“Look, Yemima!” dozens of bereaved mothers and young widows have said to me this year as they show me a last letter from their loved one.
“Read it,” they ask, and their eyes tell me that, more than they want me to read it , they want me to read him – to reveal something new to them about their loved one, something in his words that they couldn’t perceive themselves.
I understand. For years I’ve tried to decipher the doodles that my little son, who was very ill, drew on my Chumash when I was preparing to teach, but he’s no longer here to tell me what his pictures meant. Through these mysterious scrawls, my child left me with enormous freedom to piece together the story of his life, the story of his death.
I’m reminded of my son’s doodles when I stand before the last words of the casualties of the war. And I try, I try so hard, to read beyond the fleeting letters, to smell the burnt parchment and to bring tidings from that other world to the mother who’s here longing for them…
Each time anew, I discover that when fighters leave final words behind, they are constructing a new secret code, a code secret even to them, since they are writing about a reality that they’ve never experienced. A reality in which they are no more.
What did they want from this last letter of theirs? They intended for us to turn their words over, again and again. They imagined us imagining them writing. They wanted us to understand that, when they wrote about the moment when they’d no longer be here, they thought about only one thing: about us.
About the mother who would cling to these words like a legacy; about the father who would be so proud; about the loved one left behind; about their people, Am Yisrael , for whom they fought. They wanted all of them to know one thing, in the words of poet Natan Yonatan: “He must have loved me, that man.”
In the last words that soldiers – male and female – leave behind, they seek not to be heroes in death. They seek to be heroes of life.
By writing about the possibility of their deaths, they are not tempting death, but defying it, sticking out their tongue at it, attempting to confuse it and send it off to another place, as by sleight of hand. These fighters are the only people in the whole world who yearn for what they wrote with their own blood to never be read.
Last words are no less than Torah, demanding contemplation and study. This is exactly how the first last words in our history were written: in the Torah.
At the end of the Torah, at the edge of the wilderness, eight final verses appear, opening with the words “And there died Moses, servant of the Lord.”
The Sages turn these words over again and again, trying to understand how Moses, who wrote the entire Torah, Moses, the man of truth whose Torah is truth, could write words about himself that cannot be true: “And there died Moses”? But a dead man cannot write!
“Can it be that Moses was alive and wrote, ‘And there died Moses, servant of the Lord?’” the Sages ask in the Talmud, and they answer: “Rather, until here, God dictates and Moses writes; from here on – God dictates and Moses writes with tears” (Bava Batra 15a).
The Sages explain that Moses writes down these last verses as he weeps.
The Ritva, a renowned 13th-century exegete, adds his own moving interpretation: “’Writes with tears’; unlike the entire Torah, which was written with ink, Moses wrote these last eight verses with his very tears.”
Wow. Moses wrote the rest of the Torah with black ink, but the Ritva relates that Moses wrote the final verses with a clear ink, an invisible ink – his tears.
Moses wept. Moses wept a lot. He wept because of how much he loved life. Throughout the Torah, Moses – who fought bravely against the Emorite, Amalek, King Sihon – writes about the value of life. His whole life he dreamt of redemption, of freedom, of a life of liberty in the Promised Land. And precisely because of this, he writes his final message, preparing to die outside of the Land, with tears.
The Sages reveal to us that Moses, with his last words, asks that we not forget him. That we remember his tremendous sacrifice, the fact that he did all he could to see us to victory, to see life flourishing in the Land, though he did not merit to see it. “He said to them, ‘Please, when you come into the Land, remember me,’” (Midrash Deuteronomy Rabba, Va’ethanan).
This is a basic human message, not manipulative but practically pleading: Please, remember me!
When you dwell, every man under his vine and under his fig tree, in days of peace, remember that I played a significant part in bringing about this peace – the peace I so wanted you to achieve, that I longed to experience along with you. Remember that I gave my whole life for the life of this people.
Natan Yonatan wrote a marvellous poem about last words – words of love that are read in darkness.
He wrote these words before the Yom Kippur War. Only looking back, after he lost his son Lior in that war, did he discover that he, too, had written in code without realising it:
“If a painful crown of thorns
is the very thing you love
to the desert I will go
there to study pain.
And were you to love poems
only when written in granite –
I’d live among the crags
and on the rocks I’d write.
Then, when we’ve covered up
with the sands in darkness
and the chronicle
with dark has covered up,
you will tell me words
more fair than tears or gladness;
it seems he must have
loved me, this very man.
And I want to add another line to this poem, with tears:
‘He must have loved living, that man.’”
Rabbanit Marganit is one of Israel’s most influential contemporary teachers of Torah. This is her contribution from a newly published collection of last letters of IDF soldiers who fell since the October 7 Hamas attack, If You Are Reading These Words: The Last Words of 49 Fallen Heroes, which is published by Toby Press
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