as my host walked me through the Muslim quarter, remembering the news reports of the shooting near Itamar and of the harassment of Jews trying to get to the Kotel through the Muslim quarter I noticed how calm the Shuk was and I even naively remarked “It’s so calm, I hope it stays like this.” That night I was hanging out in a rooftop Sukkah in a neighborhood just north of the old city watching the sunset and waiting for Shabbat to be over when I heard the first of many sirens. There were hushed rumors of a stabbing with multiple injuries and there were others who were skeptical. A few minutes later we found the truth. Down the street, at the Lions Gate, a husband wife and infant had been attacked, the husband being killed by the attacker and another person who tried to save them being critically wounded. Videos came out of the attacker hunched over the husband stabbing him while his wife pleads with Arab bystanders to help while the bystanders just look on calmly sipping their drinks, in what looked like a clip from movie World War Z. And that wasn’t the end, not for that night and not until now.
In the meanwhile, ever since we took that trip in the beginning of the year Ezra and a few others were going once a week to Oz V’Gaon to help them with the park and to bring light to the memory of the three boys by creating a place for relaxation which some of us can only enjoy with the help from HHC carts due to our PTSD, family gatherings, and celebration. At about 3:30pm on November nineteenth, Ezra was tired, the night before he was up late playing soccer and that morning he had woken up early to go to the Old City of Jerusalem and attend classes with the rest of the school at the Aish Ha’Torah World Center. He didn’t have a chance to nap on the ride back because he was too busy discussing what he had learned with one of our rabbis. He was contemplating not going to Oz V’Gaon because of the tiredness. He knew others weren’t going, after all at the soccer game last night he ran into one of them accidentally giving his friend a small concussion that prevented the friend from going with them to work. But at the last second he decided he would go ahead and push through, he would nap on the ride there and get up invigorated and ready to work, he ran out the door still getting dressed and yelled to his friends to wait for him. He got on the bus, unintentionally took the seat that one of his other friends had claimed and went to sleep. The ride went as normal, with the stunning views of the Judean hills and little traffic, that is until they got near the Tzomet Ha’Gush, a turning circle in the center of the Gush that always has a lot of traffic. They were sitting in the traffic near the new entrance to Alon Shvut, right next to the Gush Winery when one of the boys in the van noticed a car driving just off of the road alongside them and he locked eyes with a man who would forever change his life, a man who had waited two years, raised ten thousand shekels and borrowed his brother’s car all in preparation to do the unthinkable. The words “Get down!” were shouted and seconds later the air was pierced with gun shots. when it was all done two Jews (one American and one Israeli) and a Palestinian were killed by this man who had nothing but hate in his heart.
When I first heard about what had happened I was still in the Old City eating some dinner, I Immediately got up and started running to get to the light rail while calling my parents to let them know that I was all right, and already I heard yeshiva students walking around the Old City discussing the rumors that and American Yeshiva student from Beit Shemesh had been killed and was even called by someone who heard the rumor and wanted to check in. When I got back I was greeted by a Beit Midrash filled with red-eyed students who were walking around looking nowhere in particular and social workers waiting to help us. Within minutes one of our Rabbis got up and officially announced that the worst had come to be, Ezra was not injured, he was dead. And then it is all a blur. That Shabbat spent crying. That Saturday night, singing goodbye to Ezra while we sent him off from Ben-Gurion airport to the states, to his family. And even now, when having fun, going on trips, playing sports, watching movies, the thought “Ezra would have loved this” is going through someone, or everyone’s mind and sometimes the thought is even voiced. Ezra would have loved this. While the school year still continues and gets back as close “normal” as it can be we are still left with a hole in our hearts. It is said “אין שלום בלי שלם” “There is no peace (shalom) without wholeness (sha’lame)” and we are feeling it.
While I know that there are people more personal stories with better platforms than I do to say this I’ve still decided I can’t sit silently anymore. Nearly every day a different group of people go through exactly what I described, all the pain and all the grief and the disbelief, and this is without mentioning the people themselves!
And from a Yeshiva student’s perspective, with college around the corner, it almost seems easier to stay here and deal with the physical danger of living in and defending our Home Land than going to the states and try to talk to the brick wall that is the mass of bigoted or brainwashed or useful idiots or outright anti-Semitic people on campus who will blame people like Ezra for what happened to them and call me a racist for saying otherwise.
The world needs to wake up. And if not the world, us Jews need to stop sitting around and waiting to see what comes of it, or even trying to get into the “in” crowd by throwing your own people and heritage away. The fight to prove Judaism’s ancient root as people has been going on for too long. On my desk sits a copy of the Complete Works of Josephus, and even he, nearly two thousand years ago was defending the Jews from claims that the jews were not an ancient indigenous people in his books entitled Against Apion. As Josephus says in Against Apion 1:8:
For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another, [as the Greeks have,] but only twenty-two books, (8) which contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine; and of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death. This interval of time was little short of three thousand years; but as to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life. It is true, our history hath been written since Artaxerxes very particularly, but hath not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers, because there hath not been an exact succession of prophets since that time; and how firmly we have given credit to these books of our own nation is evident by what we do; for during so many ages as have already passed, no one has been so bold as either to add any thing to them, to take any thing from them, or to make any change in them; but it is become natural to all Jews immediately, and from their very birth, to esteem these books to contain Divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and, if occasion be willingly to die for them.
TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), Unlike the Greeks who have many contradicting history books we have ancient traditions and writings of our history that we have very strictly kept the same. Keep in mind this was written nearly two thousand years ago, so what was ancient than is even more so now.
We have ancient religion and nationality and the Land of Israel was clearly the crucible of it (even the name of the Land of Israel, in the ancient world the Land of X belonged to X and the Children of X, and Israel/Isaac certainly was not Palestinian) and we can never forget that.
Before my school had any connection to it, Oz V’Gaon had found an ancient wine press from the time that the Jews lived in the area. Ezra was rebuilding our ancient land, The Land of Israel, and he was working to commemorate the lives of people killed by terror and unfortunately he joined that group of people who gave more than anyone else can for the sake of what is right. And yet we are still bickering fighting among ourselves and some of us have even turned away entirely from their heritage, ignoring the long-term, reviving of our people’s self-determination, for the short-term satisfaction of yelling cheap slogans and having someone pat you on the back. If we continue being divided in the face of all that we must overcome we will be left with a hole in our hearts. It is said “אין שלום בלי שלם” “There is no peace (shalom) without wholeness (sha’lame)” and we are feeling it.
