Filling the Gaps
Recorded Version
Text Version
Every year for the past 30 years I have written a Yom Kippur Greeting. They always start with a story or a poem. This year’s story is something else again.
—
There are ten of us here tonight. Ten destroyers. Ten disappointments. Ten hopeless people whose families have been driven beyond their ability to care. There are ten of us, laying in our beds, talking almost like normal people, waiting for the lights to turn off.
When they do, as they do at the same time every night, I can feel the uneasy breathing of those who share my room. I close my eyes and listen to the tortured shifting of legs beneath their sheets as the other residents of the shelter relive their pasts and imagine their tomorrows. I am one of them. Just another useless breath who will be missed by nobody other than these people. We are a community of eyesores and the world would rather look away.
The shelter tries not to make us feel that way. There are prints of trees on the walls, and there are board games and books. There are showers and even a laundry. When we sleep, our bodies and our clothes are clean. The sheets themselves are spotless and the rooms are tastefully decorated with faux wooden floors and white walls and highlights of Aegean blue. The color reminds me of the sea. I love the sea. Sometimes I like to go to the upstairs workshop and just look out the windows, watching the waves roll in one after the other. Those waves tell me that the world won’t end; no matter what I do.
It isn’t just the building, though. They work hard here, to make us feel like we’re valued. The social workers stop by to check in on us and refer us to those they imagine can help. To their credit, they look us in the eye. Most people won’t. The social workers care too. I know they do, and I value it.
But it doesn’t really matter.
They may not see just another drug user when they see us sitting across from them in their tiny offices. They may see us as people, even valuable people. But I know the future they see. I know they can’t help but see us sprawled out on a street corner, eyes dilated, breathing shallow, pulse barely there. They can’t help but see our skin turning blue as a couple of cops stand over us casually wondering whether we’ll die before they bother to call an ambulance.
To their credit, they try to imagine something better for us. But all it is is imagination.
It’s okay. I understand. I’m clean. I have been for almost a year. Nonetheless, I know I am cursed and I know I am a curse. Deep down, anything better than that street corner feels like an almost hopeless aspiration.
At least, it did until today.
About two weeks ago, I lost my Health Insurance card. It costs a lousy 13 shekel to replace it. 3 Euro. 3 Euro I don’t have. And without it I can’t get treatment. Not only to keep me clean, but to keep my seizures at bay. 13 shekel that could push me over the side.
It was 12 days from when I lost the card to when I checked the neighborhood Facebook groups on the computers they have in the workshops. And there it was. Somebody found my card. Somebody bothered to pick it up – in the far less than perfect Florentine neighborhood no less. Somebody cared enough to look for the owner of a card that could be replaced for 13 shekel.
They cared enough to look for me.
I met her. Just an hour ago. The woman who found my card. Her name is Aviya.
She could see what I am. The way that I live. I couldn’t hide it. She knew too much. She offered me food. She offered me money. She wanted to help. But she turned me away when I said that all I wanted was to sit and talk with her and her friends. It was okay, though.
You see, she wasn’t like the social workers. I could see it in her eyes. She didn’t see a man sprawled out in the street, taking his final weak breaths. Suffering the final stages of an unstoppable addiction. No, she saw something else. She truly believed in something else. She believed that I could matter.
It was the first time in a long time that somebody had seen me that way.
The next morning the lights come up in tandem with the electric shutters that lock out the sun. The brightness of South Tel Aviv penetrates the walls of the shelter. I wake up. We all do. There’s no need for us to change our clothes. Like everybody else in the room, I’ve slept in my clothes. Instead, we shuffle upright, open our lockers and retrieve our most valuable possessions. I pull out a wallet occupied by a single ID and a single Health Insurance Card. There is also a plastic bag stuffed with a single change of clothes. Next to it is a disposable plastic water bottle. I don’t quite know why I keep that last one in the locker. Perhaps it is because everything I’ve ever had has been stolen.
A social worker checks in on me at breakfast. She knows there’s something’s different about me. The change in me has brought doubt to her eyes, like I’m a bipolar man on an unnatural high that she knows will bring me terribly low. She asks, point blank, whether I’m using again. Chemical bipolarism. I try to reassure her, but nothing I say can truly dissuade her from the truth she expected.
