Farewell

We parted from Boaz that afternoon in Arequipa. He was flying back to the US and his job in Washington, DC, and we were about to take the overnight bus to Cuzco. Being with Boaz was wonderful, and parting from him was sad.
While we were planning the trip, Judith was strongly opposed to doing any more than our business in the Colca Canyon area and returning from Peru. She had no interest in Peru and no desire to tour there. Ofer had been to Peru in the early 1990s and fallen in love with the country, so he naturally wanted to take advantage of his presence there to become reacquainted. Hannah had also been in Peru, but not the parts where we were, and she's an enthusiastic traveler, so she also wanted to stay on. I had mixed feelings. Like Judith, I had never had much interest in Latin America in general or in Peru - indeed I had been very apprehensive about the trip, imagining that people would be trying to rob us left and right. On the other hand, since we were laying out so much money to get there, and we had already committed so much of our time, why not do some ordinary tourism and get a little fun out of the trip?
We could always justify it, if there was any reason to justify it, by saying that we were going to see the places that Asher planned to see. We were completing his trip for him.
It's true that everywhere we subsequently went in Peru, Asher's shadow was with us - as his shadow is with me every time I dice an onion. And it's also true that we had a fascinating, enjoyable trip during the following ten days or so.
But I don't intend to write about those experiences here.
It's time to sum up and move on.
Planning and anticipating the trip to Peru was central in our lives during the months preceding the trip, especially in Judith's life, for she did most of the planning and arranging. We had a specific mission, and we completed it successfully - more than successfully. I'm proud of our family, proud of our friends who contributed so generously to our project, pleased to know that their contributions went to worthy people, glad that we were able to express personal gratitude to the people who did so much to help us. I'm also glad that I liked Peru and the Peruvians so much.
However, having completed the mission, I am left with emptiness: what is there to do next? What's worth doing?
Grief is lonely and individual.
Asher's death is many losses to many people, each of whom knew him in a different way, each of whom is in a different stage of life. We are all many things to many people, and when we die, each of the many people loses something different. We have lost a son, a brother, a friend, a student, a patient, a colleague.
"You can't take it with you," as the cliche tells us. But you leave a lot behind, assuming that "you" exist after you are dead, so that "you" are deprived of something or have lost something.
If we assume that "you" stops existing when "you" dies, then "you" leaves nothing behind. But it is we who are left behind, we who have lost, and we who imagine how "you" could have had a longer, fuller, more rewarding life.
Asher would have been twenty-nine last June. He might have gone on living for at least another fifty years, growing, developing, working, creating, gathering friends, lovers, a family, a career - living a full life and enriching the lives of others.
I've said it before. If Mephistopheles had appeared to me and offered me a deal: die instead of Asher, and he'll live for at least the number of years that you've lived so far, I would have taken it. Asher should have been speaking at my funeral a year ago, not I speaking at his.
I've had a decent shot at life. He only got a beginning.
Until Asher died, I was always optimistic, pretty much assuming that things would work out all right. I've lost that.

Winding Up

While Judith and I were at the lookout and then at Dante's school, and Ofer was trying to get to the place where Asher last was, Hannah and Boaz went where Asher planned to go: the bottom of Colca Canyon, the second deepest canyon in the world, an enormous ravine that widens out into a valley, whose walls, wherever they're not too steep, are terraced for agriculture.  

Tourists who have enough time hike down into the canyon, stay over night at the Oasis, a kind of resort, with hot springs, and then go on to visit some of the villages in the canyon, which are accessible only by foot or by mule.  You probably feel as if you're in a charmed zone, close to nature, far from noise and pollution, seeing people whose way of life is rooted deep in the past.

But Hannah and Boaz only had a day, so they left at dawn, hiked down, ate lunch at the Oasis, and then hiked up, reaching Cabanaconde again before dark.  

Hannah hired a mule to get back up, but Boaz took on the challenge of coming back on his own and met it with flying colors.  It's a stiff climb in any event, but at that altitude, it's especially hard.

The High Mountain Rescue Unit took us back to Arequipa the next morning.  We left early, so we could reach the condor lookout in time to have a chance of seeing some condors - but there weren't any that day, just about five hundred tourists.

All the way to Cabanaconde from Arequipa, I had been thinking to myself: these are the sights that Asher saw.  All the way back, all I could think was that Asher's body had made the same trip, in the same vehicle.

Not Knowing

The path down to the lookout took us past the kindergarten and a second school building of some kind. As passed it, a woman saw us, rushed out from somewhere, and pounded on the door of the second school building. Out came Dante, our English round-faced speaker. He told us he was going to have some English classes in the adult education school that afternoon and asked us to come by at three. He told us he spent the morning in the school building, to make sure no one broke in and stole the computers. We wondered to ourselves what that meant about the population of the village.
In any event, we agreed readily, and that afternoon, we went back to what was now a very familiar corner of Cabanaconde. As usual, there was a misunderstanding. The English lessons didn't really begin at three, and the students who began learning at some vague time after three were not high school students but elementary school kids, and not many at that. Dante evidently expected us to stay all day, from three on, but we only planned to spend an hour there.
About eight kids gradually gathered, and Judith and I gave them a lively, improvised English lesson. Their performance was pretty impressive, seeing that Dante was hardly a fluent speaker of English himself. They knew a lot of vocabulary, and they were lively and intelligent. It was fun working with them.
I guess any kid who was willing to go back after school for voluntary English lessons either had very pushy parents or high personal motivation.
Dante told us that he had arrived in Cabanaconde a few years ago with some kind of a diploma and one English book, no building, no program, but with some kind of government backing. He gradually built a program, recruited students, obtained a building, and started teaching English as well as tourism, electronics, and computers. Does he really know very much about those four fields? Evidently enough to get people started. If you wait until you have fully qualified teachers in places like Cabanaconde, you'll never have any programs.
Dante needs textbooks, dictionaries, and atlases, as well as other equipment. So now he's on our "Help Cabanaconde" list, too. Dante was a little disappointed when we told him at four that we had to go, but we didn't have a lot of energy, between the high altitude and the high emotions we'd been experiencing.
Meeting his students took our mind off the reason we were in Cabanconde for a while, but when we got back to the hotel, we were reminded sharply. Ofer had returned to the hotel, and he was exhausted and distraught. Instead of coming back from seeing the place where Asher fell with a clear idea of how the accident happened, he came back with more questions than answers, as well as a badly injured knee.
All he could say to us was that if Asher had somehow gotten to the place from which he apparently fell, he must have been a champion mountain climber - which we know he wasn't.
Our only hope of finding anything definite out now lay in the memory chip of his camera. At the time we thought we had it, but when we got back to Israel, Ofer discovered that the chip we had was not the one upon which Asher had recorded his pictures from Peru, and that chip wasn't with the camera or his belongings. It's gone.
That afternoon, Judith and I didn't push Ofer to hear his theory about how Asher had fallen, and we have decided not to since then. If Ofer has worked out a theory by now, it's still only a theory, and even the fullest knowledge can't change the horrible fact that our son is dead.
Asher's death was shrouded in mystery from the start. For nearly two months, before his body was found, he was only "missing," and we hoped that somehow he was still alive. We will never know exactly what series of errors and miscalculations led to his fall. That's frustrating, but what good would fuller knowledge do?

