On October 7, 2023 Shlomo Efrati was called up for reserve duty. He was stationed at the Civilian Casualty Collection Station, for treating bodies of civilian casualties.
8.10.23
“When my children learn and celebrate
the Holy One Blessed Be He says to the angels
look at my beloved people in their pain and trouble
how they are engaged in my happiness.”
I work, humming a song from Simchat Torah,
while they pass before us like a flock of sheep,
all night long, more and more arrive,
holy children, holy women, their bodies holy vessels of commandments.
I say thank you to them, that I am proud of them, as I treat them with my righteous partner.
I go outside and there is light in the sky, as if by luck God at least remembered how to make day,
I sit on the ground sobbing.
9.10.23
Sunrise lights another black night.
The trucks continue to arrive with bodies
and trailers bring more refrigeration containers.
We unload everyone from the Nova party,
put them on the table.
Navel piercing, butterfly tattoo, starfish anklet,
she wanted to celebrate the world, and ended up here, in front of me, with two bullet holes.
And the smell, God. It’s the smell of the devil, as if he’s saying I was here and did something evil.
I hear names and connect them later with faces of the missing on Facebook.
I don’t feel tired, as if all this is happening to someone else.
10.10.23
Another night passed,
the martyrs of Be’eri arrived.
Here lies a holy community,
elderly, women, and infants,
secular people slaughtered in the name of God’s Holy unity.
You think by now you’ve gotten used to the routine until you hear someone say:
“Bring that body into the room with such and such family…”
as if they reserved a hotel suite here.
In the room I wrap myself in a white suit like the kittel I wear during high holiday services, and take fingerprints according to strict military protocol:
Someone calls out “right thumb,” and everyone else responds “right thumb” in a macabre call and response:
Me: “Right pointer”
Everyone: “Right pointer”
Me: “Right middle finger”
Everyone: “Right middle finger”
Me: “Right ring finger”
Everyone: “Right ring finger”
me: “Right pinky”
Everyone: “Right pinky”
We go outside to take a breath, take off our masks and suits,
and suddenly you realize –
Yisrael from the refrigeration room is a Hassid,
Galia the dentist is an atheist (the only one in Jerusalem, in her opinion),
Avi from the Police is Ethiopian,
everyone sits together, everyone has the same look in their eyes.
And the heart is full, so full.
11.10.23
Routine.
The smell already bothers me less, somehow no longer awful just sickeningly sweet
Bodies come from all directions,
Michael to my right and Gabriel to my left,
and above me…who knows what’s above me?
Body bags of all sizes have stopped shocking me.
Today I saw something unusual – a body with a swastika on it,
and two days ago it unsettled me when I treated someone from the Nova party with a tattoo that said, “Just No War” and right above it, a bullet hole.
Feelings rise and fall,
sometimes tears overflow, sometimes I’m calm,
I don’t know exactly what sets me off.
Today I almost didn’t have time to put on phylacteries during morning prayer, and then I made a point to do so
just so that I could feel normal.
I hold back difficult stories from friends, why should I bring them down.
But there are images I can’t get out of my head.
12.10.23
Today I treated a few extreme cases,
Ah, by now it’s impossible to take fingerprints from most of the bodies.
The great challenge is when thoughts of the hostages in Gaza sneak in,
and fear of the evil starting up in the North.
I saw some things today that I shouldn’t have,
it’s important to tell myself this, to be more careful about guarding my eyes.
I try to joke around outside between deliveries,
everyone is just waiting to be cheered up.
I get goosebumps when I see a woman soldier on the phone,
and stare at the nail polish on her fingers.
I realize I’m living the words of King David’s Psalms,
I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, evil will not befall me, God is with me.
Yesterday there was a kind looking man, a young kibbutznik.
I said to myself, here’s someone I’d want to be friends with if he was alive.
I’ve just come out from treating a few bodies with clever tattoos:
It’s 16:20 somewhere
Perspective
Karma
I don’t have any more strength for this,
let it end already.
13.10.23
Shabbat descends on the valley of murder,
but death deliveries continue to arrive.
Each body gets a case number from the police,
the Hebrew word for these kinds of numbers sounds like pelle, the word for wonder.
By definition – it is a number of wonder.
Every time I finish treating a body and look around to find their number,
I say to myself, wow, what a wonder.