I leave the shelter just before nine. They keep it closed from 9 till 3. I imagine it is so that they can clean out all of our filth. Any normal day I might look for work, trying my hand at the restaurants and furniture shops that dot the neighborhood. But I know nobody will hire me. Not even to wash dishes. And, somehow, I know I am meant for more and more will come for me.
I cross the street and head for the park overlooking the beach. As people pass by on the promenade, I lay back on the grass and listen to the waves.
I remember going to the beach once. I was a little kid. My father and I took a train up from Milan to Lake Como. Were my parents together then? I don’t know. But my father was there. There are beautiful beaches running alongside Lake Como. But we didn’t visit them. Maybe we didn’t have the time. Or maybe the problem was money. Instead, we visited a little park that overlooked the lake, like the patch of grass I’m laying on. I remember playing in that grass as the waters gently lapped against the shore below us. When I looked back at my father, he was looking at me. And I knew what he was seeing. He was seeing a beautiful future. A bright and promising future.
That was, perhaps, the last time anybody looked at me like that.
He died in Be’er Sheva in 2013. I was 22. I was also a resident of the San Vittore Prison in Milan.
I never lived up to his dreams. I never got to say sorry for failing him. I apologized plenty, as any user would. But I’d never shared the truly penitent sorry of a man who has found a better path.
When I open my eyes I’m back on the beach in Tel Aviv. There’s a woman there, standing over me and looking at the tattooed pattern running down my left arm. It is a South American pattern. She asks me about it, and I tell her I’d done it myself. On the spot, she agrees to hire me – albeit only for a small fee. It is the first work I’ve had in months.
Somebody else has seen something in me.
I can’t wait to tell Aviya.
As the day comes to a close, I head back to the shelter. On a lark, I look up the world’s greatest waves, wondering whether I might visit them – find hope in them. I read about the Tahitian waves at Teahupo’o. They seem a dream too far. But there are other great waves. In Portugal. I can imagine visiting Portugal. I download a little video on my phone. Maybe I’ll become a surfer and see them in person.
The next day, I finally meet her again. She buys us coffees. I tell her I’m sorry, so very sorry, that I can’t afford to buy her a cup of coffee. She smiles, but not with pity. And then we talk. We talk like we’ve known each other forever. Like we’re just catching up on lives that have drifted just a little ways apart. She used to be like me. Living on the street. Not anymore though. She has a business. She has employees. People who were once like me and like her. And she’s lifting them up, one by one. She’s lifting them because she sees something in each and every one of them. Something other than a body on the street.
A cat passes by the cafe. It is a mangy thing. I glance over, but all I can ask myself is whether she sees hope there too. We sit there and we talk about music, about art, about history. I tell her how I crawled my way out of Italy. I tell her how I made aliyah, just hoping to come down to Be’er Sheva and say sorry and goodbye, one last time, to my father. She listens. She hears of my troubles. No, she isn’t hiring.
But that’s okay. Now, I know I’ll find another way.
I show her the video of the wave in Portugal. I tell her my plan, my dream. I’ll become a professional surfer and they’ll pay me to go there.
She laughs, but there’s no malice in her laugh. There is only joy.
That night, I send her a text. I tell her what she means to me. How she’s changed me. I send her a song. A song in which I promise everything, in which I promise to go where she leads. In which I promise more than I can give.
I get on the bus the next day, planning to meet Aviya again. I find a package on the seat next to mine. It’s a gift, something unique, something special. Something far more expensive than I could possibly afford. There’s a card on the package, but no name. No identity.
When I get to her, she’s busy again. She’s working with one of her employees. I take just a moment and show her the package. I ask whether it might be possible to return it, like she returned my card. I want to live up to her example. But no, nobody’s going to search Facebook for a missing gift. Instead, the little package is mine. I’m almost swimming with delight as I hand it to her.
The lyrics of the song run through my head “Aïcha, take it, everything is for you.”
She’s given me hope. I am delighted that I’ve managed to give her something in return.
On the night of October 1st, nine days later, I’m walking alongside the light rail line in Jaffa. It is just after seven in the evening. I hear a burst of muffled shots. I turn and see gunfire erupting within one of the train cars. I hear a baby cry. I see a woman fall. The doors open and the killers, the terrorists, step out.
