Yet More from the Eulogy

I've been using the words I spoke in the presence of Asher's body at the funeral to organize my thoughts. In the meanwhile, of course, we are approaching the thirtieth day after his burial, and we have been through a lot: the seven day mourning period, when we were at home and friends came and visited us and took care of us; the subsequent period, during which we have been fortunate to have our other son with us - on leave without pay from his job with a law firm in Washington DC. I've been attending morning prayers every day, indeed leading them, as the person in the heaviest period of mourning is expected to do, and reciting the kaddish: May His great name be magnified and sanctified...
During the six weeks of tension between the time when we realized that Asher was missing and the time when we learned that his body had been found, I was more or less unable to pray - in fact during the past few years I had been growing more and more distant from prayer and religious ritual. But since his funeral, I have felt that it's right and fitting to pray - not for the "elevation of his soul" as the tradition has it, but in an effort to put together what his death has shattered.
The next thing I said in the eulogy was: I learned a great deal during that limbo period, when Asher was merely missing, not necessarily dead.
The first thing I learned was the amazing power of the imagination, something which, as a student of literature, ought not to have been surprising to me. We knew next to nothing about what had happened to Asher. We had received an email from him, sent from the little town of Chivay the day before he left on the hike, telling us not to worry, that he wasn't planning to do anything dangerous. There was no record of his staying in any hotel or hostel in Chivay. No one remembered him. For all we know he had been murdered or abducted that evening, before he even got to Colca Canyon.
The most probable thing was exactly what did happen, that he had fallen to his death. But even after weeks of intense searches, his body had not been found, suggesting that something else had happened to him. We hoped that he was sick or injured, lying in someone's home, hospitalized somewhere, that he had run away with a local woman, that he had decided to go off and learn how to be a shaman with a mountain wizard ... any scenario that might leave him alive. With virtually no concrete information, the imagination can do wonders.
That period was one of great fear, great tension, great sadness, and great confusion. We continued trying to live our ordinary lives, and at the same time we, as a family, devoted enormous efforts to finding Asher. There were days when I was hopeful and days when I was pessimistic, with no concrete reason for either feeling.
We were fearful that we might never know what had happened to Asher, that he might be missing forever. I can't say with a whole heart that I wouldn't have preferred that to knowing that he is dead. Wouldn't it have been better to have him be missing for even a year or two and then show up? But I'm not sure we could have lived with the tension.
I didn't tell everyone what I was going through. There wasn't any point. What was I going to say, "Oh, by the way, our twenty-eight year old son disappeared in Peru"? So a lot of people were taken by surprise when the news of his death came out. I play in a big band. During the time he was missing, I went to rehearsals and performed twice. Now, during the thirty days since his funeral, I haven't been going to rehearsals. People in mourning aren't supposed to enjoy music, according to the Jewish tradition.
Living with the grief is not easy, but grief is an emotion we share with other people. Too many other people. Life is full of sadness now, and all our future joy will be colored by it.
That's what I said afterward in the eulogy: Asher's death has torn a huge hole in our lives, in the lives of his immediate family, in the lives of our community here in Israel, and in the lives of a huge network of friends and relatives abroad. A few people came to visit us during the shiva who had suffered similar losses, and they told us never to expect the wound to heal. In fact, I would think of myself as unfeeling and shallow if the wound ever did heal. I don't want to stop feeling sad about the loss of my wonderful son.
I concluded the eulogy with mention of a prayer that observant Jews recite every morning, one in a series of morning benedictions, beginning, "Blessed are You, O Lord, Our God, Who gives the cock intelligence to distinguish between day and night."
I had stopped reciting those blessings for a long time, but before the funeral, I said them again, and I got to the one that says: "Blessed are You, O Lord, Our God, Who prepares a man's steps," and I thought that, in Asher's case, it didn't work. Asher's steps led him to his premature death. What is one to think? That sometimes God watches your steps, and sometimes He doesn't? That He watches some people's steps and not others? That He meant Asher to fall? Or that it would be great if He did watch out steps for us?
I have religious friends who lost children and spouses to cancer, and the prayers say that God heals the sick. Not easy to say for a person whose loved one wasn't healed.
Strangely, I'm not angry. I'm not angry at God, whatever that might mean, for letting Asher fall, and I'm not angry at Asher for taking the wrong trail and not turning back when he got to a tricky place. While we were in doubt, I sometimes looked angrily at someone Asher's age and said to myself, "Why aren't you missing, instead of Asher?" But I don't want anyone to be missing. I don't want anyone to die young. I don't want to deepen the sadness of the world.

So, I've reached the end of the eulogy. In a week we'll reach the end of the thirty days of deep mourning dictated by the Jewish tradition, but we haven't reached the end of anything.

More from the Eulogy

Toward the end of the eulogy, I said that I learned a lot from Asher, and that possibly the most important thing I learned was that when a person doesn't fit into frameworks, maybe the frameworks are wrong, not the person.
Every child teaches his or her parents how to be a parent for that specific child. There is no such thing as "father" and "mother" and "son" in the abstract sense. There are a couple of billion individual fathers, mothers, and sons, and each of them is unique. It took me a long time to learn how to be Asher's father - I'm not sure that I ever truly learned, but even though he's no longer alive, I can keep trying to learn.
I always adapted well to frameworks, until I finished university and had to step out of academic frameworks into real life. At that point I discovered that I couldn't cope with bureaucracies, which is why I've been self-employed for more than twenty-five years. It was difficult for me to have a son who never fit into schools. I wasn't brought up to question institutions, and I didn't go off to battle them on Asher's behalf when he got in trouble. Perhaps I should have. I always thought he should have been more adaptable, that he should have behaved better. Perhaps he should have.
But looking back on things, I wouldn't have wanted to have Asher any other way. If the schools couldn't accommodate a bright, talented, creative person like him, there was something deeply wrong with the schools. If his teachers were threatened by his originality and intensity, that shows their inadequacy as teachers.
We received a wonderful letter from a remarkable woman who was the principal of his school for a year, who remembered Asher's intense honesty and integrity with respect, even gratitude. If he had had more teachers like that, he would have fit in better.

