LOOKING AROUND: In the face of tragedy

By Barbara Sofer
Aug. 29, 2002

I look out the window of my Jerusalem apartment. A van drops off a physically challenged adult at the home of my neighbor, Miriam Freier, who hurries through her flower garden to welcome the guest. The scene in front of the Freier home happens so often that no one in the neighborhood looks up. For a quarter of a century, the stone house with its lovingly tended roses has been a sanctuary for the needy.

But this is not a time for passive observation. Rosh Hashana is approaching. Both Miriam's acts of lovingkindness and the cruel fate of those she befriends are much on our minds, as might be the story of her namesakes.

The Talmudic tractate Hagiga relates the perplexing story of "two Miriams." The Angel of Death dispatches an emissary to pick up Miriam the hairdresser. Because their names are similar, Miriam the child-care giver is rounded up instead.

On learning his mistake, the emissary volunteers to return Miriam to the world of the living. Let her stay, he's told. Questions Rabbi Bivi: How could she be taken away "if it was not yet her time?" The Angel answers: "She was holding a poker in her hand and she was extending it into an oven." In other words, she has injured herself and is therefore vulnerable.

The rabbinic explanations seem to fall along two main axes. The first implies a secret culpability to Miriam the child-care professional, making her "premature" death deserved after all. The other explanation is that tragic error does exist in the world. Bad things happen, even to good people. Even good deeds are not always able to deflect all the evil.

Often we can feel the palpable presence of the Creator. Other times, it is so hard to affirm Rabbi Akiva's dictum that "all is for the good." An incident in modern Israel eerily parallels the talmudic story.

In 1982, Haya Harel was at the Jerusalem office of Na'amat gathering packages for Israeli soldiers in Lebanon. A cousin phoned to tell her what had just been announced on the radio: Jerusalem soldier Yuval Harel from the East Talpiot neighborhood had been killed in Lebanon and would be buried that day in the Mount Herzl cemetery. Haya's son Yuval was serving in Lebanon. They lived in East Talpiot. Haya fainted at the news, injuring her forehead. When her co-workers revived her, she realized that there had to be another soldier by that name. It was inconceivable that her son could be buried without anyone contacting her.

Many of her relatives and friends, assuming that it was Haya's son, showed up for the funeral, only realizing at the cemetery that Yuval, son of Miriam, not Yuval, son of Haya, was being buried. Haya Harel went home. There came a knock on her door. When she saw the IDF representatives, she told them that they, too, had made a mistake. The other Harel family lived a few streets away. The soldiers shook their heads. Her own son had been killed in Lebanon, too.

Twenty years later, the pain is undiminished. She has no satisfactory philosophical explanation of why her son was killed.

Faced with questions that may have no answers, we decide how we will act. Indeed, for my neighbor Miriam Freier, a teacher of the hearing impaired, one of life's unexplained tragedies became an impetus for personal action. Twenty-five years ago a little girl was abandoned in a Jerusalem hospital. Tens of thousands of children in Israel had received inoculations that year, but the little girl's shot caused a rare reaction that partly paralyzed her. Miriam's husband Zerem, a senior pediatrician at Shaare Zedek Hospital, told her about the girl, and two days before the holiday of Succot, they brought her home.

"I'll never forget looking over and seeing her happily making succa decorations with my own five little children," Miriam said. "My own life has so many moments of pleasure. I'm happy when people have good moments in their lives like me."

Hospitality for the physically challenged became customary in the Freier household. Their children got used to frequent guests in wheelchairs.

As Miriam's familiarity with the physically challenged grew, she was surprised to learn how many of them had never attended a Pessah Seder. She was gratified when, at her request, the luxurious Inbal Hotel agreed to provide a festive dinner.

One of the most difficult moments in her work had been the time when a hotel manager had asked her to move the wheelchairs out of the lobby, so as "not to disturb the guests." Miriam observed that "we don't want to see the physically challenged, because we don't want to be reminded that this could happen to us."

But then she came with a bolder idea. Like other young Israelis, those with disabilities want to take vacations abroad. So, while most of us are visiting fjords and ancient synagogues each summer, Miriam Freier organizes a bus full of men and women in wheelchairs and takes them to Switzerland and Italy.

But beyond her cultural projects, one area worried her most: housing.

There were the physically challenged living in hostels or nursing homes who wanted to live independently. And there were those who lived independently whose physical condition had deteriorated. What they needed was a group home, with separate apartments and a communal social area. So she set up an organization, and named it for her husband's late brother, Shalhevet, the Hebrew for flame. She asked the Jewish Agency to let her renovate a 50-year-old neglected apartment building. The Ministry of Housing would have to agree, too. And she'd have to raise the money for renovations.

She hasn't solved all the problems of Israel's disabled, but for some she has made a critical difference. Our friend Dennis Turner will be among the first moving in to the house on Rehov Shimoni this fall. A mathematician and martial-arts expert from the US, he made aliya from the United States a decade ago, expecting to live a vigorous life here. A rare germ suddenly attacked his spinal cord and left him wheelchair-bound. For the past six years, he has lived in a Dickensian nursing home. He can earn a modest living doing computer consulting, and soon, because of Miriam Freier, he'll have the dignity of independence.

"The ability to do this is my daily reward," she shrugs.

The central image of the High Holy Days is a scale in which our good deeds and errors are weighed against each other. I picture Miriam Freier approaching this annual weighing, her garden pail in hand, spilling over with so many mitzvot. For all our wonderings and contemplation, one thing is sure: at this time of year in particular, each of us would like a bucket just like hers.