Watching the dead

fragments from the last few days

They asked for volunteers to watch over the dead. The Jewish custom of Shmira requires never leaving a dead body alone from the moment of death until burial. They’re not used to so many dead at the same time. There is no shortage of volunteers.

I sometimes joke that my four kids are ‘rookie numbers’ at our kids’ Jewish school. I’ve now seen the horrible flipside of that: what it means to leave four or five children without a father.

Each day there are three or four funerals. Each day new awful details, new shocking stories of heroism. I suppose every such massacre around the world carries such stories, each detail a universe unto itself. But this one is ours. Each detail a neighbour, a friend, a classmate. A mirror unto ourselves.

This interview is tough to watch. A wife and mother of 5 begging for a miracle to save her husband. Bleeding herself, pleading for him not to leave their children, including their two-month-old newborn (who has shrapnel in his leg). His thirteen-year-old, a new man, said the mourner’s prayers at his father’s funeral as a first act of manhood. I knew Rabbi Eli Schlanger only in passing. Many of my friends considered him a close friend. He was that kind of guy. He died approaching one of the assailants, arms in the air, pleading for him to stop shooting at his people.

Watching Rabbi Ulman, always kind to our family, who lost his son-in-law, standing heartbroken before our community, urging us to tell our loved ones how much they mean to us. While we can.

The father of the boy in my son’s class died. He leaves behind his wife and four children. This is idiotic, but I can’t get out of my head that my boy had asked me to invite his son to his birthday party but for whatever reason it had slipped and I didn’t. And it’s completely irrelevant to anyone, but it’s been bothering me endlessly.

It’s almost unbearable how decent these men were, just decent people out of the spotlight who went about helping their community. Chabadniks trying to multiply the number of good and holy deeds in the world, fathers working to raise their children and support their families.

14-year-old Chaya’s story is remarkable. She is the sister of another of my boy’s classmates. What nachas to her family. There is a shocking interview with her on Sky News I can’t find online to link to. As she covers these children with her body, who are already covered in the blood of their mother, and is shot, she calls emergency services for help, who hang up on her.

They killed 10-year-old Matilda. The look on her father’s face. They gave her the most Australian name they could think of. The love of new, grateful migrants for this land. You couldn’t script this.

The story of Boris and Sofia Gurman haunts me. He was 69 and she 62 and they tackled and disarmed the 24-year-old gunman. Just contemplate that, as I have over and over for 48 hours straight. Look at them. They look like every relative I have. Tough, Jewish Soviet stock. Just look at them. No smiling in photos! But no doubt a wry joke thrown in. Imagine you are a 24 year-old gunman and you are disarmed by an almost-70-year-old and his wife and your dad has to shoot them down to save you. There is some sort of cosmic justice in this humiliation, and in this heroic end for this couple, who left a Soviet past to a glorious paradise in Bondi like so many of us. But of course, justice is entirely the wrong word. There is no better way to go than they did, but better to have lived.

A small scene that has stuck with me for two decades: during the post-9/11 Western terror scare I was at a family gathering at my uncle Boris’s house in Adelaide. They were joking about the latest government urge to report suspicious behaviour. My uncle joked how every second person looked suspicious to him. His friend joked back that it was every first. To me somehow that joke in another place and time from people very similar to Boris and Sofia Gurman seems to have materialised into a real life monster that snatched these people away.

61-year-old Reuven Morrison, who came as a teen to Australia from the Soviet Union, was also killed while attacking one of the assailants.

And of course there is Ahmed Al-Ahmed who attacked and disarmed the father gunman. Honestly, there is no man alive who has not fantasised about doing what he did. He stopped an armed assailant with his bare hands and lived to tell the tale. That’s it. There is nothing left for this man to conquer.

The day after the attack a friend sent me a photo of himself dropping off flowers at the Sydney Jewish Museum. I guess it was the face of the Jewish community to him, and it was a lovely gesture (thank you Mark). Funny (?) thing is, his parents’ home was vandalised not long ago with anti-Jewish graffiti (they’re not Jewish).

I guess he was not the only one with that idea. I saw a picture of my old shul, its perimeter covered in flowers. This is a small suburban shul in the north of Sydney, nowhere near Bondi. Something about it moves me deeply. The spontaneity of the outpouring of support and grief from everyday Australians. I can’t write this with clear eyes.

My daughter’s non-Jewish kindy teacher has been distraught, calling around families to find ways to support her Jewish kids. She looked after one family’s four kids for nine hours so that the parents could bury their friends. Thank you so much Catherine, you are a blessing.

I do not begin to scratch the universe of stories of pain and heroism around these people, I only relate the fragments that have been weighing on me.

I don’t know how any of this plays out. Each day is relentless. What does a future in Australia mean? Where else is there to go?

The political reactions from our government have been farcical. Political discourse seems surreally disconnected from reality. The purpose of the attack was not to “divide us” — it was to kill Jews. It’s not the gun laws either. Laxer Australian gun laws have not led to Jewish massacres over the preceding two centuries. What’s different now? They won’t name it. They are captive to grim electoral realities. Calls for more laws are so Australian, and so fundamentally misguided.

I told my youngest daughter about what happened. I told her not to worry, that she’s safe, it’s over. She asked me what if it happens again. I told her it won’t (I lied), and that I’m here to protect her. Then she asks me: but what if you’re dead?

May all their memories be a blessing.