More of the Eulogy

The next two lines of the eulogy read:

• Asher was a complex person
• Asher had an extreme personality

The first statement might have been superfluous. He was intelligent, sensitive, multi-talented, and rebellious - so how could he have failed to be complex?

The complexity of Asher's personality was directly related to its extremeness. He threw himself into projects, conversations, encounters, and experiences with enthusiasm - but he sometimes withdrew and withheld himself, becoming unreachable for a while. He occasionally flew into white hot rages (less and less frequently as he matured), and he often bought extravagant gifts for his friends.

Asher was confused by his own personality and devoted significant effort to self-understanding, especially when he understood that he had done something destructive and wasn't sure why.

I have long had the sense that certain people have chosen to play more demanding roles in life than others, and Asher was definitely someone like that, a bundle of contradictions. He was intelligent, a retentive, critical, and omnivorous reader, but the last thing he wanted to be thought of was an "intellectual." He enjoyed the courses in art history and other fields, to which he was exposed in film school and art school, and he did well in them, but he had no interest in finishing a BA. He was artistically talented, but he never wanted to call himself an artist. He enjoyed business and was good at getting jobs and making money, but he didn't care about money at all. His political opinions verged on anarchism, which may explain why he was not drawn to political activism.

I went on to say that he had a commanding presence. When you went to a restaurant with Asher, he knew how to get the waiters' attention. He was lively with an infectious laugh. For about half a year he was the manager of the tapas bar where he had started as the chef. He stayed in the front room and made sure everyone who entered was greeted and seated, made sure the food was served promptly, made sure the patrons liked what they ordered, gave people the feeling they were welcome and valued. He also had the task of hiring waiters and barmen, and he handled it with maturity and responsibility, interviewing dozens of candidates confidently and conscientiously.

Ofer Israeli's Second Report

After Asher's funeral, Ofer wrote his second and final report, which I have also translated into English:

Greetings,

On Tuesday, January 8, 2008, the funeral of Asher Zeev Green of blessed memory, my wife's brother, was held in Jerusalem. As you know, Asher disappeared about two months ago in Peru in the area of the Colca Canyon. During this time, the family set in motion an enormous effort, spanning continents, to find him alive and well. To our great grief, the hoped for result of finding him alive, safe and sound, was not achieved. Asher was found dead. However, some consolation may be found in that we brought him back to Israel for burial.

After my return from Peru about a month ago, after two intense weeks during which I oversaw the searches for him on the ground, several groups remained in place and continued working. The most significant of these was that of the High Mountain Police of Peru, with whom I had worked during my presence there. Fifteen members of the group, under the command of Robert, continued to look for Asher every day without cease, including their holidays. The searches were concentrated at that time in isolated canyons and gorges, inaccessible by foot, where we had not managed to search while I was there; these places require the use of ropes and special means for rappelling and climbing cliffs; our comrades progressed slowly, because it is possible to survey only from one to three hundred meters along the cliff every day – but they persisted. The work was done according to a plan that I had prepared with Robert, the commander of the unit, before I left Peru; after my return to Israel, every evening, Israel time, I spoke with the office of the unit in the city of Chivay, and I brought the maps in my possession up to date. After analyzing the data, I would decide, with the full cooperation of Robert, the commander of the unit, on the way in which the searches on the ground should continue, taking the weather conditions into account as well as the number of men available for the searches and many other factors.

About two months after his disappearance, a forty-three-year-old resident of the village of Cabanaconde named Diego found Asher. Diego, who earns his living by collecting herbs for the cosmetic industry, happened to be walking along a trail, which is inaccessible in Western terms, having taken a shortcut home because rain began to fall, and he came upon Asher's pack. Afterward he discovered his body. A two hours hike—which would take more than six hours for other people—brought Diego back to the local police station in the village of Cabanaconde. This picturesque village is the point of departure for most of the treks in the canyon and apparently was also Asher's point of departure.

Because the rainy season had begun, it was not possible to recover Asher's body immediately, and the operation was postponed for two more days. Finally, the members of the High Mountain Police set out for the place where Asher had been found at three a.m. on Thursday morning, January 3, 2008. After about three hours of descent, using mountaineering techniques, they reached Asher. After another two hours, they began his removal to the village of Cabanaconde. This difficult trail, which does not serve as a conventional hiking path but is mainly used by wild animals, presented enormous challenges to the rescue team. Moreover, a few hours after the beginning of the recovery, steady rain began to fall, increasing the great danger facing the rescuers. Finally, after approximately another twelve hours from the beginning of the recovery (it began around seven in the morning and ended only toward seven in the evening) the rescue team reached the village of Cabanaconde on the top of the cliff.

At the same time, Boaz, Asher's brother, and I left for Peru. The goals of our trip were to assure the swift and proper transfer of Asher's remains to Israel, in accordance with Jewish law, to present the reward that we had promised to anyone who found Asher, and more than anything else to thank the members of the High Mountain Police, who worked tirelessly during the past two months and were those who ultimately removed him from the canyon.

