The Lion: On Ordinary and Extraordinary Grief. In Memory of Amitai Even Shushan z"l

The Lion

There is nothing normal about the life we are living.

There is the veneer, of course. We still shop, work, order takeaway and track its arrival. We still think about Pesach and the cleaning. We still wake up, brush our teeth, drink our coffee, and get on with our day. And in between, we duck for cover from an incoming missile. We check where the latest one has fallen. We run to the nearest shelter, count the ten minutes, and then continue — to work, to zooms, to errands, to dinner, to bedtime. We reassure the younger ones that this won't be for much longer, and tell the older ones that they are strong, that they are resilient, that the battle they are fighting is not only ours but the world's.

But underneath that surface — underneath the veneer of ordinary life — there is a lion. Not the lion of the current military campaign ‘Roaring Lion”. An internal lion, a private one, that wants to roar so loud and so fiercely that the sound itself might crack something open. And we are afraid to let it loose. We don't know where it might stop, what it might destroy, what might be left standing after its release.

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Two years ago today, we lost Amitai.

In a moshav kehilla of thirty-five families, every child is family. But Amitai was not simply family — he was my daughter's soul brother. They grew up in each other's houses from the age of three. He was her older brother in everything but blood, and he was that for my other girls too. He was the centre of all the action — the chevra man, the revered madrich, the one who was serious and fun in equal measure and somehow made everyone feel that they were the most important person in the room. Looking at his smile, it is still — it will always be — impossible to believe he is gone. The pain is so deep, the loss so visceral, that sometimes it feels unreal. In fact all of it feels unreal. How does anyone mourn properly when we are still suspended in this Groundhog Day of veneer normality?

There is nothing normal about breaking that news to your nineteen-year-old child. Nothing normal about watching her speak at his funeral alongside the tight-knit group of eight who grew up as one. Nothing normal about navigating grief in all its ambivalent colours across two years of continual war. Nothing normal about not being able to mark this anniversary properly because the missiles are still coming. Nothing normal about watching your child in the type of pain you have never experienced that cannot be reached or fixed. Nothing normal about fathers and mothers burying their sons, newly married wives burying their husbands, or the sentence that forms in your own mouth — I'm lucky, I have a mamad — a safe room having become the measure of my gratitude.

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Remember that lion?

I just let it out. Marginally, here, with you.

But here is the other side of that lion — and I know how this sounds to the outside world, I know how dissonant and incomprehensible it might seem but here goes: there is nowhere, and I mean nowhere, I would rather be. AND there is nowhere I would rather be raising my children.

The other day I was walking with my daughter Noa, wearing sandals and a sweater in the cold. I laughed: how have I given birth to such Israeli children? It was a laugh of pure pride. Tanya White from London, so very British, now on an Israeli moshav. Because despite everything — because of everything — these children are what my ancestors could only dream of. They are fighting battles our people haven't fought since the Maccabees, living history we couldn't have imagined since King David. And they experience Jewish life not in black and white but in full colour — that bittersweet, irreducible mixture of pride and grief that has always been the engine of Jewish resilience, and that finds its fullest expression in the Israeli soul. That does not erase the pain or make it bearable. But it gives it context — places it within a larger arc that holds pain and joy, loss and love, sacrifice and triumph, without asking you to choose between them. And somewhere in that realisation I understood: I am now another piece of that story. Another dot in the long, astonishing, agonising, miraculous pattern of Jewish history.

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Today, on the second anniversary of losing our beloved Amitai, I think about the countless Jews across the centuries who went to their deaths with their faith intact — with the unshakeable conviction that despite everything, there was no other people they would want to be part of, no other story they would want to be inside. And I think about Amitai, and I know — as his family and friends say again and again — that he would choose this path even if he had known the outcome.

But let me be precise about what Amitai's choice means. Our enemies sanctify death — they celebrate the grave as victory, raise their children on the promise of martyrdom. We are not that. We have never been that. We fight, and we grieve so deeply because we fight, in the service of life. Every soldier who falls is a world destroyed, not a world consecrated. Amitai did not go because he was indifferent to his life — he went because he understood that some lives can only be protected at great cost to one's own. He, like thousands before him and alongside him, understood that to be a Jew is to take responsibility for your people — not as an abstraction, but as a lived, embodied act of commitment. This is what it means to belong to a people who have known centuries of suffering and have still, always, chosen life. Who were victims long before victimhood became a hashtag, and who have never — not once — chosen to be defined by it. We mourn because life is sacred. We fight because life is sacred. The grief and the courage are not contradictions, they are two faces of one truth.

So we can roar like the lion of Judah — fierce, proud, purposeful, rooted in three thousand years of survival and flourishing. And we should. That roar has kept us alive.

But I think we also need to make space for the other roar. The personal one. The one that doesn't sound noble or historical or redemptive. The one that is simply — devastatingly — human. The roar of those who have lost the ultimate: a child, a husband, a soul brother, a future that was just beginning. And the roar of those who have lost something harder to name— routine, safety, predictability. The mother who hasn't slept properly in two years. The child who knows how to detect an incoming missile and casually enter a safe room. The person who feels guilty for struggling because someone else's suffering is objectively, measurably worse than their own.

But here is what I have learned: someone else's greater pain does not silence your lion. It doesn't shrink it or shame it or render it illegitimate. The roar I need to release is mine. It doesn't compete with anyone else's. Grief is not a hierarchy and suffering is not a competition.

So today I am making space. For the noble roar and the desperate one. For the lion of history and the lion of heartbreak.

For Amitai.

For Mali, Effi, Orel Liad and Avishai.

For all of us who carry him — and carry everything else — and keep going anyway.

I am letting my lion out. You can too. We have earned the right to roar.

לעילוי נשמת אמיתי בן מלכה ואפרים הי"ד