Two Dreams

A few weeks ago, the body of an Israeli hiker who had fallen into rapids in Peru was discovered, wedged under a rock, not far from where he had fallen, months later, after the water in the river had receded.
The night after reading about that, I dreamed that Asher's body had been recovered similarly. In my dream he had long, black straight hair and a long beard, though in reality Asher had short, light, curly hair, and was clean shaven. The figure in the dream, who was definitely "Asher," looked like a figure of Christ after he has been taken down from the cross.
Even though he had been under water for a long time, we started resuscitation, and he responded. "A medical miracle," someone shouted.
I woke up in fear.

In a dream last night I saw a child of about five, a child of mine.
I had come home from somewhere and found him with a terrible bloody wound on his face, between his eyes. The blood on his face was very bright red.
I hugged him and wanted to rush to the hospital with him, but he spoke calmly and said it had happened earlier, and he had taken care of it.
The "child" was Asher, and when I realized it was he, again I woke up in fear.

How strange it is to see someone in a dream, who doesn't look at all like the person you're dreaming of, but you know it's the same person.

A Message from the Condors

The next morning, Hannah and Boaz walked down into the canyon, accompanied by one of the mountain rescue men, and Ofer went with Diego and Benito, another mountain rescue man, to see the place where Asher's body was found and the place from which he fell. Judith and I decided to spend a quiet day in Cabanaconde.
The Kunturwassi hotel is on a low hill a short distance away from the main square, which, as usual in Peru, has a church on one side and stores and restaurants on the other three sides. The hotel is a rambling assemblage of bungalows adjacent to the main building, which houses the reception desk and a restaurant on the upper floor, with a view down into the village and out to the mountains on the horizon. A little brook flows out of the rocks under the restaurant past the outdoor stairway leading from the reception desk down to the rooms. You can also climb up a flight of stairs from the restaurant to an observation tower on top of the hotel.
When Judith and I sat down to eat breakfast, the waitress, a motherly woman in her forties, spoke softly to us in simple Spanish that we could understand. Were we Asher's mama and papa? The whole village was worried about him and looking for him. She expressed deep sympathy and suggested that we should have a mass said in Asher's honor, but we explained that we weren't Catholics.
She accepted that news with no comment.
The day before, on our way to the kindergarten, we saw a sign that read "Mirador Achachihua, 500 m," and we decided to see what that was. The path continued onward past the kindergarten, as the village houses thinned out. We reached what looked like a half-constructed, reinforced concrete bull ring. At that point it wasn't clear where the path led, but we clambered over a low stone wall and continued in the direction of the canyon, finally reaching a promontory from which you could see all the way down to the Colca River in the bottom or the canyon, and at the peaks and cliffs in three directions. We were in sight of the place to which Robert had taken us the night before.
A local guide was there with a small group of young tourists, but they left after a while, and Judith and I decided to stay there. We could see down to the place Asher had presumably meant to reach and the general area where he fell. It was a good place to collect our thoughts and be alone with our feelings.
I sat down on a rock to write in my notebook.
The silence was nearly absolute. The sound of the rushing water of the river, more than a kilometer below us, came up to us faintly. Otherwise there were no sounds - no engines running, no human voices, no horns or sirens.
Soon afterward, we began to see large birds flying in the canyon below us: eagles. Then condors appeared, five of them, first soaring and wheeling at eye level over the canyon, then rising higher and circling in the air over our heads. They came so close to us that we could hear the wind rushing through their feathers. We could see their eyes, their beaks, the hugeness of their black, extended wings. They circled and circled, as if inspecting us. We moved so they wouldn't mistake us for carrion. We knew that condors don't attack live animals or people, but we couldn't help be frightened, they were so large and majestic.
I tried to take pictures of them with my point and shoot camera, totally unsuited to that. I only managed to capture a few blurry images.
I don't know how long the condors stayed in the air above us, circling, swooping, disappearing and returning, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone.
Earlier I had thought - against every skeptical principle in my mind - that our mission in Peru was to free Asher's soul from the Colca Canyon. His body had been brought back and buried, but until people who loved him came to see the place where he fell, his sould would be stuck there.
The visit from the condors had a mystical quality to it, as if they were helping us free Asher's soul from that place. As if they knew why we were there.
As we left, heading back to the village, I began sobbing uncontrollably.

The Official Version

That evening Robert led us to the point at which, in his opinion, Asher went astray.
We started in daylight along a trail leading from a corner of the main square of Cabanaconde, not the trail that hikers ordinarily take on their way down into the Colca Canyon - but there is no sign in the square, and it would be easy to start off at the wrong corner, in the right general direction, but on the wrong path.
Ever since we found out what happened to Asher, I have been imagining that wrong path, picturing it to myself, running after Asher and telling him he'd made a mistake.
For quite a while the trail was wide and nothing would indicate that it was the wrong one. It wound between low stone walls through small fields newly plowed and planted with corn. A few minutes along that path, we came to a junction, where you could turn off to the right and get onto the correct path down to the canyon. Again there was no clearly visible sign, but on a rock, where no one would notice it, on the near edge of the path, low toward the ground, someone had written "Oasis" - the name of the resort inside the canyon. When we saw that sign, we thought to ourselves: If only someone had written "Oasis" in large letters, with an arrow pointing to the right, on the wall facing the direction of the village, so that someone coming from there would have seen it, Asher might be alive now.
Robert led us past that point, along a path that was still well trodden. Farmers use it to get to their plots of land. We were five members of our family: Judith, Hannah, Boaz, Ofer, and I, accompanied by Robert and Cabezon. We reached the end of that path and walked across a small plot, and, as we looked out over the canyon, Robert presented his conclusions to us - an official police report.
In his opinion, Asher reached that point and then took a steep animal trail downward around prickly bushes that had since been burned off. He came to a series of two waterfalls and managed to negotiate the first. When he got to the foot of that waterfall, instead of continuing to the left, where the trail continued, he stepped back on the narrow ledge to take a picture of the waterfall and then fell backward, plunging about a hundred meters to his death.
The place from which he fell and the place where his body was found were more or less inaccessible from the point to which we'd been taken, and the following morning Ofer was planning to go there by a different, somewhat easier route with Diego and Benito, a member of the rescue unit. Robert strongly discouraged Hannah and Boaz from even considering going there, because the hike would be so demanding and dangerous.
After presenting his theory of how Asher had happened to fall, Robert described how they had recovered his body. The operation was extremely difficult, because the terrain was so steep. They wrapped the body and loaded it onto a kind of sled and pulled it up the cliffs with ropes. All the while rain was threatening, and if it had started to rain, they wouldn't have been able to continue. Robert said they were "praying to Asher" all the time, to keep it from raining, and the rain did hold off until the body was stowed safely on the rescue unit's white pickup truck - the vehicle we'd been riding around on since we'd reached Arequipa.
As I write these words, my eyes well up with tears.
After all the explanations, and after seeing the place, the story still made no sense. True, Asher was not an experienced hiker, but even an inexperienced hiker - or especially an inexperienced hiker - should have known that the path Robert showed us was not a well-worn path taken by hundreds of hikers down to a popular resort. It's hard to imagine that Asher wouldn't have reached that place, taken a look, and said to himself: I must have taken a wrong turn. I'll go back.
On our way back, darkness fell, and we all withdrew into ourselves and thought about what we'd seen.

