Remembering Shachar

Here at L’chaim: The Jewish Letters Project we have written a tiny bit about the idea of an afterlife of a wisdom letter. The writer can not fully know what the impact of a letter will be. Rabbi Elana Zaiman took her father’s letter out of her purse when she was having a lousy day to hear his voice and “feel his presence.” When Dr. Paula David’s son Eric got married 25 years ago in Toronto, she read the words of David Kochberg, her maternal grandfather, at the wedding. I learned that the letter had also been part of family Seders, Chanukah parties, and funerals. Words travel. Similarly, after his wife’s passing, David Finger of Texas talked with his rabbi about the tradition of ethical wills or what I call wisdom letters, and wrote a Dvar Torah in 2023 in honour of his late wife, Phyllis Finger, who had worked as a lawyer in Houston. In his Dvar Torah, he shared what he had learned about the tradition of writing such a letter. His wife’s own letter had inspired his own learning.

What is intriguing is that one can never predict the impact of a letter, and what will emerge afterwards. There are likely many letters that are not remarkable and are unread, forgotten, or ignored. I sometimes wonder about lost letters waiting to be found in an obscure location, a hiding place or a forgotten shoebox.

The late David Finger found his late wife’s letter in her desk drawer by accident. His late wife Phyllis, had written a letter and tucked it into the drawer of her desk in her legal office in Houston, Texas, but she had not told her husband or adult children about its existence. After her passing, David found the letter when he was searching for something else in the drawer. The wisdom letter, sometimes called an ethical will, is not a legal document. It has no legal power. Its power resides in the voice of the person who wrote it, as well as the recipients who hear the words.

Here at L’chaim: The Jewish Letters Project, I have a soft spot for the creative outliers. Sometimes, outliers include the recipients of the letters. Take, for example, the descendants of Sholem Aleichem. The great Yiddish writer asked his descendants to gather once a year on his yahrzeit to read the stories that made them laugh out loud from a repository of the comic material he had composed. He left it up to his family members to determine what was laugh-out-loud funny, and for more than 100 years they have been honouring this wish. The room has been filled with laughter in his memory. The power of his request resides in the comedy itself. Comedy is a powerful weapon against despair, and despair is a luxury Jews can not afford.

It’s a wild card as to what happens after people receive a letter. Some of what happens afterwards depends of course on the content of the letter, the people for whom the letter was written, and the community where the words land. It is an issue of reception, and what folks do with the words they hold in their hands.

In this regard, I want to highlight the story of a 21-year-old Israeli, Shachar Fridman, who was killed in the war with Hamas in November of 2023. He was on his post-army release leave, with a ticket for Thailand purchased. Instead of going on his travel adventure, he chose to stay and defend his country. He was killed on November 18, 2023, while protecting other soldiers from terrorists. He was a paratrooper from Jerusalem who worked with austistic children. His Hebrew name, Shachar, means dawn.

I am sharing his letter here. The letter is short and direct.

Smile.
Strive to make every person you meet smile too.
Be open to criticism and always try to improve yourself.
Know that the greatest quality a person can have is the ability to make another person happy.
Open your ears to the needs of others and open your eyes to their pain.
Try to smile as much as possible even when it’s hard.
Pay attention to the small people who fall in the corners of the eye.
Appreciate the little things the world has to offer, especially nature and music.
And most importantly, be good people in your own way. Don’t let
society dictate to you what makes you good people,
just try as hard as you can,
and even when you fall, know that that’s the road to success.
Love yourselves and the world. When you radiate happiness
a circle of joy will slowly form that will create a better world.

— Shachar — https://remembershachar.com/en/

What happened after the letter landed illuminates a great deal about him and the community he was part of, including his family. The projects launched in Shachar’s honour include a cafeteria predicated on chesed or kindness where volunteers bring homemade baked goods and the creation of natural spring as an oasis. There is music inspired by his writing, and a newly launched hospital program helping marginalized patients with dementia and a children’s book. There are chocolate bars and wine bottles with his name, as well as a Torah mantle in his honour from a congregation in Coconut Grove Florida.

I will devote the next post to exploring how these innovations unfolded as a way of honouring his memory after interviewing his mother, Liat Fridman who internalized the content of her son’s words and then deployed his letter as a map for her future navigation about how to live while honouring his words by creating innovation in the name of goodness.