There’s a Facebook post that came out just yesterday (16 hours ago, as of this writing), that already has 10,000 responses, 2,500 shares, and 1,100 comments. It’s clearly touched something very deep here. It’s by someone named Ran Apelberg, whom I don’t know.
Below is a screenshot of part of the post, and below the screenshot, an AI-generated translation of the rather long post.
A few brief comments on the FB post, below.
I was killed on the 120th day of the war, but I didn’t tell anyone.
The battles were raging and I didn’t want to hurt the guys’ morale.
At the end of the month, I got leave.
My wife Talia picked me up from the train and hugged me tight, as if she were drowning in a frozen sea and I was a wooden door. So of course I didn’t tell her I was dead; everything had already fallen on her shoulders these past months.
The moment I entered the apartment, Romi, my four-year-old daughter, came running from the neighbors, jumped on me and refused to let go—so I didn’t tell her either that Daddy was dead. Why break her heart?
After Romi fell asleep, Talia waited for me in bed with white wine.
“I missed you,” she wrapped her warm thighs around my cold body.
We made love.
Not because I wanted to (the dead don’t need sex), but just to make her happy.
It didn’t work; she stayed distant (or was it me?), and when she asked what I’d been through—I stayed silent (no reason to bring horrors into bed).
A few days later I went back to the battlefield, and two weeks after that I saved five soldiers from death.
“You’ve got balls of steel!” the battalion commander slapped my back.
I wanted to say I was dead, so I hadn’t really risked anything, but since my actions had revived the unit’s spirit, which still hadn’t recovered from the death of Gilad the platoon commander, I replied, “Thank you, sir.”
At some point I was sent home, back to “normal life,”
but between me and it stood a transparent, impassable border,
behind which I watched them like a fish in an aquarium.
And the world that once excited me—turned faded;
work at the computer store no longer interested me,
nor did poker games with friends,
and at home, with Talia and Romi, I felt like an invading germ.
Until…
One Saturday, Romi fell in the living room. “Daddyyyy!” she cried and I froze, hypnotized by the sight of blood trickling down her forehead, the clear tears dripping from her eyes, the yellowish urine that escaped her, and I thought about how many shades of fluid are in the human body, and remembered Sergei and the bullet he took to the head.
That night, after we got back from the ER, Talia said I had to get help, that she couldn’t reach me, that she was out of strength…
But all I heard was blah-blah from someone who doesn’t understand how the world works and how bloody and stinking and monstrous it is.
Better she doesn’t know.
Let her put on an avocado mask and go to sleep.
But she kept nagging, so I went to the living room and stared at the sidewalk, seven floors down, and wanted to jump, because I felt like a foreign body that life had rejected.
The window wouldn’t open.
Turns out the frame was bent by a rocket that fell nearby.
So I gave up and went to bed.
The next day, Assi, who’d been with me in high school and in the unit, came into the store. Since it was already noon, we went to the hummus place, gossiping about Victor who learned to jump with his new leg, about Barry who got a better hand than the one he lost, and about Udi who finally proposed.
At some point, there was silence and I asked if Talia had asked him to come talk to me.
Assi nodded, because there’s no bullshit between us.
“So why is she worried?” he asked.
“It’s hard for her to accept that I’m dead,” I answered honestly, because I no longer had the strength to hide it.
Assi wasn’t fazed and speared a pickle from the plate. “Remember when you died?”
“The day Sergei was shot.”
“Mmm… half a year.” He bit into the pickle. “And what’s the hardest part about being dead?”
“That I don’t feel anything.”
“Really?” He looked at me, picked up a fork and stabbed my hand.
“Ow!” I jumped, “Are you nuts?!”
“Turns out there are some things you do feel,” he grinned, like a kid who just egged the principal.
I glared at him. Really? Seriously?! That’s your reaction to my death?! Seven years of psychology studies for this?! I got so angry I threw an olive at his eye.
“You son of a—” he flung pita at me.
So I threw a shish kebab at him.