Diego

We got to know Diego a little better in the restaurant. Ofer had given him the promised reward of $1500 last January, and now he asked Diego what he had done with the money.
The police had taken $200 from him - not the mountain police, but the regular criminal police. We were outraged, but Diego smiled sweetly and said he'd given it to them willingly.
He'd spent another $500 to send his oldest child, a boy in his late teens, to study cooking in Arequipa. We were very gratified to hear that, because that had been Asher's profession, something Diego couldn't have known. He had spent the remaining $800 on a private operation for his wife, who had a tumor, because if they had waited for an operation through the national health services, it might have been too late to operate at all. She was still sick, he said, and there were going to be more expenses.
Then and there we decided to give him another $500 from the funds that our friends and relatives had contributed in Asher's memory.
Diego, who is in his mid-forties, makes a living, if you could call it that, by gathering cochineal, a red dye made from insects that live on cactuses. He roams through the Colca Canyon looking for cactuses infested with the insects and gathers as many as theee kilograms of the stuff every day - weather permitting.
Diego found Asher because he had been looking for cochineal in an area of the canyon where he usually doesn't go, it was starting to rain, so he took a shortcut home, and on the way caught sight of Asher's hat and backpack.
Ofer asked him how much he's paid for the cochineal (which was selling for between $50 and $80 per kilogram in 2005, according to some Web sites I have recently seen). Diego gets $5 per kilogram for what he gathers. So on a really good day, he makes $15. When it rains, and he can't go out looking, he obviously doesn't earn a penny, and if he's not lucky, he gathers a lot less than three kilograms. The material that he gathers looks like a greyish powder on the surface of the cactus. Gathering three kilograms of it would take a very long time, even if you found it quickly and easily.
Diego's seven-year old daughter, Miriam, was a bright, delightful child, with a charming smile and lots of energy. She had a great time in the restaurant, enjoying her food and the Inca Cola she'd ordered. But she was too bashful to repeat the poem she'd recited at the ceremony in the school yard. Her older brother, who was also with us, was a quiet, twelve-year old, with his father's shyness.
What will happen to them? Their mother's health is poor, and how long can Diego keep roaming up and down the canyon looking for cochineal? The older son, who's learning to be a cook, is the family's main hope.
We were lucky that Diego found Asher at all. The rains started soon after the body was discovered, and if his remains hadn't been found then, they might never have been found. Diego was lucky that he found Asher. The prize money saved his wife's life and gave the family hope for the future.
We were glad that the man who benefitted was such a deserving person.

The Second Ceremony in Cabanaconde

On the way from the kindergarten to the elementary school, we had to climb over ditches and piles of rubble. They were gradually paving the streets of Cabanaconde.
"When we were looking for Asher," Ofer told me, "the whole town was dug up like this. He could have been buried anywhere."
That's what we had been afraid of. Maybe Asher had made the wrong man angry at him, gotten into a fight, and been murdered. The killer could have thrown him over the edge of the canyon or buried him under the rubble in the village streets. No one would have known.
In the two or three weeks between the time that Boaz and Ofer came back empty-handed from Peru to the time when the body was found, we were preparing to hire a team of Israeli specialists to go and look for him. One of the men who would have been on the team said that among the first things they would do would be to check for new and unmarked graves in the cemeteries.
The school building was a simple concrete structure, but large, airy, and attractive. The kids, dressed in uniforms, had gathered in a big courtyard behind the school, and tables had been set up, laden with the books, materials, and equipment we had bought. I was pleased to see piles of world classics in simplified school editions: Cervantes, Moliere, even Moby Dick.
The ceremony at the elementary school was longer and more formal. I spoke in Hebrew, and Ofer translated into Spanish for me. The mayor spoke, saying that Asher wasn't the first person who died accidentally in the Colca Canyon, but we were the first family who ever thought of doing something for the people of Cabanaconde. The Governor spoke, and with my meager Spanish I heard him mention Israel, which was one of the things we had in mind. Then the kids sang a few songs and a five or six of them came up by turns and recited poems in Spanish, with sweeping theatrical movements of their arms and deep bows. One was a patriotic poem about Peru, how they would defend it against all enemies.
Then we gave a notebook, a pencil, and a ballpoint pen to each of the students.
Then, before we left, they gave us presents - Peruvian handicrafts.
Diego, the man who found Asher's body, showed up. His eight-year-old daughter attended the school, and she had been one of the kids who recited poems.
It was two-thirty or so by then. We were all hungry. Ofer invited Diego and his family to meet us in the square, so we could take them out for lunch.
He came with his daughter and his twelve-year old son, but without his wife, who wasn't feeling well, he said.
We headed for a place down the street from the corner of the square, but before we got there we passed a little hotel, which had a restaurant, but whose shutters were drawn. Diego's daughter insisted that she wanted to eat there, saying (I think) that it was her aunt's place. So we knocked, someone rolled up the shutters, and we went in.
Communication with Diego was awkward, since it all went through Ofer, but we could tell he was a kind, very modest person, shy and self-effacing.

The First Ceremony in Cabanaconde

Before leaving the lookout at Cruz del Condor we ate avocado sandwiches in the triangular rolls typical of this part of Peru, and that was our last food for quite a while that day. We checked into our rather whimsical hotel, the Kunturwassi (which we later learned meant, "Home of the Condor"), without any baggage, at 12:30. We were due to meet the school principals in half an hour. There was no time to eat, so I rested.
At one o'clock we walked down the narrow street from out hotel to the main square of Cabanaconde, past a little house with a Jehova's Witnesses sign on it, and there Mario and Norma were waiting for us.
We were concerned. A ceremony was planned at the two schools, at which we'd display the gifts and distribute things to the children, but the truck was stranded. How could we hold the ceremony?
Just as we reached the square and greeted Mario and Norma, the truck rolled in. The situation was saved.
We followed the truck down a narrow, unpaved road and began to get an impression of Cabanaconde: a grid of narrow unpaved roads lined with adobe houses, mainly roofed with galvanized steel sheets. There were animals in almost all the courtyards. A few hundred yards down the street, the truck stopped in front of a low, white building, identified as "INSTITUCION EDUCATIONAL INICIAL CABANACONDE," and the mountain rescue men started unloading the truck.
Norma ushered us into her kindergarten. About forty little kids were sitting against the walls of the large courtyard, beneath a large brownish yellow mural, with Peace written on it in Hebrew, Spanish, and Arabic. An Israeli, who had signed his name as Lior, had preceded us in Cabanaconde!
While they were unpacking the things we had bought, I went over and sat with the children. Once had I taken a couple of pictures of them and showed them the pictures on the display of my digital camera, I was mobbed - what a pleasure!
Then the ceremony began. Cabezon, the driver, organized the pupils into lines, and they sang some songs for us. The teacher who led them in singing clearly enjoyed what she was doing. The children were all clean and well-behaved. They stood quietly in their lines while we gave each of them a notebook and a couple of pencils.
The mayor of the village and the governor of the district (a man appointed by the central government) were in attendance. In the end, as we were leaving, Norma draped necklaces of dried corncobs around our necks. Then we headed for the elementary school for a more elaborate ceremony.
At the kindergarten we also met Dante, a young man with a smooth, brown face who spoke pretty good English. In fact he told us that he taught it in an adult education program that he had set up. His son was one of the kids in the kindergarten, and he'd been invited to attend the ceremony.