I give myself a moment to look in wonderment, without pain or shock,
a chance to wonder, what is God’s message?
What wonder is hiding from me here in the valley of murder?
That night, after many hours of work,
a body arrived in the worst possible condition.
My arms and legs refused to dedicate themselves to the task.
I went outside but there was nobody to replace me,
and then a backup of bodies started to form.
Army fingerprinter! Army fingerprinter! Where are you?
I called my Company Commander who hadn’t slept for a week
and told him I’m a total wreck.
Quietly, without argument, he gave me a hug, and went instead of me.
There are limits of the spirit, you have to know what they are.
Shabbat started while I was treating bodies,
what a remarkable thing, the heart fills with elation,
I feel in every particle of my body that everything I’ve gone through in life was meant to prepare me exactly for this moment,
exactly to be present in this place,
to engage totally and serve from a place of holiness.
Shabbat shalom to the shabbat of Genesis,
which also seems like a new beginning for my path in life.
15.10.23
I returned home for fourteen hours
the longest time I spent with my family in the last week.
Panic overwhelmed me – my throat choked and in mky midn I see non-stop images of horror.
I started to drive Ma’ayan crazy, so I went out a little to see people at work.
It didn’t help.
I arrived back at base,
but there were no more bodies to treat.
Is this lucky or horrible?
I didn’t know any more.
I sleep-walked between the empty treatment rooms,
where was everyone?
The refrigeration room was empty,
did all of the dead go to their final rest
and leave me here with a ringing in my head?
I went outside and took deep breaths,
that helped some.
There is no rest.
28.10.23
After treating the bodies of many victims,
I’ve learned that each one comes with its own energy.
Everyone from the Nova party, martyrs from the kibbutzim, the old women from Sderot.
They’ve passed through fire and water, each one comes with their own backstory.
One day the body of a terrorist was brought in by mistake.
Darkness filled the room.
The body lay lifeless on the table,
so vulnerable, I thought to myself.
And in his pocket, the essence of evil: three grenades and a pack of condoms.
Suddenly, I remember a verse from Yom Kippur prayers:
Hamol al ma’asecha, have mercy on Your creation.
How much mercy is missing in our world,
what a tragedy that people are imprisoned their whole lives in this evil.
It’s terrible to recall I felt pity for him.
Not over his death, but for the life he had lived.
Pity that he had the potential to choose good but chose of evil.
I grasped his hand and my heart was clean.
I saw the image of God in him and thought,
How twisted that a man with a clean heart handles absolute darkness.
I prayed to God in my heart – have mercy on your creations,
take these people out from the cycle of evil and protect me,
that I may always walk the ways of truth, in the fields of bloom and beauty.
1.11.23
Even before I started my shift I knew there had been a difficult incident.
I go in and there are three bodies waiting.
They’ve already been identified so I move on to their belongings.
I take off a G-Shock watch, wash off the blood, and put it in a bag for the family.
The tourniquet that was on him needs to be buried because of all the blood.
A small book of Psalms, soaked in blood.
I take scissors, try to salvage what I can,
at some point I give up and say the rest should be buried, it’s impossible to save anything else.
I send what’s left of the Psalms to the refrigeration room in a bag.
15 minutes later Martin calls me over.
He whispers in my ear as if he’s speaking to my heart – give it to the family, what do you care?
We’ll cut off a bit more, save it for the family.
There’s no one like Martin.
On the Mako news site, their pictures are posted while I’m cleaning blood off their things.
Such beautiful boys.
We didn’t know it yet but there was a delivery of 11 more on the way, from an APC that drove over a roadside bomb.
The first coffin goes out for burial, and I stand for kaddish with nine others.
We lift the coffin into the van.
On its way to a final rest.
My shift ends just as another van arrives. I jump into action even though the new shift is there.
One body, very tall.
We open the bag. Not a scratch on his head.
He’ll be easy to identify we declare cheerily.
I take him to CT, then the treatment room, and finally at that point the people from the new shift tell me to leave.
I acquiesce and take myself home.
2.11.23
I clean a blood-soaked yarmulke,
so much pain in this world.
We receive someone’s book of Psalms,
the bookmark at Chapter 60:
O God, You have rejected us, You have pierced us;
You have been angry, restore us!,
There is a hole in my heart.
7.12.23
A very difficult day.
The first body of the day was routine,
good looking face, trim beard, tattoos.
