Transcending Grief
Sandee Brawarskyr, The Jewish Week

October 19, 2003 -- A sukkah like no other stands in Jerusalem; its walls are the panels of a memorial quilt, with squares sewn by more than 100 women from all over Israel to honor the memories of those lost in terror attacks.

Sherri Mandell, who is one of the initiators of the quilt, explains that “loss envelops a person from all sides, the way a sukkah does. This sukkah gives you an a sense of dwelling in that experience.”

The sukkah is a project of the Koby Mandell Foundation, founded by Sherri and Seth Mandell, whose 13-year-old son Koby was killed on May 8, 2001. That day, he and a friend, Yosef Ish-Ran, cut school to go hiking near their home in Tekoa, a West Bank town near Jerusalem. Their bodies were found the following day; the boys had been stoned to death.

Sherri Mandell also honors the memory of her son in a new book, The Blessing of a Broken Heart (Toby Press), an unusual, intimate and powerful work about mourning. Her writing is poetic and spiritual, grounded in the teachings of Judaism. While her grieving is never-ending, she has written a book abundant with holiness, love and beauty, not hate and despair.

Early on she writes, “Hate can steal a person’s soul. But I will not let it. Instead, I will learn about the soul, about the new land Koby and I share. I will learn the customs and the language, to translate the signs I might otherwise miss. ... Since Koby’s death, I have had moments of peering through the curtain of ordinary reality, touching something greater, deeper, more extraordinary. Sometimes I think that God and Koby are in cahoots, preparing these moments for me. I pray to my son, and I can’t help but feel that Koby sends me his blessing.”

In an interview with The Jewish Week, Mandell explains that writing was a way of dealing with the pain, and also a way of connecting to her son. At first she didn’t realize that her accounts of her learning and experiences would turn into a book, but soon after she began, it took form and she completed it in four months.

She read many books on grief but found that “most are how-to guides, written without the feelings. I felt the feelings in this book.” It includes “all the wisdom I was given by other people about pain, suffering and loss. It does contain help for others — a line of healing, an orientation that changes. It happened to us after Koby died. You can use the power of a tragedy and transform it and bring good into the world.”

Mandell, 48, who grew up on Long Island, says that her early life wasn’t at all spiritual, not connected to Judaism. While traveling after college, she met her American-born husband in Israel, and took on her husband’s Orthodox practices. (They returned to the U.S. and moved to Israel in 1996.) While she enjoyed the intellectual parts of Judaism, she struggled with belief. After Koby’s death, she felt a need to understand where he was, how Jews had dealt with this kind of loss, and study was a natural path for her. One rabbi who visited her who had also lost a child told her that people would try to comfort him by saying things like, “Sorry your child is lost,” and he’d reply, “My child is not lost. My child is with God.”

She is remarkably candid about mystical experiences. Among them are many encounters with birds and baby birds during the first year after Koby’s death, suggesting his presence and also the mysteries of the world. She writes that birds “symbolize the connection between heaven and earth. We look at them and see the bliss of soaring between both worlds. They give us a taste of pure freedom. When God speaks to me, opening windows into the higher realms, those windows are opened for me by birds. The birds are my angels, telling me to look up and not sink into the gravity of my sadness.”

Mandell learns much from teachers with whom she studies and also from the women who come to see her. “They reach into their souls and give me divine pieces of themselves; love and compassion — they feed me with their words. Israeli women are unafraid of suffering; they know death as a companion.”

Now, she is comfortable comforting others, and unfortunately, there are many occasions in Israel for her to do so.

Pain, she writes, “is a rock you throw into a calm pond. It keeps expanding. As soon as you deal with one pain, there is another to take its place. There is the acute pain, which comes like a butcher knife to your heart; the pain when you see your son in a photograph, his sweet smile. ... There is the chronic pain, the pain of missing him coming in the door. ... There is the pain of him not being there for his siblings. ... Then there is the pain of losing your future with him ... the pain which is a vise around your throat of not talking to him ... the pain of the cruelty inflicted on him. ... The pain of knowing that death is there lurking in the corner for all of you.”

She and her husband and their three children still feel at home in Israel. They have considered leaving Tekoa, but not Israel. “It would be betraying Koby to leave. My job is to be more Jewish. This has made me feel Israeli, tied me here,” Sherri Mandell says. She admits it would be difficult to leave Tekoa and the people they know, the people who knew Koby. “This was a community loss, too,” she adds.

She writes that she is no longer the person she was. “But rather than mourn the person I was, I work to bless the person I have become.”

Mandell explains that according to the Zohar, each soul has a mission in the world and a soul can only acquire a new mission when a person dies and that soul is later born into a different body. In near-death experiences, though, a new soul may be brought down into that person’s body. “In suffering my son’s murder,” she writes, “I’ve also been reborn. ... I’ve acquired a new mission in life. Koby is leading us to a new sense of holiness, still bumping into us, forcing us to define ourselves, creating a deeper belief in God and in our mission on this earth.”

The Koby Mandell Foundation also runs healing retreats for bereaved mothers and widows, for families and for young adults as well as Camp Koby and Yosef, a program run during the summer and school holidays for children who have lost parents or siblings.

After Sukkot, the quilt panels of the sukkah will be exhibited around Israel and perhaps in American synagogues too.