Two Stops on the Way to Cabanaconde

Early the next morning we piled into and onto the police vehicle, loading it beyond what anyone would think it could take: eight people, suitcases, the school supplies and computers we had bought. The plan was to reach the lookout point, Cruz del Condor, by eight-thirty, so we'd have a chance of spotting the famous Colca Canyon condors.
Along the way we stopped in the village of Yanque, which has a vast central square and a monumental church, with beautiful stonework. We got out and walked around there, but we didn't have time to go into the church.
The unpaved road grew narrower as we drove along the edge of the canyon, seeing terraces that were probably built long before the Spanish arrived in Peru. We were taking the route that Asher took on the last day of his life, seeing the sights he saw, trying to imagine his response the landscape while responding to it ourselves.
Cruz del Condor, despite its remoteness, attracts hundreds of tourists every morning, busloads full of groups from all over the world, tourists hoping to catch a sight of the majestic birds. We got there almost too late to glimpse any condors, but, luckily, three or four of them did show up, as well as a couple of eagles.
Even if the condors don't oblige by soaring into view, the sight from Cruz del Condor into the Colca Canyon is majestic. We spent a lot of time there, just looking down at the river, a kilometer below us, around at the cliff faces and up at the vast sky.
We also looked over the merchandise exhibited by women in local costume, some of their own handicrafts and other thngs evidently provided by suppliers.
The drop is very steep from around Cruz del Condor, and it was possible that Asher might have fallen from there. We were aware that we were drawing closer and closer to the place where he died.
We continued on in the direction of Cabanaconde, the village from which hikers head down into the canyon. The main dirt road into the village was closed, so we had to take an even rougher back road that led behind the village's fields. After a few minutes, the left rear tire of the pickup truck burst, and there was no spare tire.
Why wasn't there any spare tire? I never found out.
Some of Robert's men were already in Cabanaconde. He telephoned them and told them to buy a spare tire. Meanwhile, we started to walk into the village, heading across the fields. All of us were glad of the excercise. The weather was sunny but cool, the setting was idyllic - small plots of land, down with corn and other crops, and even a pair of oxen plowing one of the fields, to make the scene more bucolic.
No one seems to be particularly upset by the flat tire. Robert and another rescue policeman walk with us, and Cabezon, the driver, waits with another man for a new tire to show up. It was only mid-morning. There was plenty of time.

Chivay (3) - Alejandro

Ofer attended two shamanistic ceremonies while searching for Asher with the High Mountain Rescue Unit.  They were both recorded on video, and we''ve seen them.  The first was with 

a woman, who told them that Asher was still alive, and the second, a few days later, was with a man named Alejandro, who told them that Asher was dead and where to look for his body.  He turned out to have been right 

both about Asher's fate and also about the approximate location of the body.  Alejandro said that he communicated to the spirit world through the condors.

The men of the unit insisted on getting supernatural help in their 

search, according to Ofer, and they would not have been motivated to go on looking without that input.

The ceremonies involved burning coca leaves, reciting incantations in the Quechua language, pouring libations, and offering llama fetuses to the gods.  They took place very early in the morning, at the edge of the canyon.

Ofer gave Alejandro about

 a hundred dollars worth of food in return for his assistance.  The men of the rescue unit said that if he gave Alejandro money, he would just drink it up.

Alejandro came to the rescue unit headquarters in Chivay shortly after we had finished with Asher's knapsack.  He was a short, slight man, in a huge black felt hat, so drunk that he was incoherent, and he had a black eye.  He came with his wife and their eighth child, an infant.  His wife was thin and worn, sad-looking.  Though she was probably only about forty, she seemed to be closer to sixty.

Ofer had wanted us to get up at four the following morning to take part in a reenaction of Alejandro's ceremony, but none of us saw the point in it.  His visit to the headquarters was in place of that ceremony.

Communication with Alejandro was difficult.  His Spanish, even if he had been sober, would have been too mixed with Quechua for Ofer to understand, so Robert had to explain to Ofer in ordinary Spanish, and Ofer explained to us in Hebrew.

Judith asked him how he had come by his supernatural powers.  He explained that eighteen years ago, he had been struck on the shoulder by a meteorite, which was in the shape of a condor, and since then he had possessed powers.  He took the piece of metal out of his pocket and showed it to us.

Alejandro works steadily at his profession of telling people's future, and he is paid pretty well for it.  In fact, he was just as glad not to go through the ceremony with us the following morning, because he had been called to another place.  However, he told us, his abilities will only last for another four years, after which he'd have to work at something else.

By the time Alejandro showed up, I was suffering terribly from altitude sickness, not to mention the intense emotions that arose when we went through Asher's belongings.  My head ached, and I could barely focus on what was happening.  Otherwise I'm sure I would have been interested in hearing just what powers Alejandro possesses, whether he is also a medium, for example.

Look how far Asher took us - to the genuine folk religion of the Andes.  He would have been fascinated by Alejandro and would have enjoyed him, because there was a kind of sweetness and innocence about Alejandro.  He was no charlatan.  He believed in his own powers as much as the people of Chivay believed in them.

Part of me is shouting: What good did any of it do?  Asher's death is an undeniable, unchangeable, empirical truth.  But the fact that we involved so many people, who helped us as much as they could, is a kind of good.

In Chivay (2)

After lunch came one of the hardest moments of our trip.  We assembled at the local headquarters of the High Mountain Rescue Unit, not far from the main square of Chivay, and sat down on low, worn out armchairs around a table.  A short, ordinary looking man appeared, wearing civilian clothes.  We were told that he worked for the regular police force in Chivay, and he wasthe one  responsible for keeping Asher's knapsack.
In early January, when Diego discovered Asher's body at the bottom of a cliff, he saw Asher's hat and his knapsack before he saw the body itself.  He rushed up to report to the police, who returned to the scene.  The High Mountain Rescue Unit was responsible for recovering the body, but the regular police took the knapsack - ostensibly for investigative purposes.  In Ofer's presence an inventory was taken of the contents of the knapsack, but the police wouldn't release it, although the body itself was taken to Arequipa for an autopsy and then released to the Jewish Community of Lima after Ofer identified it.
Although there was no suspicion of foul play, the police retained the knapsack as evidence of some kind, apparently until we, his parents, came to claim it.  This is one of those situations where we could get no clear answers from anyone.  Was it necessary for us to come all way from Israel to Peru to obtain release of the knapsack, or could we have delegated someone to get it?  What did the local police want it for?
Now we were given the choice.  We could go with the man from the police department and pick up the knapsack there, or we could wait at the Rescue Unit's headquarters and he would bring it to us.  We chose to wait.  The man left and came back shortly with the small green canvas knapsack Asher had taken with him on an excursion that was supposed to have been short.
The procedure was formal and bureaucratic.  The man from the police department brought with him an official list of the contents of the knapsack, which we had to sign.  With a straight face, he told us that four hundred soles (about $130) in paper money, that had been with Asher, had completely disintegrated.