After I landed in Lima, the capital of Peru, on Friday night, we went to identify Asher. The process was long and shocking for me, and at this time it is very hard for me to estimate its long-range influence on me. Immediately afterward, at four a.m. on Saturday, I took a flight to the city of Arequipa. From there I traveled another four hours to the town of Chivay, from which I had made the searches on my previous visit to Peru a month earlier. It took me another three hours to reach the village of Cabanaconde. After examining the contents of the pack that Asher had carried with him, mainly the travel journal that he had written, I was required to leave it in the police station. Immediately afterward I went out with the members of the High Mountain Police to the nearest point to the place where Asher had been found. Because of the weather conditions, it was not possible to enter the canyon safely and reach the exact point where he had been found. When I reached the place, I received a detailed description of the process of recovery from the members of the unit, and especially from their commander Robert. Later, I held short a personal and religious ceremony where I read Psalms 91. I choose to quote verse 12 to you: "Lest your foot stumble." It is astonishing how appropriate those words are to what ultimately happened to Asher.

Later at night I performed a ceremony in which I gave Diego, the man who located Asher, the sum of fifteen hundred dollars. This was done as had been promised in a poster that we had published before leaving Peru. During the ceremony it became clear to me that Diego and his family are desperately poor, and his work, which unbearably hard, does not permit him to live a decent life. I found great consolation in knowing that the prize was finally given to a family that needed it desperately and not to someone affluent.

Even later I met with Alejandro, a local "wizard," who had walked with the High Mountain Police during the entire period. This amazing man was not willing to accept payment for his work, and I compensated him by buying him basic foodstuffs (rice, flour, sugar, oil, and so on). Such a gesture was one that Alejandro could not refuse. During the time of searching, quite a few mediums were in contact with us: Alejandro and some Western psychics. In the end I found that of them all, Alejandro was the closest with respect to the description of the event—both with regard to the circumstances and also with to the location where we found Asher. I leave it to you whether this is significant.

The following morning, Sunday, January 6, 2008, I spent with the fifteen members of the High Mountain Police, who had worked for almost two months in searching for Asher. During that time, the members of the unit had truly risked their lives more than once. My personal debt to them and that of the whole family is enormous, impossible to estimate. This sense of obligation led me to try to compensate them in every way possible. However, the honor that characterizes mountain people was revealed here in its full power: the entire group, headed by their commander, refused adamantly to take money from me. This, I must point out, is in absolute contrast to other official bodies in Peru.

Finally I found the appropriate formula: after a long discussion with their commander, Robert, I managed to make him agree that accepting equipment was not a blow to their honor, because it would improve their ability to locate and rescue people in the future, both Peruvians and tourists, who might encounter danger in the region. In the light of this agreement, I took a number of actions:

First, I paid to have their vehicle fixed, for it was not in condition to be driven according to the lowest Western standards.

Second, I bought them a large quantity of cold food such canned goods for use when they went out into the field. It is important to point out that during the entire period from the time I left Peru until Asher was found, the members of the unit performed searches without eating during their time in the field, because the police only buys them unprocessed food such as rice and flour, and not products that can be carried when they go out into the field.

Third, I bought uniforms for them, because these friends had to purchase their official police uniforms with their own money.

Fourth, I bought them other professional equipment such as high quality ropes. This was because their ropes had been worn out during their searches for Asher.

In addition, I performed a kind of group therapy: I sat in a circle with them for more than an hour, and I let them pour out what was on their hearts in front of me and in front of their comrades, in my presence. After they saw me weep profusely more than once, they could overcome the macho inhibitions typical of the local culture and share the difficulties they underwent during the time of searches and mainly during the long and significant recovery of Asher's body in the village of Cabanaconde with me and with the others.

At five p.m. on Sunday I flew back to Lima. At midnight I took another flight to New York, and on Tuesday morning, January 8, I returned to Israel.

After my return to Israel and before the funeral, I made a deep investigation of the photographs and videos that my friends, the members of the High Mountain Police, and I filmed during the time of locating Asher and recovering the body. After summing up matters, I can conclude the following with quite high certainty:

1. Most probably Asher took the wrong path immediately after leaving the village of Cabanaconde, and he entered a gully that is not frequented by tourists and hikers. This is apparently the reason why we did not locate even a single person who had met him.

2. After entering this challenging path, he apparently continued his descent, since he did not assess correctly the degree of danger he was facing.

3. Asher slipped down to his death at a waterfall of forty to eighty meters in height, and he was found beneath it.

4. The fall gave him no chance of survival, and he ended his life immediately. This conclusion completely negates the dreadful possibility that he might have been lying on the ground, waiting for rescue.

5. He was found by chance. Indeed, the path he was walking on is not used as a hiking trail, and Diego passed by only by chance.

6. According to the plan of operations that I laid out, the men of the High Mountain Police would have reached the point where Asher was found about ten days after he was actually found.

7. However, it is very probable that if Diego had not found Asher, we would never have succeeded in locating him. This is because we are now at the beginning of the rainy season. This season is characterized by many days, sometimes entire weeks, during which heavy rains fall, and they do not allow entry to the canyon and certainly not complex and dangerous search operations. Dry days, in contrast, are very rare. Furthermore, Asher was lying beneath a high waterfall that is now flowing moderately. The heavy and frequent rains greatly increase the flow of water, and this would apparently have led to his being swept down into the Colca River, which is about two hundred meters below, and it flows on to the mighty Amazon, and from there to the Atlantic Ocean.

A full summary of this intense period after such a short time is apparently impossible. Nevertheless, I will lay out certain conclusions:

First, the greatest aspiration of all, to bring Asher home to Israel safe and sound was not achieved. For Asher fell to his death. However, we can find great consolation in that we brought him to Israel for burial.