A wave of stupid laughter took over and we kept pelting each other with fries and falafel until the owner lost it and kicked us out.
“What if…” Assi wondered as we walked back to the store, “it’s not that you don’t feel, but that… you’re afraid to feel?”
“Afraid to feel what?” I asked, and immediately thought of Ortal, Sergei’s wife, who after years of fertility treatments finally got pregnant, and how he came back from leave beaming and showed us the ultrasound of the boy. “Check out this mega-penis! Just like his dad!!!”
48 hours later, he took a sniper’s bullet.
A bullet that wasn’t even meant for him.
I was supposed to go to the window,
but I was breaking a record on a dusty Game Boy I’d found,
so I asked him to go instead and…
I started to cry, because he didn’t deserve it. He didn’t.
“Now I know you’re alive,” Assi said, “Know why?”
“Why?”
“Because dead men don’t cry.”
He put a comforting hand on me and suddenly there was wild gunfire,
fighter jets tearing through the sky, which stank of smoke, of decay,
someone cried “Yama! Yama!!”
Or maybe it was “Mama! Mama!!”
And my hands searched for a weapon, but I was in civilian clothes, in the middle of Bialik Boulevard—
“I’m losing my mind,” I told Assi.
“You’re not, bro! You’re feeling, don’t run from it, don’t run!” And he hugged me tight and didn’t let me fall.
That evening I went to Talia, who was folding clothes, and said I wanted, like before, to read Romi a bedtime story.
“Not sure that’s a good idea,” she refused to look at me.
So I pinched her butt, like we used to do to annoy each other when we were dating.
It surprised her, even confused her.
“Assi came to visit me at the store,” I said.
“And…” she glanced at me.
“He stabbed me with a fork.”
“Too bad it wasn’t a pitchfork,” she looked at me for a few seconds and must have seen something that changed her mind, because she picked up a book from the couch and handed it to me.
I read Romi a story about a turtle who wanted to be a butterfly, and the night lamp painted colorful animals on the walls.
She fell asleep before the end, where the turtle, drawn in black and white the whole book, suddenly glowed with colors.
And even though it was a predictable and silly ending, I teared up, and stroked her tiny, sweet fingers, moving with the rhythm of her dreams, and I couldn’t understand how in the same world horror and love could live side by side.
And I thought of Sergei, of his wife, of the baby in her belly, of corpses and kisses, screams and butterflies, and everything inside me stormed and raged and cried… and I didn’t run from it… I didn’t run. I didn’t run.
There are thousands, probably many thousands, of the “living dead” walking around this country. Some will be OK eventually. Some will not. But I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know someone who — at least for now — is the walking dead.
With that in mind, one can appreciate why the plans for Avner Netanyahu’s opulent wedding next Monday have caused some consternation in some quarters.
More on that below.
Bibi Netanyahu’s son, Avner, is getting married next Monday evening. Mazal tov. By all accounts (and I know a few people who know him fairly well), Avner is a lovely guy. He stays completely below the radar. Unlike his exiled brother who now resides in Miami at Israeli taxpayer expense (security and the like), Avner never makes political comments and doesn’t live on the public dole.
He’s just a decent guy with a complicated family (which includes his half-sister, Noa, who is totally estranged from the PM father).
But because this is a country soaked in pain (hence the combining of these two social media posts, the one above and this one), even this wedding has become controversial, as have the protests that are planned. One of the participants in the conversation below posted the clip on his X feed, so we added subtitles for our readers.
I’m not taking a stand on either the wedding or the protests. We’re just sharing this clip to give a sense of how almost everything in this country relates back to the heartbreak that lurks around every corner, to the heartbreak that is going to shape the soul of this nation for as long as anyone reading these words is alive.
What happens on the battlefield, what will transpire with Iran, what we do about the Houthis, when there will be elections — all of those matter a great deal.
But none of those things will heal the soul of this hurting place. And that, more than anything, is what one has to understand to appreciate what this home that we love so deeply has become, what its leaders will eventually have to address so it can begin, some day, to heal.
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