We finished treating him, I lay my hands on his head and sent him on his way.
We took off our gloves and suits and the whole unit went out to the yard.
About a hundred people had come for a ceremony to give out new ranks.
Applause and flowery words comically interrupted by a coffin being taken out for burial, and then they continued the ceremony a minute after kaddish,
as if all this was normal.
Just as I got to the plate of borekas that I was looking for, they pulled me aside by the shoulder,
“Come in, there’s a burial preparation, but keep in mind this one is rough.”
I went inside.
In the bag – forty centimeters of burnt offering to God that went up in a storm to the sky.
Silence in the room.
We wrapped him in white, then Nati brought him with two hands to Menachem.
This Jew was carried by a designated attendant on a pillow on the day of his circumcision
and so too, now, by a designated attendant on his way to heaven.
The rest of the dirt and remaining pieces we kept separate.
During the entire treatment, the song “Adraba ten b’libenu” played in my head,
strengthen us with love for You God, that everything should be revealed
and known before You…
I left and cried the whole way home.
Feeling the soul’s ascent.
27.12.23
The moon is full tonight,
casting a precious light
on Camp Shura.
How full it is,
how much is missing,
how much emptiness there is in space.
Parts of me remain here,
with everyone I’ve treated.
It begins with a gasp hearing their name
then a look in their eyes, then a touch.
How near the body is to me
and he’s not even here.
If I am here, everything is here, said Hillel the Elder,
and what if I’m not here?
The moon is full tonight, so much of me is missing.
10.1.24
Explosion.
A new day,
the sun rose up, the wind blew down,
so many in His world bearing joys and worries,
And then, in one moment, an explosion.
A thousand pieces,
a thousand particles,
there was a person here
who was scattered in every direction
and now he’s everywhere in the world
and nowhere.
The next day in Camp Shura, the good-hearted ones rack their brains,
trying to figure out
how to fit emptiness into an empty coffin.
12.1.24
Kol od. As long as.
A candle burns in the corner of the room,
and a body is laid out on the metal table,
in the air – the traces of his soul,
and three people are working.
Opening a set of shrouds –
clothes of Shabbat
clothes of royalty.
Cleaning, arranging, dressing.
Without hysterics or shouts
just a still small voice
the soft murmuring
of hands working,
of a Jewish soul yearning.
The candle burns and it is too late to fix,
but it is possible to prepare for the world to come.
24.1.24
Pain comes to me
with a jumble of memories.
Remember us for life, we pray on the High Holidays.
They say the body remembers,
maybe this is why I cried when I stretched a sheet over the bed tonight,
it reminded me of the stretching of cloth we wrap around a body,
the way Menachem tucks the frayed edges into neat, beautiful folds.
I remember so much.
The hands remember,
hands that held hands,
hands that held what were once hands,
hands that held a finger,
hands that felt inside the bag,
hands that gently twisted and turned so as to not hurt the body,
to not disturb him.
The moment I have to open the bag always shocks me,
as if I’m unsure what to expect,
trembling at what might be,
as if it’s not already clear,
as if death isn’t the same for everyone.
The nose remembers the smell of blood,
the smell of decay, the smell of organs.
The smell of breath, knowing even before coming into the room what will be there.
You should know –
the breath is what marks the traces of soul hovering in the room.
There are moments when it’s simply impossible to explain what’s in the room.
The body is so present, the body is so absent,
as if we all gathered to throw a goodbye party for him,
and he didn’t show up.
And the eyes remember what they have seen,
but that’s already too much.
17.3.24
One whose deceased relative is laid out unburied before him is exempt from the recitation of Shema, from the Amida prayer, and from the mitzva to don tefilin, and from all the commandments in the Torah, until the deceased has been buried.
(Mishnah Berachot 3:1)
One whose deceased is laid out before him.
This is his deceased, he is laid out, and this is before him.
And he cannot turn away.
How much does the deceased belong to him?
How much does he even matter in this last and final situation?
As if the Holy One Blessed Be He made it happen that the deceased, who lived a full life somewhere on the other end of the country, would finally be laid out before him.
And on the face of it, what do you share with him?
Different lives and different ends, which ultimately lead to a shared fate in the same room.
He is laid out, he is before you, and you are alive and well and he is in your hands.
He is cast upon you to work on his behalf, in this moment when he is passing from this world.