Second, after penetrating deeply into Asher's thoughts and fantasies by a detailed reading of his journals the letters he wrote, as well as from the emails that he sent to friends and members of his family during his time in Peru, I can state almost with certainty that Asher was having the happiest time ever. He was in the midst of a process of self-knowledge and self-formation. He got to know many people in his time in Peru and they liked him, and he returned their affection.

Third, Asher did not suffer for a moment. His fell from such a height left him no chance. This conclusion was perhaps the most significant one for me. During the first weeks, I was never abandoned by the horrible thought that he was wounded on the ground and waiting for his "soul brother"—indeed that is what we called each other—to come and rescue him. Evidence of that kind, had it been discovered, would probably never have left me in peace.

Fourth, Asher loved that marvelous continent and the people he met in Peru. These people returned his love during his stay there. I state this on the basis of specific words that he wrote in his journal. Indeed, even after his death, so many local people devoted a very significant portion of their lives, more than two months, to find him. This was with real danger to their lives. This point is no less significant for me. For my great love of this continent, especially the Andes region of Peru and Bolivia, made me fear greatly that Asher had fallen victim to some act of violence on the part of the local people. The elimination of that possibility greatly strengthened my love for the place.

In conclusion, my "soul brother," Asher, in the past two months we were all in a terrible circle of expectation of the worst possible outcome. We did everything possible to bring you back to Israel safe and sound, but in the end, the result was horrible from our point of view. I myself have lost a soul brother. However, I found fifteen new blood brothers. These are the members of the High Mountain Police who risked their lives to find you. I, you, and all the members of the family owe a great deal to them.

I firmly hope that in this message, I have reported the main points as precisely as possible. I also hope that I have transmitted my great appreciation for the help you gave to Eden and our three wonderful children during the past time.

With friendship, Ofer.

Ofer Israeli's First Report

Our son-in-law, Ofer Israeli, dropped everything in the last week of November and went to Peru to look for Asher. Upon his return, he wrote the following report, which I translated into English:

Greetings to all,

As some of you know, three weeks ago I left unexpectedly to supervise the search for Asher, my wife Eden's brother, who disappeared in Peru in the area of the town of Chivay, which is near the city of Arequipa.

After about two weeks had gone by, and we hadn't heard from him, we began an extensive search for him from Israel, including telephone calls to the hotels and hostels, tourist agencies, and the local police. All efforts to reach Asher were fruitless, and in a decision made at the spur of the moment, I decided to go and supervise the searches for him locally. I was joined by Boaz, his brother, and together we stayed there for about two weeks.

I performed the searches in the area with professional teams from the High Mountain Rescue Squad, whose men specialize in finding and evacuating hikers in the surrounding mountains and canyons. These men worked with me shoulder to shoulder and did an excellent job. The work routine was as follows: I would go out with six men for two days of searches, while the other six rested and gathered strength in Chivay; every two days the teams switched, and I would go out with six fresher men. On the fifth day of searches I would flood the area with twelve men.

The rationale that guided me was to look first on the easier trails and only afterward to expand the search to the more difficult and dangerous routes. This was after I and Asher's sisters, my wife Eden and Hannah, who were in Israel, and his brother Boaz, who was with me in Peru, analyzed Asher's character. We came to the conclusion that Asher would most probably take the easy hiking trail and not risk dangerous or irrational adventures. Nevertheless, after we checked the easy trails, we went out to the harder and more distant ones, which most tourists don't reach.

On the last days of our searches we acted in a more focused way in specific places where an incautious hiker might lose his balance and fall: vertical cliffs over 1,000 meters high that end at the floor of the canyon. Here we descended with ropes over 200 meters long and surveyed at the bottom of the cliff with binoculars.

Additionally, during the days of searching, I frequently made use of a tracking dog to find Asher by means of the used clothing that we took out of his knapsack, which he had left in Arequipa.

During our stay, following the advice of the local people, including the men of the mountain police, we turned to local “wizards.” The locals were absolutely certain that they would be able to help us, and I went along with them and accepted their insistent requests. The experience was unique and even heavenly and greatly increased the assurance of the searchers – I have attached a few photographs that illustrate the rituals that we carried out.

Further searches were made in the vicinity of the town of Chivay and the cliff that surrounds it. This was done in order to eliminate the possibility that he might be found near the town. I finished the last day of searching at 17:00 in the office of the police commander of Arequipa, to whom I made an official report of Asher's disappearance. An hour later I was on a plane to Lima.

The next morning Boaz and I had meetings with several people in Lima. We met with a representative of the Jewish community, who put us in contact with a local private detective agency. After a discussion and consultation with Mr. Yossi Maimon, an Israeli businessman with extensive connections and strong influence in Peru, we decided to hire the detectives. We also met with representatives of the American Embassy to see how they could help us. Pressure was put on the American Embassy by Senator Hillary Clinton by means of influential relatives and members of Boaz' law firm in Washington. We also met with the local Chabad rabbi, Rabbi Hareuveni who promised to help us by turning to local religious leaders.

The situation now is as follows: we left Peru without finding Asher. In the field, four teams are now at work: one is the local mountain police, whose men constantly patrol the area and give me a daily report about the places where they have been, and I bring my map up to date; the local police in Arequipa, who have sent representatives to the place; the private detective agency, mentioned before, has sent two men to the area who are performing an independent investigation (I promised to double their fee if they find Asher, and I hope this is a sufficient incentive for them to search thoroughly); the fourth team in action is a kind of federal police, which sent agents from Lima. My sister Shoshi, who lived in Spain for years, put us in contact with a Spanish billionaire who spoke with the President of Peru, who is now personally involved in the investigation.