Everything else in the knapsack was in surprisingly good condition, dry and intact.  We took items out one by one.

There was his camping gear: a sleeping bag, a silk liner for the sleeping bag, a poncho, a first aid kit, a compass.

There was a transistor radio, a good pocket knife from Granada, Spain, which we had bought there and given him years ago, his excellent digital reflex camera (which was irreparably broken by his fall), and some other personal things.

There were disposable contact lenses, condoms, dirty clothes, a couple of knitted wool hats, and his journal - written in Hebrew.

There were a couple of CDs, a waterlogged Spanish dictionary, and that was about it.

Nothing so valuable that the police had to keep it for a year.

Sorting through his belongings, invading his privacy, really, brought him intensely close and infinitely far away.  Every thing that we touched was a reminder that he is really dead.

I haven't read the journal yet.  He left another one in his large pack in the hotel in Arequipa, an intensely personal, self-revealing document that Ofer read last year, when they found it, hoping to find some clue about what had happened to Asher.  I looked at a few pages of it and saw that the material is privatel, so I set it aside.  Were he alive, he would never have shown it to me, and I think it's wrong to invade his inner life.  But I can't bring myself to throw it away either.  Perhaps some time I will want to know more about him.

According to Ofer, Boaz, and Hannah, who have read it, his travel journal, the one that he had taken in his small pack, is simply an enthusiastic description of where he'd been and what he'd done.  His handwriting is hard to read, but within the next month or two I intend to transcribe it and translate it into English.  I'll post it here, if it's interesting.

We were hoping that the memory chip that was in his camera would contain more pictures from Peru, aside from the ones he'd emailed to us, and perhaps give us an idea of where he was before he fell.  But, there was no chip in the camera, and the one that was in the camera case had no pictures from Peru on it, as we found out when we returned to Israel.  The chip that was in the camera has disappeared, along with Asher's banknotes.

In Chivay (1)

Our second stop on the way to Chivay was at the highest point along the way, where everybody stops for the view. The air was thin and cold. Here, too, women had laid out piles of knitted and woven goods. I bought a brown and white striped alpaca wool jacket to go under the black felt hat I'd bought in the market in Arequipa. I paid fifty soles for it, less than twenty dollars, and I've been wearing it steadily ever since. (The picture was not taken where I bought the jacket, but some time later, at an Inca site near Cuzco).
The last part of the road to Chivay descends steeply. In the last email that he sent us, from Chivay, Asher described the terraces cut into the mountains above the town. He spent the night there, and we never found out where he slept. That was one of the mysteries that haunted us during the time he was missing.
In November, 2007, Boaz mainly stayed in Chivay while Ofer was searching for Asher with the Mountain Police. Boaz and Ofer took a room in a hostel on the town square, and when they left, the owner had refused to accept payment. She had been very involved in the search, anxious not only to help but also to show that no foul play had been involved - for the sake of the town's good name and the tourism business.
Judith bought some Christian souvenirs of Jerusalem for her, but she was out of town, and we couldn't give them to her personally.
She bought similar presents for the owners of a restaurant, relatives of the hostel's owner, who had treated Boaz and Ofer to a couple of free meals while they were there. After we ate lunch, the couple who own the restaurant and their daughter came up to the dining room to meet us. Along with the presents for them, we gave them the gifts we'd brought for the hostel owner.
Ofer translated for us as we gave the gifts and told them we were grateful for their kindness and concern.
They were very pleased with the religious items Judith had bought for them. They explained that they were "charismatic" Catholics and hoped to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
When it was time to go, I told them, through Ofer, that I very much wanted to pay for the meal we had enjoyed there, and they answered that they very much wanted to treat us to it. I accepted their hospitality.

Getting Closer

Early on Sunday  morning, October 12, 2008, the Rescue Unit pickup truck took us from Arequipa, a city of with with a population of about 750,000 people, to Chivay, with a population of about 5,000.  Somehow Robert loaded our suitcases,  all the equipment we had bought for the schools, and eight people (six in the cab and two in the back) on the pickup truck, and off we went.

The altitude of Arequipa is 2,380 meters, and that of Chivay is 3,600 meters, and 

on the way you go as high as 4,700 meters.  Until then I hadn't been feeling the effect of the the altitude, but it got to me that day.

All the way I was thinking that these were among the sights that Asher saw on the second to last day of his life, when he took the morning bus to Chivay.

The distance from Arequipa to Chivay is only about 100 kilometers, but it takes three or four hours to cover it on the narrow, winding, climbing and descending roads.  The landscape is barren.  The road traverses a vast, arid plateau with jagged mountains on the horizon.  Part of the region is a nature preserve, and we saw a lot of vicunas, alpacas, and llamas.  We stopped at a way station with a restaurant and stalls where women sold their handicrafts.  We drank some coca tea and examined the woven and knitted garments on sale.

Everything was entirely new to me.