I think about running, but I know there is no chance of escape.
There’s a bright spurt of fire and then a millisecond later the rounds slam into me. I fall back. The pain is immense. I crash to the street corner. My breath is not shallow, but liquid and ragged. My heart is not slow but pumping furiously.
I imagine the cops urgently calling an ambulance. But it is I who know that it is too late.
I watch the two men run past me. For a second, I wonder if they realize that they wasted a bullet on a man nobody who matters will miss. A man with a dead-end life.
And then I realize that that’s no longer true.
She saw another path. She knows there was more for me than I could imagine for myself.
It is with that thought, that beautiful thought, that I close my eyes for the very last time.
—
The above is a story based as strongly as I could manage on the life of Victor Shimshon Green. He is described in the news simply as “Green, 33, was living in a homeless shelter.” I had the opportunity to attend his funeral on Monday. Just two people who knew him spoke. One was Aviya. Although I don’t have the details of their conversations, or all the details of his life, I pray my necessarily incomplete reconstruction has done no dishonor to his memory.
On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, during Unetane Tokef an old man came up to open the Aron. I was standing closest to him, and I expected little of him. But as he opened his lips and began to sing, I was blown away by the holiness I heard. As he sang with the Chazan, I wrapped my Tallis around my head and started repeating a mantra: “Kol ha’am kadosh. Kol ha’am kadosh. All the nation is Holy. All the nation is Holy.”
Even those you don’t expect it from.
As I repeated the words, the caveats left me. Instead, the feeling, the idea, flowed through me, overwhelming my sense of time and place and reason. I was begging Hashem on our Day of Judgement to rescue us – all of us – from our enemies. Because, somehow, despite all the evidence of our shortcomings, All the Nation is Holy.
Later, the Chazan sang הֲבֵן יַקִּיר לִי אֶפְרַֽיִם… is Ephraim not My precious son, is he not a child of delight? For whenever I speak of him, I recall him even more. As I listened, I could not help but remember my mother. Every time she spoke of Jeremiah, her precious son, her lost son, she recalled him in an ever more beautiful light. I imagined all the other mothers who have lost children in this terrible year. I imagine their children growing more beautiful with each day that has been lost.
As I rose to blow the shofar, I was crying and shuddering. I was begging the Lord Almighty to spare us any more of this pain.
On the second day, I felt an overwhelming need to speak. To explain why this Rosh Hashanah is not like all the others. To speak of the terrible curses and the great miracles we have experienced. To talk about how we stand in the balance – halfway between destruction and victory. I felt that I needed to share how we can and must appeal to G-d’s covenants in order to secure His mercy.
As I stood before the Aron Kodesh – the Holy Ark – I knew I needed to speak. Not for my sake, but for the sake of my message. Right then and there, I resolved that I would speak, irrespective of whether I was invited. But I would speak without displacing others. Starting the very next day, I would stand and speak in the park every Shabbat and Holiday. I would speak in the park like a crazy man cast aside by his society.
I decided to call it Torah Tziburi, ‘Public Torah.’
The very next day, I did speak twice – once in the morning and once in the afternoon. A grand total of 4 people came.
The speech was far from my greatest. My mind was on what been missed on Rosh Hashanah – a message that no longer needing sharing. And, of course, it was less of a speech than it was a conversation; a pair of friendly listeners sharing a park bench is hardly the forum for grand oratory. Not that conversation doesn’t have a power all its own.
But I did speak.
I spoke about Rosh Hashanah as the days in which we dream of a future. I spoke about Yom Kippur as the day on which we erase the poison of the past. And I spoke about days between as days in which we build a new past, a new reality, a new person to stand before the Almighty.
I spoke about the Torah reading of Yom Kippur and I pointed out that it begins with the words “After the deaths of Nadav and Avihu.” I could not help, as others have done, but imagine that Aaron was performing that first Yom Kippur service not only for those who were living, but for the children he had lost in the months before.
And then I asked those few who attended to pick someone who has fallen this year. I asked them to learn about them. I asked them to plan to represent them on Yom Kippur itself. But before then, I asked them to extend the legacy of those who have passed one last time.