Our future expectation is as follows: we all hope that one or more of the four teams that are now in action in the area will manage to find Asher. If not, I will probably go back to perform more searches in the area, possibly next June and July at the end of the semester.

I hope that with this message, in which I have summed up the main points, I have satisfied your curiosity and, most importantly, that I have expressed my personal gratitude as well as that of Eden and our children for the great help that you extended to out family while I was in Peru. I will try to keep you up to date on developments from time to time, hoping that they will be positive.

I am attaching pictures to make things more graphic for you,

With thanks to you all,

Ofer

Eulogy Expanded (2)

When I came to the next lines of the eulogy, I couldn't go on. When I first wrote them and spoke them, I didn't realize how tragic they were.
Here's the translation of what I said:

• Asher was a brave person.

• He did not avoid risk.

• He was quick to decide and quick to act.

We think that Asher died for those very reasons. He apparently started off on the wrong trail into the Colca Canyon, and when he reached a difficult place, instead of turning back, he decided to try and get past it: he was brave, he did not avoid risk, he decided and acted quickly.

That was not what I had in mind consciously when I wrote those words. I wasn't thinking of physical courage but of the courage he needed to drop out of a secure program in art school, where he was doing well, and to try his luck in the hard and competitive world of New York. I wasn't thinking of danger to his life, but of the risk of trying something new, time after time.

After he finished the cooking course, he got a job at the Core Club, an extremely exclusive private club for the wealthy and well-connected on Manhattan. He worked there for six grueling months, getting up at 4:30 in the morning so he could be at work by six and start cooking breakfast for the members. He stayed on through lunch and then went home and collapsed. The cuisine there was on the highest gourmet level, and at the time Asher was planning to stay on a path that would lead him, eventually, to become a gourmet chef. However, after six months, the club started faltering, he was working fewer hours, and enjoying it less and less, until he finally quit and started out in an entirely different direction by taking over the kitchen of the tapas bar. Once he made up his mind to leave the Core Club, it didn't take him long to do it: quick to decide and quick to act.

If Asher had been more cautious and less impetuous, he would probably be alive now, but he wouldn't have been the Asher we loved, admired, worried about, and treasured.

Time Out

I've only gotten about half way through the eulogy.
I'll get back to it.
I keep thinking how wrong the whole thing was.
I should have been lying there, wrapped in a shroud, on a stretcher, and Asher should have been saying the eulogy.
I wonder what he would have said.

My sense of time has been confused by bereavement.
Ordinarily I am very jealous of my time. I have a lot to do every day, and I try to use my time, plan my time, control my time, so that I can end the day with the satisfaction of having accomplished something.
Now I look at time as a kind of desert that has to be crossed somehow. I think of my days as huge, barren expanses that have to be filled somehow, because I don't care very much about what I'm doing.
I've been getting up at five to six every morning, so that I can make it to synagogue on time to lead morning prayers and recite the kaddish in honor of Asher.
Despite the strong Jewish prohibition against music during mourning, I have been practicing saxophone or clarinet every day since the end of the shiva, the seven day period of deep mourning. That's another hour or so that I can fill. I've been doing very technical stuff, long tones, scales, intervals, taking advantage of the patience that grief has given me.
I'm working, editing someone's book, but it's hard to concentrate on work.
I can't plan for the future or even imagine the future. Imagining what I might do tomorrow takes a huge effort.
I don't think about Asher all the time, but the thought of Asher is always just one thought away, and I never know what will trigger it.
On February 7 we will mark the thirtieth day after Asher's burial. Until then I'm not supposed to shave or have my hair cut, I'm supposed to recite the kaddish for him ... after that no mourning restrictions apply to parents who have lost a child, although children who have lost parents are supposed to observe mourning restrictions for a year.
I know that we're supposed to go back to living an ordinary life, but I also know that every joy we have will be hollow, and every sorrow that we have will be that much deeper.

Eulogy Expanded

The next four lines of my eulogy for Asher read as follows:

• Asher matured profoundly during his three years in New York.

• This makes his death even more painful for me.

• He was at a turning point in his life.

• He had clarified his values and priorities for himself.

He had been living on his own for a while, first during his two years in England, then, when he came back to Israel, he got a job as a production assistant at an avant garde theater school. He rented a room in a picturesque flat in an old building with high ceilings near the center of Jerusalem, and he stayed there for two or three years. After the director of the school left, and the new director hired someone else, Asher worked and studied in various places. While he was at film school, renting a room seemed like an extravagance to him, so he moved into a studio apartment we had carved out of our home, after three of our four children moved out.
Asher persuaded us to enlarge the studio apartment by cutting an unused room in two - if you haven't seen our house, you won't be able to imagine this very easily. Although the studio apartment gave him privacy and comfort, he didn't like being dependent on us. If he had stayed in art school for another three years, he would have been in his late twenties and still living at home, not on his own, not supporting himself. So a strong motivation behind his decision to move from Visual Communications to Haute Cuisine was to take care of himself, to step away from dependency on his parents.
Within a week of his arrival in New York, he had found an apartment and a job, and from then on he made his own living in New York, took care of himself, lived like a grown up - as a young man in his twenties should. I'm sure he was very pleased with the knowledge that he could take care of himself, that he relished his own self-confidence.
As a parent, nothing has pleased me more than seeing my children grow up and take charge of their own lives: seeing our married daughter become a loving, responsible mother, seeing Asher's older brother complete law school and take on a serious job in a big firm, seeing Asher move forward in his chosen career path, and seeing his younger sister thrive in her university studies (also enjoying her presence in our home for the time being). If a parent has enabled his or her children to become self-sufficient adults, that parent can be called successful.
At first Asher thought he would aim toward becoming a gourmet chef, but after about a year of studying and working in high end restaurants, he took a job managing the kitchen of a tapas bar in the Lower East Side, making good food, but not for wealthy people who think nothing of paying a few hundred dollars for a meal. Later he studied restaurant management and considered opening a restaurant of his own, but after examining the financial risks he decided against it. Rents were too high in the area where he wanted to open the restaurant. Meanwhile he was working in a very successful Malaysian restaurant on Manhattan. Finally, however, he decided to use his skills to benefit people rather than to make as much money as he could, and he was planning to volunteer for a project run by his teacher in the restaurant management course, teaching restaurant skills to street kids in Vietnam.
Asher had a firm belief in the value of good nutrition, in avoiding factory-processed foods, in fostering local foods and genetic variation. One of his reasons for going to Peru was to visit the home of maize and potatoes, where a lot of the original genetic variety was still preserved. I can imagine that if he had lived, he would have become involved in nutritional education, in spreading the value he found in cooking, serving, and eating real food. He also had a strong commitment to hospitality, not in the cynical, commercial sense of serving customers and getting money out of them, but in the true, deep sense of making people feel welcome and comfortable.
The following line in the eulogy reads: I expected good surprises from Asher.
I was hoping he would put together his skills in design, management, cooking, and human relations into something wonderful and astonishing. He certainly would have done so, had he lived.

