Personal Kaddish

We will remember you, our dearly departed. How you looked, how you spoke, how your faces shone and the pulse of your lives—your laughter, and your pain.
We will remember your voices, the spark of light in your eyes.
You will stand alive before our eyes, one instant, always.
We will remember your thoughts, your opinions, what you gave to others. What you always were, and always will be—you, yourself, the one, the only.
[…]
We will mourn each and every day for what was lost with you—years of life, the future you could have had, the profession you could have chosen, to learn from and to enrich with your ideas. The people you could have loved, the family you would have created. The simple pleasures of life, the crises and the pain: life in all its fullness.
And we will remember your death. How you were set upon by cured, horrifying evil. We will scream out the words of the poet, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, “Let the blood pierce the abyss! Let the blood pierce to the darkest depths! It will consumer in the darkness, and undermine all the withering foundations of this world.”
[…]
Our dearest, something of us died with you, and something of you lives in us. For as long as we live, we will carry you among us. Again and again we will give you life—in memory, in words, in tears, in celebrating the life we live—inseparable from your presence, from the great thing you were, and no longer.

Written by author David Grossman for the funeral ceremonies held in Kibbutz Be’eri for some 100 members of the Kibbutz killed in the slaughter on October 7th.

Translation: Levi Morrow