I asked them to build upon their stories by creating, in their merit, during these Ten Days of Awe.
After Shabbat, I thought briefly about following my own advice. But the beautiful profiles I read of fallen soldiers didn’t call to me. They didn’t need me. So, I turned my mind to my Annual Yom Kippur Greeting. But I couldn’t think of anything to write about. Yesterday morning, knowing time was short, I rose to daven the amidah (our thrice-daily silent prayer). I stood there and before I uttered a single word, I asked Hashem to tell me what to write about. To give me something that would uplift others. And then I knew I had to write about the homeless man who had been slaughtered on the night before Rosh Hashanah. Standing there, in those first moments, my mind told me he would have been a troubled man, but my soul told me he was at peace.
I opened my phone right there in shul and began to try to learn more about him. I found a photo. I learned his age. I learned his name. As soon as I got home, I dug deeper. I learned that he loved music. I learned that none of the Facebook friends who had commented on his few posts seemed to care enough to commemorate his death. I learned he was largely estranged from his family.
And then I learned that his funeral had been delayed to that selfsame afternoon – in Be’er Sheva.
It was there that I met Aviya.
It was Aviya who told me that Victor was a man who desperately wanted to do more, to give more, with his life. As a very first step, he was a man who desperately wanted to buy her a coffee. It was Aviya who told me that every effort he made seemed cursed. He spent everything he had assembling a DJ’s kit. And then it was stolen. He spent everything he had on a tattooist’s gun and ink. And then it was stolen. But despite it all, she didn’t see a cursed man. She only knew him for three weeks, but the man she saw was a kind man. A good man. A man who could be more. That’s how she thought he saw himself.
In the days leading to Yom Kippur, I am following my own advice. I am dedicating my creative efforts – and my holy ones – to lifting up the neshama (the timeless soul) of Victor Shimshon Green. But I don’t want to just donate my efforts. I want to accomplish something Victor would have wanted to accomplish.
Victor Shimshon Green never got to buy Aviya a coffee. So, I’m going to walk in the footsteps he’d hoped to walk in. No, I’m not going to buy Aviya a coffee (although I certainly wouldn’t mind). Instead, I’m going to make a coffee for Rebecca – the love of my life who sees more in me than I see in myself. Not just any coffee, though, a Spanish Coffee complete with a burnt sugar rim.
Perhaps you can do a little something of Victor’s as well. Perhaps you can create something, even something as simple a coffee made for a loved one, in his merit. Perhaps you can achieve, on his behalf, a little of what he hoped to achieve for himself.
If ideas escape you, then share his music. Or perhaps donate to Aviya’s effort to raise money for ramen noodles that are given to the homeless of Tel Aviv’s Florentine. Victor really appreciated those noodles.
If you want to do something more fundamental, then perhaps I can suggest this: open your heart to the goodness and the holiness that reside within you and within those around you. Open your heart and be not afraid to do what you must to help others walk in the path of their purpose. Open your heart and be not afraid to help yourself walk in the path meant for you.
I have not done enough of this in my own past. I prefer the purity of thinking and writing and speaking. I fear the dirtiness of horse trading and politics and conflict. I have to overcome my own fears and that starts with recognizing that I am not ultimately serving myself. No, I am trying my best to serve something greater. Because of that, my distaste and my fear must be overcome.
As with every year, I ask for your forgiveness. Not only for this shortcoming but for any other way in which I or my family may have wronged you – whether we know it or not. And as with every other year, I extend our forgiveness for any wrong or slight – whether we know of it or not.
chazak, chazak, v’nitzchazek
Be strong, be strong, and be of good courage,
Joseph Cox
p.s. The next Torah Tziburi will be on the first day of Sukkot. The first session will be at 8:00AM at Park Hachavlim in Modiin’s Buchman neighborhood. The second will be at 4:00pm in the amphitheater below the corner of Rivka and Rachel Imenu. I expect the topic will be “Celebrating Under Uncertain Skies.”
If you are interested in my other work on Constitutionalism, the Day After in Gaza, military morality in Israel, Torah, the Prayers, development economics etc…. etc…. let me know. I believe all of it is a part of my purpose. I have regular email lists and perhaps I could have more.