Eulogy Explained (4)

The next thing I said about Asher at his funeral is that he was quite rebellious.
I don't think he was rebellious out of anger (though obviously there has to be a fair amount of anger in any rebellion) so much as out of integrity. He had a strong inner sense of what was right and just, and he would not have that be violated. Because he was also a deeply loving person, his rebelliousness caused him a lot of inner conflict, which he was trying to understand and cope with to the last days of his short, intense life.
Asher's rebelliousness was hard for me to handle as his father, because it often made me furious at him. Yet I always admired him for having the courage and conviction to rebel. I myself never rebelled openly against authority. Being the only child of a mother with a very strong and controlling personality, I shunned confrontation, because I had no chance of emerging victorious. But Asher grew up as the third child of four in a family that gave him a lot of room to be himself. He knew that there would always be a way back, even after an intense crisis.
We were upset and bewildered when Asher dropped out of high school after tenth grade, but since there was the option of studying independently for his matriculation examinations, we realized that he wasn't denying himself options. In any event there was no way we could have forced him to continue. The school, one of the most flexible and liberal schools in Jerusalem, wouldn't take him back, so even if we had insisted, there was nowhere for him to go.
As Asher grew into manhood, his rebelliousness toned down and became independence, determination to find his own way in life, with confidence in his abilities. He remained intensely critical of authority and the abuse of power, though he was also somewhat cynical about political and social action.
Parents ought to learn from their children at every stage of their respective lives, and I am still learning from Asher after his death. Asher's adolescence coincided with a difficult time in my life. My father died when Asher was eleven, and my mother died shortly after his thirteenth birthday. In fact, Asher and I were visiting my mother, following the celebration of his Bar Mitzvah, when she died. Although my parents were both in their eighties, and neither of them died unexpectedly or tragically, it was not easy for me to deal with the change in my status from devoted son to middle-aged orphan. In retrospect - I never thought of this until Asher himself died - having lost my parents at that time must have made it difficult for me to respond with love to the turmoil that Asher was going through in his teens. Asher withdrew into his own life then, avoiding us as much as he could, and he was very precocious. He had a girlfriend a few years older than he, he used to spend a lot of time with her and her friends in Tel Aviv, and we really didn't know what he was doing with himself. Probably because I was coping with my own bereavement, and because I am averse to confrontation, I took the easy way out and let Asher do as he pleased.
Several close friends of our family, who are also professional psychologists, have complimented us on the way we handled that difficult period in Asher's life, for letting him be independent, but I have residual doubts about it.

More about Asher's Talents

I once reproached Asher for taking things up and dropping them instead of pursuing them until he mastered them, which is what he was on the way to doing at last with cooking. He responded that he had gotten what he needed out of the things that he tried, and that was enough for him.
This leads me into a train of thought. Upon reading in today's paper that Bobby Fischer died, I realized there is a huge difference between talent and obsession. A person who is obsessed with an activity risks becoming unbalanced - his or her achievements in that field may be extraordinary, but they come at the expense of breadth of character, They are enslaved to what they do. Obsession is neither a guarantee of achievement nor a sine qua non for it. Talented people love what they do and engage in the activities they're good at because of that love, as an expression of that love. Asher's talents derived from enthusiasm, from love. If he didn't love what he was doing, he stopped doing it.
Last year a young man his age, who had wrestled with deep depression, hanged himself. Asher had been a close friend of his for a while when they were in high school. Then, for some reason, which he never told us, he became so angry with his former friend that he broke off all contact with him - very rare with Asher, who used to have furious fights with people and then make up and become even closer friends. Later, as Asher understood how deeply distressed his former friend was, he felt compassion for him, though they never became close friends again. The news of that young man's suicide was as shattering for his parents, his parents' friends (including my wife and me), and the whole circle of people who had known him as was the news of Asher's accidental death in Peru. Naturally that suicide aroused fear in me that Asher might do something like that as well. Who c0uld tell what kind of stress he might be facing and hiding from us? But of course, thinking back about who Asher was, I realize that he loved life too much to have killed himself intentionally.