The Second Ceremony

All the time I was with the school principals and Boaz, I knew that Asher had sent us to do these things. His trip to Peru and his death there had brought us to Peru and had given us the mission of helping these people.
We eventually found a computer store and bought two computers for the schools, but by then it was about one o'clock, too late to go back to the school supply shop and buy everything the principals planned to buy, because the High Mountain Rescue Unit had planned a ceremony at their headquarters.
The unit's driver was waiting for us in their pickup truck at the market to take us to the headquarters. He is a short, stocky, powerful, good-humored, patient man, and because of his huge head, he got the nickname "Cabezon." The rescue unit's headquarters was in a half-built, outlying neighborhood, a drive of about twenty minutes.
When we got there, the equipment that Ofer had bought with Robert in Lima was spread out on a table - all kinds of high quality gear for climbing, camping, first aid, and communications. The members of the unit were quietly inspecting the equipment.
Meanwhile I looked at some of the pictures on their bulletin board and got a better idea of the kind of work they do. There were photographs of the men on mountainsides in the snow and on rafts in the river. Aside from Colca Canyon, there is another very deep canyon in the area, the Cotahuasi, where people can also get into trouble. The rescue unit has to be prepared to go where people probably shouldn't have been in the first place.
The ceremonies that Ofer and Robert planned were important, though they weren't attended by anyone beside ourselves. They gave our presence an official quality, which partly defused the emotional tension and made it easier for everyone to express and control feelings. The men knew that we were the parents and siblings of a young man we cared intensely about, and we knew that they had exerted themselves beyond what could be expected of them to find him, when they still thought he might be alive, and to locate and recover his body, when we knew he was dead. They did it because Ofer had bonded with them so closely that they adopted his concern, because he made them realize how important it was for us to bring him home for burial, though in their belief system, it probably would not have been so important.
Though the atmosphere among the men of the rescue unit was ordinarily relaxed and informal, for the ceremony they briefly took on military severity, lining up at attention, saluting, and speaking with stiff formality.
Again we emphasized that the equipment had not been purchased with our own money, but with money that we raised from friends and relatives, who had heard the story and identified with it.
Later we ate at a nearby restaurant called Fresno, which you will not find in guidebooks or on websites, a totally local place that served large quantities of ordinary, well cooked food for very low prices (according to our standards). After our late lunch, we went back into Arequipa and gathered up all the loose ends of the day. We met the school principals again, went back to the school supply store (Robert came with us to expedite things), laid out $950 in US dollars for it, and went back to the hotel to rest up after seeing all the school supplies loaded onto the back of the pickup truck.
I enjoyed the intense bustle of the streets around the market. I was getting used to the look of the people: no one seems to be fully European; you are treated to a huge variety of indigenous countenances.
In his emails, Asher expressed enjoyment at being in a world that wasn't yet entirely corrupted by global mega-capitalism. I can see that, but I can also see thousands of people scrambling to make very small amounts of money. Tiny little Daewoo taxis with 800 cc. motors race about the streets of Arequipa and Lima, and the fare for a short ride is about a dollar. So how much could those drivers be earning in a day? There's such great charm in the air here, that it's hard to avoid romanticizing the poverty.

Purchases Continued

There were a lot of clerks in the school supply store, most of whom were not doing very much. You'd never see that kind of inefficiency in an Israeli shop (not to mention an American store). Wages are apparently low enough in Peru that employers can afford to hire a lot of people. That's good for the customers, and the store, which was very large and carried a large and varied stock, was also well organized and clean.
Boaz and I waited on the sidelines for a long time, while the two school principals consulted with the salespeople, diligently writing down the prices of every item. Then, without buying anything, they told us they wanted to get the computers first and then come back to purchase the school supplies, when they knew exactly how much money was available. So off we went to buy computers. On the way we were joined by another teacher from Cabanaconde, a short man wearing a well pressed sport shirt, who seemed to know his way around.
Like the visit to the school supply shop, this quest took us to places where most tourists in Peru would never think of going. The first stop, a brisk ten minute walk farther away from the central square than the market, was an electrical appliance shop, which sold televisions, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and a a huge assortment of other appliances, but not computers. As carefully as the principals had done their homework by compiling detailed lists of the supplies they needed, they hadn't found out where computers were sold in Arequipa.
Upon the advice of a salesperson in the appliance store, we then took two tiny taxis a branch of the Saga Falabella chain of department stores, where you definitely don't feel as if you're in a poor, underdeveloped country. We were out of the tourist zone of Arequipa and out of the lower class neighborhoods as well. Saga Falabella doesn't sell to the kind of people who buy in the central market. As composed and self-confident as our school principals seemed, it was pretty clear that they don't patronize Saga Falabella either. Norma, who could probably hike up and down the Colca Canyon without any problem, hesitated before stepping onto the escalator.
There was a small computer department on the lower floor, but no one seemed very interested in selling anything to our group, which would have seemed a bit puzzling to anyone who noticed it: three rural educators, an unsophisticated looking teen-aged girl (Norma's daughter), and two Gringos. Boaz thought that the sales staff might have taken the people from Cabanaconde as a bunch of country bumpkins who had come to gawk but not to buy, but finally someone did pay some courteous attention to us, but, as it happened, they only had one computer in stock, and we wanted to buy two.
Not having been to Cabanaconde yet, I suggested to Norma in my rudimentary Spanish that they might deliver the computer there, and she dismissed the idea out of hand. Now that I've seen how far away it is from Arequipa, and how bad the roads are, I understand why my idea was preposterous.
So off we went in search of another computer store. Time was passing, we weren't making much progress, and Boaz and I were getting a bit antsy.

Purchases

The market in Arequipa isn't for tourists. They sell the things that local people need there. I bought myself a broad rimmed black felt hat to keep the sun off my face and to make myself feel a little better.
That same afternoon we went to an entirely different kind of market, high-end shops selling expensive goods for tourists - sweaters woven of fine alpaca wool, scarves, and jackets - set in a series of renovated cloisters. While the others were shopping, I listened to a couple of indigenous musicians, who were playing pan pipes and various Andean flutes. I talked to them a little and eventually bought a disk from them.
The next day we did shopping of an entirely different kind. We had decided to give about $3,000 of the money we raised in Asher's honor to the schools in the village of Cabanaconde attended by the children of Diego, the man who found Asher's body. We had given Diego the promised reward of $1,500 last January, and we thought that if his good deed was also seen by the people of the village as benefitting them, he would arouse less envy. We also thought such a gift would be an appropriate gesture of gratitude for the people's concern.
Through Robert, Ofer had asked the principals of the kindergarten and the elementary school to prepare lists of materials and equipment they needed, but we weren't sure whether they had really done that.
At nine-thirty in the morning, a striking group assembled in the lobby of our hotel, not the type of visitors tourists customarily entertain. Robert came with a few of his men, uniformed policemen packing revolvers, and that rather took the desk clerk aback. He also brought the two school principals and the teen-age daughter of one of them, who was studying tourism in Arequipa. Norma Maquesilva, the principal of the kindergarten, which serves about seventy children aged two through five, is a short, sturdy woman of about forty, dark-skinned and indigenous looking. Mario Maque Castelo, the principal of the elementary school, with about 170 pupils from first to eighth grade, is a taller man, also dark-skinned, perhaps a few years older than Norma. Both of them had an air of quiet dignity and seriousness. We immediately saw they had done their homework diligently. They had long and clear lists of everything they wanted to buy for their schools and the children, including two computers.
Boaz and I went shopping with them, while Judith and Hannah tried to find someone to frame the certificates of gratitude we had prepared for all the policemen who helpedus, and Ofer went with Robert and his men to do some more shopping for equipment.
Robert and his driver took us in the police vehicle, a rather old white Nissan pickup truck, to a large school supply store at the outside corner of the market building. Boaz and I tagged along with the two principals, with whom we could hardly talk, since our Spanish is rudimentary, and their English even more rudimentary. But it was a treat to see them in action.
Before buying anything, they priced every item, trying to plan things so they would have enough left over to buy the computers. They stood at the counter, consulted with the salesgirls, and made lists and calculations, working slowly and with infinite patience, betraying no emotion.

