The horrific reports that flowed in overnight Thursday and Friday morning from Mount Meron sent me back 45 years, to May 1976.
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My good friend and neighbor Aviad Pohoryles (now an Israel Hayom journalist) and his brother Leon, along with my sister and I, had lit the neighborhood bonfire near our home in Holon. My father was surprised us when he reported that there had been an accident, and he – along with my mother – were on their way to the north. The next morning, my father returned home with terrible news. My grandfather Modechai was on a tour bus that had fallen off a cliff at Mount Meron.
A total of 13 righteous men and women were killed in that disaster, on their way to celebrate the Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. My grandmother was badly injured, but lived, but to her last day the scars on her face were a reminder of the awful accident. My grandfather, who was also my mohel and should have been the one to prepare me for my bar mitzvah, became, to my mind, a saint. And my father? For months, he barely spoke. Only in retrospect did I realize that the task that had befallen him of identifying my grandfather between the wrecked bodies, had taken it out of him. Even my tough father remained scarred.
So every year, the celebrations at Meron turn from a Jewish story to a personal, family one. While everyone else links the event to the gomel prayer, with which they mark the end of a plague that killed 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva's students, for us, it is even more closely tied to the Kaddish mourning prayer for my grandfather and the other 12 victims from Ashdod.
This weekend, we were all plunged from the heights of joy into deep grief. Haredi Jews, traditional Jews, secular Jews. There was an uplifting of the spirit at the end of a plague. Like there was back then. People of faith flocked to Mount Meron in thousands of cars and buses. The world was following the event. It was the first open, accessible religious event to be held since the outbreak of the COVID virus in Israel last year. Once again, we were a light unto the nations. Or at least so it seemed. Who would have believed that 45 righteous would not be returning home? Who thought that a father, like my father did 45 years ago, would have to go to the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine to identify bodies – this time, two of his sons. The heart weeps, and not only the heart.
"He who is prudent will keep silence in such a time," Amos 5:13 says, rightfully. And if that isn't enough, we have the example of Aaron, who discovered that his two oldest sons had died, as told in Leviticus. What did Aaron do? He "kept silent." Then too, the great joy turned into deep grief. The inauguration of the holy site turned into a burial of two sons.
We are holding a national day of mourning, but the darkness will stay with us for many days to come. We are still burying our dead and identifying the last of the victims. The blood boils and we weep with the families. We will mourn – and then we will thoroughly investigate who is at fault. Why the government doesn't have more authority over religious events, why there is not complete sovereignty over Jewish and Muslim holy sites. We owe it to the victims, to the families, and to ourselves. We also owe it to the enormous audience that will continue to visit Mount Meron in the years to come.
It was moving to see the solidarity among the citizens of Israel. Tel Aviv residents stood hours in line to donate blood, residents of Arab villages lined the roads leading to and from Meron and set up rest and refreshment stations. In the year of COVID and elections we were told that we were a fractured, irreparably torn society. But that's not the case: Secular, religious, and Haredi Jews, as well as non-Jews, are all responsible for one another and demonstrated exemplary unity and mutual help. The exceptions to that are the exceptions.
We must not blame the victims, and we must not rush to draw conclusions. But if only the tears of 2021, like our tears in 1976, will be the last tears of grief from Meron. Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, possibly one of the most national rabbis in our tradition, once whispered to me when I was a child mourning my grandfather, that he preferred the gomel prayer over the Kaddish.
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