Eulogy Explained (3)

The third thing I said was that Asher was a very talented person. His major talent was in drawing and painting. During the seven-day mourning period, a friend from elementary school spoke to us about how Asher drew constantly in class. His teachers let him draw, because if he kept busy with that, he wasn't disruptive. School came easily to him, and he was bored by the lessons. He used to sit in the back of the room and draw comic books, which he actually sold to other pupils (typical of Asher, by the way).
Another visitor, a retired art teacher, remembered how Asher stood out in the classes she gave at the Israel Museum. He would come early, stay late, work well and hard, and help out. This is a perfect example of Asher's attitude toward teachers. He didn't take her classes seriously because they were official classes given in the Youth Wing of the museum, or because she had the title of teacher, or because she was his parents' age. He took her classes seriously because she was a good artist and a good teacher. It's a tribute to him that some fifteen years after he studied with her, despite the hundreds of pupils she saw during her career, she still remembered Asher.
When Asher was about three, we took him to an exhibition of colorful paintings by Ruth Tsarfati, a famous illustrator of children's books. He was so delighted by the bright colors and images that he truly danced with joy. I've never seen a child respond so immediately to visual art.
Later on he became interested in movies, and he was a gifted film critic, responding to films with precocious insight and sensitivity. In ninth grade he started studying cinema in the High School of the Arts in Jerusalem, and he was happy during his first year there, when the film program was small.
For a while Asher also played drums. When he was very little, we took him to an ultra-orthodox wedding that we were invited to, where the musical entertainment was limited to a male singer who accompanied himself on a drum set, because some extremely pious Jews avoid playing musical instruments in Jerusalem, a sign of continued mourning for the destruction of the Temple. The next morning, Asher took all the big pots and their lids out of the cupboard and made himself a drum set.
He was also talented with food. During high school he started to work in a hole in the wall cafe, making grilled cheese sandwiches and brewing coffee, and within a short time the owner was letting him manage the place. Later he invested some of the money my parents left him in a coffee shop and set the whole thing up, designing the place, figuring out and designing the menu, hiring the cook, and everything else. The food was delicious, and all our friends ate there and enjoyed it. Asher was studying animation at Bezalel, so he didn't have time to run the place. If he had, it would have been a commercial success, too. But the other owners were kind of feckless, and the place declined and closed. Meanwhile Asher realized that he didn't have the patience to be an animator.
Later Asher attended the Sam Spiegel film school for a year but couldn't take their approach. He worked at various jobs for another year and studied painting and drawing to put together a portfolio to apply to Bezalel, this time in Visual Communication. His work was excellent, and he invested himself in it. He definitely had the ability to become a painter, but he didn't fancy himself an "Artist."
While he was studying at Bezalel, he was working in restaurants, first as a barman in a coffee shop, then in the kitchens of two restaurants. All of his art projects that year were centered on food, including a playground made of cold cuts and a video involving his mother sewing together chicken skins over an illuminated globe, and at the end of the year he realized that he would rather learn to be a gourmet cook than learn to be a commercial artist. So off he went to New York to work in restaurants and study cuisine.
He was as talented at cooking as he was in the visual arts.

Eulogy Explained (2)

The second thing I said was that in his way of dying, as well, Asher was exceptional.
He probably fell to his death on Sunday, November 4, his first day of hiking in the Colca Canyon in Peru. He apparently took the wrong path from the very start and reached a difficult place, overestimated his ability to cross it, slipped, fell more than forty meters, and died immediately. He was alone, so no one saw him set out, and no one knew he had fallen until his body was found two months later.
Almost everyone who hears about this tragic accident asks, "Was he alone?" Perhaps if he had not been alone, he would not have taken the wrong path. Perhaps if he had not been alone, his partner would have said, "Asher, that's a dangerous place, let's turn back." Certainly, if he had not been alone, unless his partner had also fallen, we would have known of his death within a day.
We can wish that someone had been by his side to tell him to turn back. I fantasize over and over again about being there myself, calling out, "Asher, that's too risky! Turn back!" But nothing can change what happened. We can wish that he had had better judgment or more skill. But fatal accidents happen all them time, and this time it happened to him.
There is a weight on my chest as I write this. During the six weeks between the time that we realized he was missing until his body was found, there were many days when I felt grief for Asher in the most physical way: pain around my heart. I learned how apt the expression, "a heavy heart," truly is. But until his body was located and identified, we imagined scenarios that would leave him alive - kidnapped, perhaps, or injured, sick, on some kind of spiritual journey - anything that would not have ended in a grave in Jerusalem.
Asher did a great deal during his short life, and, had it not been cut short, he would undoubtedly have done many extraordinary things. As sorry as I feel for us, for our loss, I feel even sorrier for him and his loss, for the future he won't have.

Eulogy Explained

The first thing I said at the funeral, while Asher's body lay wrapped in shrouds on a stone slab in front of me, was: "Frameworks didn't suit Asher." From his first day in elementary school to the day he decided to leave the program in Visual Communication in the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem, Asher had to exercise great self-control in order to accept the demands of educational institutions. A fine woman who served as the principal of his religious elementary school for a year wrote to us with memories of Asher. He didn't want to attend the daily prayers, so instead of forcing him to attend, which would have only made him disruptive, she allowed him to read religious poetry by himself while the other children were attending prayers. If only the other so-called educators who dealt with Asher had been as creative and understanding!
He wasn't purposely rebellious. He was born that way. If he didn't respect a person, he didn't care whether that person held institutional authority, and if he did respect a person, he didn't care whether or not that person held some institutional position. He left high school after the tenth grade and prepared for his matriculation examinations in a private school that had only one purpose: getting kids through the government exams, with no "educational" trimmings. Asher understood that he needed a matriculation certificate, and he was willing to apply himself to the task of passing the examinations, but he couldn't stand it when people pretended to be educators.
He persuaded the army that he was psychologically unsuited for military service, which, indeed, he was. He could have managed in the army as the Chief of Staff, but not as a simple soldier taking orders.
Asher had been working for a production company while he was preparing for his exams, and he did very well with that - he always thrived in work situations, where the structure of authority was related to a real task, and he was never happier than when working hard physically.
His experience with the production company led him to apply to the two-year Stage Management course of LAMDA, an excellent theater school in London, and was accepted. He later admitted to us that during the first year he had his usual problems with authority and institutional frameworks, but in his second year he came around and excelled. While he was struggling during his first year, he never told us how hard he was finding it. Among the many things I regret about my relations with Asher as his father, I'm sorry I didn't provide him more support while he was in London.