Arequipa - Day One

Boaz and Hannah were both confident that we were doing something important and necessary, but I still had my doubts. Boaz had spent a good deal of time in Arequipa during the search for Asher, a period of intense anxiety, uncertainty, and helplessness. Despite their best efforts, no trace of Asher could be found. Returning with us wasn't easy for Boaz. Going there at all wasn't easy for us.
I found myself entertaining the semi-mystical idea that we had removed Asher's body from Peru, but we hadn't freed his soul - not a manner of thinking with which I feel at all comfortable.
We walked a few blocks down the sunny street from our hotel to the Plaza de Armas, the central square, with the cathedral or large church, that lies at the center of every town in Peru. I still wasn't feeling the altitude, though Arequipa is nearly 2,400 meters above sea level. We turned into a little alley with half a dozen restaurants on it, and I got so annoyed at the hawkers outside them, who wouldn't stop waving menus in my face, that I refused to go into any of them. We went on to the main square, only to be assailed by another flock of menu wavers, but we had to eat somewhere, so we had lunch on a balcony overlooking the Plaza de Armas. The food was good, and the view of the plaza was worth the extra price of eating in a tourist restaurant.
I was far from used to being in Peru.
We spent the afternoon exploring Arequipa, so by the end of the day I was feeling more at home there. Ofer led us to the city's main covered market, which covers a large city block, not too far from the central square. The last photographs that Asher sent us by email, including the last picture that we have of him were taken in that market.
Naturally, when we got to the market and saw what Asher had photographed, we were overcome by deep sadness. That was one of the hardest moments of our trip, but, as with many other of the hard moments, it was mingled with the bustle and excitement of the market, with the attraction of the very things that had caught Asher's eye.

Moving on to Arequipa

I was not attracted by Lima.  We had spent a few hours in the center of the city  on the day before Yom Kippur, which was a Peruvian national holiday.  The Plaza de Armas and many of the huge churches and public buildings were impressive, but the sky is gray, the city sprawls, and the general poverty is fairly evident.  

At the small ceremony we held in the synagogue there, we met three members of the High Mountain Rescue Unit: the commander of the entire unit, which functions in three locations in Peru: Arequipa, Cuzco, and Huaraz; Robert Grandez, the commander of the Arequipa unit, who had worked with Ofer in searching for Asher; and one of Robert's men.  They wore dark green, impeccably pressed dress uniforms and looked very formal and impressive.

After we reached Arequipa, we got to know Robert and the rest of his men quite well, though we were separated by the barrier of our ignorance of Spanish.  If we had arrived in Peru without any contributions for the High Mountain Rescue Unit, simply for the purpose of expressing our gratitude personally, I think their response would have been no less cordial and sympathetic than it was.

Judith, our daughter Hannah, our son Boaz, and I flew to Arequipa, but Ofer took the overnight bus with the policeman.  There was no money to spare for air fare for them.  In fact, we even had to pay for their bus fare.  The unit's budget is extremely limited.

Arequipa, from the moment we landed at its small airport, was a welcome contrast to Lima.  True, even from the plane you could see that it was also plagued with poverty: it is surrounded by tin-roofed, adobe houses, more like outlying villages than suburbs, but the sky was perfectly clear, the sun was bright, the air was brisk, and the steep mountains all surrounding the city looked  like a painted backdrop, too impressive to be real.

Judith had found a good hotel for us near the center of the city, but not on a noisy street, very close to the Convent of Santa Catalina, one of the major tourist attractions, which we eventually visited.  

Though we weren't really there as tourists, along with the knowledge that we were closing in on Asher's memory, there was the constant effort to see and decipher this new and unfamiliar country.  Arequipa, with its white stone, Spanish colonial architecture, is very attractive.  None of the buildings are taller than two or three stories at most - probably  because of the constant threat of earthquakes.

We decided not to go and see the hostel where Asher had stayed.  It was enough to know that he had spent the last days of his short life in this city.

A Hard Day for Jews All Over

One is not exactly expected to enjoy Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a fast day, but we observed it in the Conservative Synagogue in Lima and enjoyed it even less than we would have, had we attended services in our home synagogue, with our friends, in Jerusalem.

There was a weird mixture of familiarity and strangeness about the congregation: a couple of hundred of well-dressed Ashkenazi Jews very much like the congregations Judith and I knew when we were young - but they were all speaking Spanish.  

After even a day or two in Peru, you realize that European-looking people are the distinct minority there.  Most of the people you see on the street are what the Peruvians call "indigenous" - dark skinned, black haired, almond-eyed native Americans.  There were a couple of indigenous Peruvian converts to Judaism among the others, but most of the people could have been relatives of ours, by their looks.  We didn't exactly feel at home, because we are used to Israel by now, but it was a memory of home, and it was impossible to forget even for a moment why we were in a synagogue in Lima and not in Jerusalem.  

If we'd been in Jerusalem, we would have had to face a Yom Kippur eve without the beautiful singing of our friend Gerald Cromer, who always used to lead the congregation in the haunting "Kol Nidrei" prayer, and who died rapidly of cancer last March.  Sadness there, sadness here.

We took a plane from Lima to Arequipa, Peru's second largest cities, high in the Andes, the day after Yom Kippur.  

Our son Boaz, who works as an attorney in Washington DC, flew in and met us in the airport on our way to Arequipa.  It was wonderful to see him, especially since we had just seen him in America a couple of weeks ago.  Boaz had joined our son-in-law Ofer in the search for Asher last year, and he had gone back to Peru after the body was found to help expedite its transfer to Israel.  Understandably, Boaz was not anxious to return.  He had no surprises to anticipate, only reminders of the dreadful time he had spent there before.

But it was good for us to have him with us.  He has a calm, mature presence

Ceremony at Conservative Synagogue in Lima, Peru, Tues. 7 October, 2008

No sign or plaque identifies the low, gray buildings that house "La Asociacion de Beneficiencia y Culto de 1870," the Conservative Synagogue in the Miraflores neighborhood of Lima. Before entering you are screened through a one-way mirror, and you must pass through two security doors. Once beyond the barriers, you are in a spacious, attractive facility, well-maintained but not lavish or over-impressive - pleasant and comfortable.

In the early evening, two days before Yom Kippur, we held a small reception in the synagogue auditorium (not the sanctuary), attended by Rabbi Guillermo Bronstein, several other members of his community, the staff of the Israeli Embassy in Lima, and two high officers of the High Mountain Rescue Unit of the Peruvian police force, along with one of the men from the unit in Arequipa. They had never been in a synagogue before and had no idea what the building was.

We held the reception there because the World Council of Conservative Synagogues had helped us handle contributions made in Asher's honor, and we were concerned with emphasizing the Jewish and Israeli aspects of our project.

The Rabbi and I both spoke briefly. I spoke in Hebrew, and the Rabbi translated sentence by sentence into Spanish.

Afterward we showed the film that Ofer and Lael Kline made about the search for Asher and the ultimate discovery of his body, emphasizing the devotion and self-sacrifice of the members of the High Mountain Rescue Unit.

I had just arrived in Peru that morning with our daughter Hannah, and we had spent most of the day arranging to receive the funds that we had transferred to the synagogue. We ultimately received just short of $10,000 in cash, and I was extremely nervous about carrying that much money around me in the streets of a city that I imagined to be full of thieves.

The following day, Ofer was due to go shopping with Robert Grandez, the commander of the rescue unit, for equipment that will help the men do their jobs better. In my short speech, I said that the fact that Asher had died in Peru had created a connection between us and the country, a painful connection, but also one of gratitude. I explained that the contributions were not from us personally, but that many of our relatives and friends had contributed generously to this cause, and we hoped that this equipment would help the rescue unit to do its job better on behalf of all other tourists in Peru.

