Remembering and Letting Go
Joanne Palmer, The New Jersey Jewish Standard

Mother of murdered boy talks about his death and her life.

Teaneck, New Jersey - Sherri Mandell's book isn't about politics, although it well could have been. She is the mother of Koby Mandell, the 13-year-old who was murdered, along with his friend, Yosef Ish-Ran, 14, in a cave outside Tekoa. She and her family lived - and still live - in a settlement 17 miles from Jerusalem, and the boys were "bludgeoned to death," according to the dispassionate New York Times, on May 9, 2001. The boys' heads were bashed in with stones and they were left in a cave to die; their murderers, believed to be Palestinians "caught up," as newspapers like to put it, in "the escalating cycle of violence," have never been caught.

Sherri Mandell reports on the circumstances of her son's death, and her book, "The Blessing of a Broken Heart," reproduces the Times article about it. But her focus, both in the book and in an interview at the offices of The Jewish Standard, is on how she and her family dealt with its aftermath. It's on the delicate interplay between grieving and growing, remembering and letting go.

Mandell, who is originally from Long Island, made aliyah in 1996; she is still more comfortable in English than in Hebrew. A writer, she has had articles published in such well-respected newspapers as the Washington Post and the Jerusalem Post, and she has taught creative writing at the University of Maryland. She was in Teaneck on the first stages of a book tour; in fact her first-ever author talk was delivered at the Torah Academy of Bergen County here last Thursday, and the second that evening at Cong. Bnai Yeshurun.It is not surprising, given her background, that one of her responses to the nightmare of her son's death was to write about it. Another response was the formation of the Koby Mandell Foundation, which she and her husband, Rabbi Seth Mandell, a former Hillel director, began almost as soon as shiva ended.

The book is an exploration of how she managed to keep alive and moving despite a pain too intense to be described. In fact, she doesn't really try to describe it, although she does a very slow minuet around the edges of that abyss. "I could have stayed in bed the rest of my life mourning him," she writes. "I could have remained broken, resenting my life, my lot. But there is something in me that refuses to be broken, no matter how intense the pain, something that moves toward the light."

The book, however, is not a self-help manual. It is not all about moving toward the light, which would make it hard for all but a niche audience to read. Instead, she writes about her son, her other children, her faith. It's in a way her own theology, which she developed after her son died. Sherri Mandell grew up barely connected to Judaism, she said; it wasn't until she married that she began living a Jewishly observant life. Even now, under the hat and the long skirt of the 48-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman is something of the look of a '70s rebel. "I didn't believe in God, I didn't feel God, for me religion was an emotional, faith kind of thing," she said. "In fact, I hated davening. I didn't go to daven." Instead, she went along with Jewish observance to please her husband, and because she didn't at all mind it, and because she immediately felt at home in Israel.

"Then," she said, "Koby died." Since then, she's developed a religious faith that makes her feel still connected to her oldest son, and to hope that somehow that out of his death will come some good. That does not, she hastens to add, negate the pain, it just helps her deal with it. In her book, she writes about birds, in whose flight she has come to see Koby.

Mandell finds that Israelis deal with death more openly than do Americans. The bitter truth is that Israelis are more familiar with it. "There's such a taboo about death and grief in America, and such emphasis on the idea of moving on, of finding closure," she said. "Of course, those things are not possible. I wasn't friendly with many Israelis" - even though she lived in Israel, her friendship circle included mainly other Americans - "but Israelis understand pain. At shiva, the women were in my face. The Americans kind of came up to me and said 'Hamakon' [the murmured line of consolation offered mourners during a shiva visit] but the Israelis weren't afraid. They were with me. "In Israel, you don't have to be happy all the time. The United States is a place where you're just supposed to be so thrilled about everything. "Not," she hasted to add, "that I want to do any America-bashing. It's just different."

Laughing helps, she has found, in the camp for children and the retreat for mothers of victims of terrorism run by the Koby Mandell Foundation. "Kids are so funny," she said, "and the other kids at camp understand." They laugh at things that would horrify outsiders, she said, or earn them stares of disbelief, or, worse, looks of pity. A reporter once asked a boy in the camp if he had known another terrorism victim. "Of course I knew him!" she said the kid answered. "We blew up together!" A girl who had been badly hurt in the Sbarro's bombing, whose sister had died there, who had been put together over the course of many operations with steel pins, still could tell jokes, she said, and they were funny.

The thrust of Mandell's book is toward healing, toward recovering - although she spares all her readers babble about recovery - going toward the light, but even in the book she acknowledges that the truth is far more complex. "It's very difficult," she said, "because part of me wants to throw up when I think about it. There's something Pollyanna-ish, it seems at times almost as if I'm exploiting his death, but it's not. I didn't write it for that reason. Sometimes I wonder how I can even talk about his death, it's such a horror. But on the other hand, I see it all the time. "I feel that it's the way God created the world. God created a broken vessel, because if you're whole you're not as pliable. If you feel that you' re in control, you're not as open to other people, and to giving and to seeing."