Mourning Time

The funeral took place on Tuesday, January 8, 2007, at 5:30 in the afternoon, at the Giv'at Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem. Ever since we realized that Asher had disappeared, I imagined myself standing in front of a crowd of mourners and speaking to them about Asher. That is, when I wasn't imagining some happy turn of events that would impossibly have left him alive and even well. I was incapable of imagining the difficulty and pain of the actual event.
My wife, his mother spoke, in English, about the way Asher viewed his work as a chef: to serve food with love, with love for the people he was serving and with love for the food he had prepared and was serving. I spoke in Hebrew. Then our eldest daughter's friend spoke on her behalf - our daughter lost her voice that morning. A devoted friend of ours, an artist who had been very close to Asher, also spoke, and then our son-in-law, who had gone to Peru and searched for Asher with the High Mountain Police of Arequipa, spoke briefly about the heroism of the men who were the ones who recovered his body in driving rain, risking their lives to climb down a steep cliff on ropes and bring Asher up.
I'm going to paste in the words that I said about Asher in Hebrew here. Later I will probably translate them.

מסגרות לא התאימו לאשר
גם בצורת המוות שלו הוא חרג מכל מסגרת
אדם כשרוני ביותר
מרדן לא קטן
התבגר מאוד בתקופה ששהה בניו יורק
זה דבר כאוב מאור עבורי
הוא היה בנקודת מפנה בחייו
הוא הבהיר לעצמו את ערכיו ואת סדר העדיפויות
ציפיתי להפתעות טובות ממנו
אדם אמיץ
לא בחל בסיכונים
מהיר החלטה ומהיר פעולה
אדם מסובך
אישיות קיצונית
נוכחות כובשת
למדתי המון מאשר
אולי הלקח החשוב ביותר שלמדתי ממנו הוא שכשאר המסגרות אינן מתאימות לאדם, לעתים קרובות האדם צודק ולא המסגרות
למדתי הרבה גם מן התקופה הקשה בין הרגע שהבנו שהוא נעדר עד לרגע שמצאו את גופתו
פטירתו קרעה חור גדול בחיינו
בחיי המשפחה הקרובה
בחיי הקהילה שלנו
בחיי רשת ענפה של חברים

בברכות השחר אנו קוראים

"המכין מצעדי-גבר"

יהיה לי קשה מאוד לקבל בהכנעה את הברכה הזאת

Irreparable Loss

Since the last time I added writing to this blog, my family and I have gone through a time of fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and hope. In mid-October, our twenty-eight year old son Asher went on a trip to Peru. On November 3 he sent us an email from the town of Chivay, telling us he was planning to hike in the Colca Canyon for a week and reassuring us that he wasn't planning to do anything dangerous or out of the ordinary, so we expected to hear from him around November 10. After another week went by, we began to worry. We alerted authorities, began to make telephone calls, and then our son-in-law took it upon himself to go to Peru and look for Asher. He was joined by Asher's older brother. They spent two weeks searching intensely for him with the mountain police force of Arequipa, Peru, and failed to find him. We feared all along that Asher had fallen to his death, but we imagined all sorts of other possibilities that would somehow leave him alive. We had absolutely no concrete information about his whereabouts after the evening of November 3, when he sent the email to us. No one remembered seeing Asher, and there was no record of his staying in any of the hostels in the town. His disappearance was a complete mystery.
Yesterday we were informed that his body was found. The most likely thing is exactly what did happen: he fell to his death while on the hike. We still don't know exactly where he fell, and we will probably never know why he fell, but we know that he did fall. Our sadness and grief is now complete. Before his body was found, I had allowed hope to keep me from grieving. There were days when I was painfully sure was dead, and days when I was sure he would be found alive.
This terrible turn of events makes all the other things that I had thought of writing about seem trivial, though I might get back to them, since the human ability to be distracted is, mercifully, infinite. Music was really the only thing that kept me going during this time of tension, music and the enormous stores of love within our immediate family, my wife and our other three children, and the messages of support and encouragement we received.
Many of the people who offered us deep sympathy are people who themselves have undergone tragic loss, or who are facing horrible situations: an educator in his fifties who is waiting to die of cancer, a musician whose wife has multiple sclerosis, a woman whose twelve-year old son hanged himself, two men whose wives died of ovarian cancer, the mother of one of Asher's high school friends, who committed suicide, a woman whose daughter died of leukemia. I could go on. When you look around you, if you know something about the people you see, you realize that you are not alone in having suffered great loss. Life is full of pain.
People have complimented my wife and me for our courage in facing Asher's disappearance, before we knew that he was dead, and they have admired the solidarity and hard work that our family put into the task of locating him. But, as I have heard from friends, to whom I have offered similar compliments, when there's no choice, you do what you have to.
All along I have felt that, no matter what the outcome was, this experience would mark and change our lives in ways that we cannot know. I feel that I can't and shouldn't resist what's going on in my heart now. Asher's name in Hebrew is related to the word for happiness. I doubt that we will ever be completely happy again.