Desperately Seeking Koby

For me, like many English speakers in Israel, Sherri Mandell was a familiar name by the turn of the millennium. She was a kind of Israeli Erma Bombeck that wrote short and light stories for the Jerusalem Post, spinning well written tales of children and life, and always wrapping it up with a cheerful moral.

One story in particular caught my eye. It is an account of how her son's canary escapes and just when all is lost, Ibrahim, an Arab construction worker that is barely literate but with good hearing, helps them find the canary. She ended with, "Maybe this is how peace will come, I thought. Slowly. People learning to listen. One bird at a time."

Sherri wrote that shortly after the Palestinian Authority had declared war on Israeli commuters, school children and innocent bystanders; so I didn't buy her optimism. But I liked the story. I cut it out of the newspaper and saved it because it was written well and pleasant to the ear.

One spring morning Sherri's oldest son Koby cut school with his best friend and hiked down into the wadi near their settlement that is halfway between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. Search parties found the boys at dawn the following morning. They had been stoned to death in one of the caves in the canyon walls.

The Blessing Of A Broken Heart is Sherri's journey after her son's murder. We follow her as she chooses to enter that land of shadows parents fear the most, a cave so dark that "you can't even see your own hand, but have to trust that when you step, the ground will still be under you."

I say she made a choice because she could have collapsed, paralyzed by grief; but instead she decides that if Koby has been taken into the darkness, then she will follow, regardless of the pain.

"I want to feel the pain – for if I go into my pain and truly experience it, swim in it, there is a chance I will emerge on the other shore of my loss, still pained and struggling, but with a different vision. I will always be living in the land of suffering. One who enters this pain understands that death is part of life, and is here, always. Death now is something that will release me and allow me to see Koby again. Death no longer scares me."

Writing during an unparalleled period of violence and hatred, Sherri doesn't settle accounts with her son's murderers or voice her opinions. She doesn't seek revenge; she seeks one thing and one thing only – Koby. She finds faith along her way and emerges with hope; "…many of us live with broken hearts. But when you touch broken hearts together, a new heart emerges, one that is more open and compassionate, able to touch others, a heart that seeks God. That is the blessing of a broken heart."

She has gained hope, and she has been transformed from a woman that wrote well, into a writer, perhaps a great one. You can find an excerpt, "Koby's Death", on the Jerusalem Post's website. It is one of the most powerful pieces of prose I have ever encountered. Before, she wrote things that sounded nice, but didn't ring true. In The Blessing Of A Broken Heart there is sincerity, truth and meaning. That too is a blessing, but at what a price.