This was the first step in implementing the plans we had been making in the previous months.

If such a ceremony had been held in the United States or in Israel, someone would have made sure that there was press coverage, but it seemed rather clear that the Jews of Lima are interested more than anything in remaining inconspicuous.

It takes a long time to get from Israel to Peru. Hannah and I left for the airport at eleven in the morning on Monday and arrived in Peru at seven the following morning. As usual, before a trip, I was extremely nervous, reluctant to go in fact, and very apprehensive about Peru, though also curious.

Before the trip I had felt listless and indifferent, as if I'd spent all the momentum that had existed in my life before we lost Asher. We undertook this trip out of a sense of duty, not with enthusiasm, and not with the expectation that we would find that cliche of "closure." Before Asher's body was located, we were in terrible doubt, and going back to Peru revived the memory of that period. Once he was buried, our doubt was gone, but so were our hopes.

It was gratifying for us to have the embassy people attend, people we'd spoken to by telephone time and time again during the searches. In a short conversation with our ambassador, a retired Druze army officer named Walid Mantsur, I told him what I've said to many people on many occasions: I didn't want the people who had done so much to find Asher to think that we wealthy foreigners expect poor Peruvians to risk their lives for us. I wanted to emphasize our personal gratitude, as Asher's parents and siblings, for the humane efforts they made on behalf of a total stranger.

Interruption

I won't be posting to the blog in the next month or so.
I'm leaving for Peru tomorrow, and I won't be back at my desk until the end of October.
I intend to take notes, for myself but also with an eye to adding to the blog when we return.
It's been important to me to express my feelings in writing and share them with friends and, possibly, strangers. Writing for me is a means of clarification and self-control.
It's forced me to tread a thin line between what's too personal and private to expose to the world and what's too general to be of interest.
The writer's task is to bring news. If you don't learn anything new from what you're reading, you needn't bother reading at all. Unless you are reading to be comforted and to have your sentiments and ideas reinforced.
All writing is a kind of journalism. That's why "journal" is a near synonym for "diary."
The journalist runs out in pursuit of stories.
The diarist records the stories that have become part of his or her life.
The author of fiction makes the stories up, or twists life stories into barely recognizable forms, in a quest for a different kind of news.
The story I've been exploring here is not one that anyone would ever choose to pursue. You might say that I've been writing about it to keep it from pursuing me.
The journalist's task is to invade other people's privacy and expose what they'd rather hide.
I'm trying to invade only my own privacy here, only to expose what might be meaningful or helpful to readers, and to avoid the need for saying the same thing over and over again in individual letters to friends. I'm hiding quite a bit, don't worry.
But here's something personal:
Yesterday, Shabbat, I was at the lowest ebb that I remember since Asher's disappearance. Every bit of energy had seeped out of me. I had the feeling that every decision I had ever made in my life - from the time I was thirteen and chose to remain at my small private high school instead of applying for Music and Art or Bronx Science, to my choice of college, to my choice of a major in college, on and on through my life - was part of a series of stupid errors based on inauthentic values and insufficient self-knowledge.
I am experienced enough to realize that this was only a mood, probably a reflection of physical fatigue as much as anything else. I also realize that my emotions are still unsteady and an unreliable basis for any serious decision - not that I have any serious decision on the horizon to make. But would such a decision be based on authentic values and sufficient self-knowledge now, as I approach my sixty-fourth birthday?
I'm not fully aware of everything that's seething inside me as I prepare for this trip, plan to pack, buy the last minute things, take care of arrangments that have to be made. It's all lurking just out of sight. But I know it's there - otherwise why would I have stayed up till after one last night, watching comedy shorts on Youtube?

The Old Year and its Curses

On our way from synagogue on Wednesday afternoon, the second day of Rosh Hashana, we happened to meet an old friend of ours, a woman whose son died in an even more pointless way than Asher did.  

She and her husband have reached out and offered us support, but we haven't accepted that offer yet - not because we don't like them, but because we've been overextended.  There's too much to deal with, and our emotions are exhausting.

Our friend gave Judith a hug and said, "What a shitty holiday this is," which was both deeply honest and a bit surprising from an orthodox Jewish woman, speaking about one of the three most sacred days of the year in the Jewish calendar.

The main theme of the Jewish calendar between the beginning of the month of Elul, the last month of the the year, and the last day of the eight day holiday of Sukkot is repentance, judgment, punishment, and reward.  The assumption is that if you've been good, or if you sincerely resolve to be good ("good" here means "keeping God's commandments), you won't die next year.  Otherwise, you will die.  The logical corollary is that if someone did die last year, God was punishing him for something.  This is hardly a comforting thought for people in our position.

Another underlying theme of the High Holiday Liturgy is that, in fact, it is impossible for a human being to be good enough to merit life.  If we are alive, it's because God is doing us a big favor, not because we deserve to live.

So along with the hope for renewal, which is a joyous emotion, there is a dark sense of foreboding and fear.  There's a promise: you can have a new beginning.  But there's also a threat, and the threat is more powerful (and believable) than the promise.

A hymn recited on the eve of Rosh Hashana says: Now there is an end to the year and its curses, now there is a start to a year and its blessings.  But we said the same thing last year, and we didn't get blessings!  What could possibly make us think that a year from now, we'll look back and say, "Too bad we're saying goodbye to this year and its blessings"?  We know from bitter experience that a year from now, we'll be relieved to be rid of the year's curses, yet, somehow, we'll be optimistically looking forward to blessings this time around.

Not that there haven't been blessings for us, even in a year of tragic loss.  Perhaps even the people in Burma whose homes were destroyed and families were decimated can think of a blessing or two.  In life, as in a gambling casino, you ultimately lose to the house, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you won't have enjoyed a good stretch of the game.

None of this is a particularly new discovery.  Before Asher died in an accident, and two of our friends, Angela and Gerald, died of cancer, and our friend's daughter Timora died of cancer as a teenager, and Asher's friend Eric hanged himself, we knew that many people die cruel and untimely deaths, deaths that make the Rosh Hashana liturgy difficult to take.  The men who composed the prayers also did not live in an ideal world where good people lived to healthy old age and bad people died of diseases and accidents before reaching their prime.  They knew as well as we did that life is often cruelly unfair.

So what did they mean by these prayers, and what can we mean by reciting them?

I have three answers.

One is social: we need the solidarity of participation in communal worship to keep ourselves together.

The second is, perhaps, magical or mystical: we hope that, by the force of our prayers, the world will become a good one, ruled by a merciful God.

Finally, we have deep need to give liturgical form to our fears about the uncertainty of life, in order to deal with them.

Zelig Lider, a wonderful man our age, whom we knew slightly over the years, one of the founders of a Jerusalem congregation, known for the intensity and beauty of its prayers, which meets just once a month and on the holidays, went into a coma just before the holiday and died on the second day, a great loss.  The curses of the year have begun already.