Look in his eyes, wide open, and see there is nothing there.
Close his eyelids with abundant mercy.
All of the commandments given in the Torah.
The commandments pass away along with the dead.
I stood before the dead person, laid out on the metal table,
the moment I took him out from the bag he was so beautiful.
I whisper to this tattooed one, or to that prayer-shawl-wrapped one:
all of the commandments given in the Torah are not important at this moment,
you are in my hands until I pass you along to the ground, to the creator of the world.
In this space, between you and me,
in this room lit by fluorescent light, you are equal to Moses our Teacher.
All of the commandments given have passed away,
now your body is the only commandment that remains.
And I prepare him – bandage, and clean, and dress.
My hands work gently, as if I worry I might cause him pain.
And when his arm doesn’t fit into the shroud properly,
I ask forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness
and do what’s needed to be done.
For him, for his mother, for his wife or children who will come to see him.
And I don’t skip over cleaning even inside his ears, even though that’s something they won’t see, so what, I see and it’s important to me.
I close his eyelids, and tie the cloth that surrounds the shroud.
Count to three and raise him into the coffin.
Forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.
I beg for forgiveness from the vacant body, the present-absence in the room.
13.5.24
I look at a picture of me from before I left home.
Ma’ayan’s behind me, it seems she has a bit more understanding in her eyes than I did,
that I wouldn’t come back the way I left,
that I am entering a small Shoah, a slaughterhouse,
to float in a sea of bodies,
bags of all sizes,
children, elderly, women, men,
consumed, through fire and water.
I smoke so as not to smell the decay.
I pass between bodies to get to the toilet.
I search for a place outside that doesn’t smell, but is close enough that they can call me.
I fall asleep in the middle of the night on a plastic chair.
I raise my eyes for a moment and look at the tattoo.
I raise your my for a moment and look in their eyes,
I open one delivery container after another after another,
I hear the beeping of the trucks backing up,
I treat the Thai workers,
I stand before a bag and pray to God,
that I can be strong enough for what I find inside.
I go outside for a moment,
to see the sky on the cusp of sunrise,
and I do not believe that the sun has risen again.
4.8.24
Thirty-seven.
They light a candle in honor of the soul’s breathless ascent
in honor of the breath
in honor of air that passes into the lungs
and out from the diaphragm
in honor of the angels that ascended during the year.
And this is me,
Shlomo Lavi
so small
so fragile
so full
of air
floating between empty bodies
grabbing air in my hands.
12.8.24 – Tisha b’Av
And now for the Tisha b’Av, the annual day on which Jews commemorate all of our catastrophes.
The Simchat Torah massacre
has entered the lines of forced rhymes in our lamentations
and the same words of history fly over my head
murder, slaughter, desecration,
burning, stoning, beheading,
as if it’s not enough
that this whole cursed year
I’ve been on the verge of tears,
as if it’s not enough I spend every trip alone in the car screaming,
as if I don’t cry inside every minute of the day,
in meetings, at work, with the children, with friends.
Now I need rhyming lamentations?
Just a few weeks ago I took body parts out of a bag.
Every sunset reminds me of the stark lines of Camp Shura,
lines where there are no rhymes.
30.8.24
One month until Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year,
and the Days of Awe have never felt this way before.
The works of our God:
He redeems those He has borne from birth
from the pits of She’ol;
The eternal Rock acknowledges those who seek shelter with Him.
The Holy One works His miracles,
showing compassion equally
to those who please and displease Him.
Therefore exalt Him,
He who shows compassion to all His creations.
When I met Aviad today I immediately saw it in his eyes,
the question jumped out from his look – did you see what I saw?!
I saw.
Did you see light, glittering at the top of the Mountain of Myrrh?
And I wanted to say more but I couldn’t,
wasn’t able to tell him that I embraced his friend
that I held him tight, I held him,
I lifted him and wiped him clean and pulled shrapnel from his back
and there was a moment that didn’t go so well with his body
but I did what was needed.
Aviad lets slip that the gabbaim organizing High Holiday services
are nervous about my leading Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur,
they’re worried I might bring Camp Shura into the synagogue,
they’re worried
I might reveal the abyss,
the gabbaim
they’re worried
I might open a window
to the world beyond,
they’re worried
it might turn out
there’s something here
behind all the pages of prayer.