opinion
Yehuda Meshi Zahav:
A life lived in Jerusalem’s bright light
ended in darkness
RON KAMPEAS | JTA
Y 14
JULY 14, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Yehuda Meshi Zahav, the chairman of Israel’s Zaka rescue unit poses in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem, Jan. 19, 2021.

whose name was a Hebrew poem, gold wrapped
in silk.

You knew Yehuda Meshi Zahav when he
founded Zaka, an acronym for “identifying victims
of catastrophe” in 1989 after a Palestinian terrorist
forced a bus over a hill and people died, and he
extended his intimacies to the splattered remains
of the dead.

Just when you were transitioning from your 20s
to the 30s, so was he, and just when you were
leaving behind the hatreds of your youth he was
attaching to the name, Zaka, Hesed shel Emet,
the kindness found in truth.

Because this is how we like to think we evolve,
from driven to kind, from beasts to humans, as
Yehuda Meshi Zahav put it in 2003, when he
described the sufferings of the 900 or so volun-
teers who belonged to Zaka and who needed
treatment for post traumatic stress: “You’re talking
about humans, not angels.”
Angels, in Jewish lore, can be monsters, thieves
of agency.

You knew Yehuda Meshi Zahav when the pro-
tester who once shared with you the heat and
streets of Jerusalem proudly sent his son into
an army he had reviled, and accepted the Israel
Prize, the country’s most prestigious, named for
an entity he once did not recognize. Because this
is how we like to think we evolve from purists
unsullied by wisdom to wise men unsullied by
purity. You never knew Yehuda Meshi Zahav. Boys and
girls who knew him said he was a monster, a thief
of agency, a smasher of intimacies who forced
them into horrors no one should ever know. He
was never indicted, and he denied the allega-
tions. We may never know him. He died last week,
more than a year after he attempted suicide. He
left seven children and his grandchildren.

Yehuda Meshi Zahav hid in Jerusalem’s plain
light. “There are people who saw one awful
image and became traumatized for the rest of
their lives,” he said in 2003. We will never know if
he was the image, or the victim, or both.

When you read an obituary, you want an arc, a
life well-lived. You want anger to melt into kind-
ness, but some furies are resistant to kindness;
they will not dissolve.

My editor wonders why I turn obituaries around
so much faster than profiles. Because the dead
are less likely to betray us with revelations that
bend the arc until it shatters. JE
asiandelight / iStock / Getty Images Plus
ou knew Yehuda Meshi Zahav, or you knew
of him. But really, it seemed as if you knew
him, because he interacted with everyone he
encountered with an immediate intimacy, a shared
purpose, however much his cause ultimately meant
your disappearance.

You knew him in the dry white heat of Jerusalem
summers because he protested, he protested the
very pavement you trod, because he hated the
state, the Zionist state, the state you had made
your own.

You knew him because you were a student and
students protested, sometimes on the same day
as haredim, or because you were a secular Jew,
and your girlfriend next to you at the bus stop was
an abomination, or her spaghetti strap top was an
abomination, or because you became a reporter and
you covered protests, and he sought out reporters.

And whoever you were, he would rush up to
you and share an insight about the police on
the horses, he would explain how best to avoid
them like he was sharing an intimacy, and then
he would rush away. In Jerusalem’s plain light, he
never seemed angry, just determined.

Because this was Jerusalem, a small town pop-
ulated by legions of hatreds and no solitudes, but
also by men and women who shared its streets
and heat and somehow got along. The thick squat
buildings in Meah Shearim bled into the British
Mandate behemoths downtown bled into the
arched Ottoman palaces in Sheikh Jarrah and the
people who hated the idea of you were also your
companions in arms.

You were not the enemy, not you, running for
awnings in winter rains and in summer heat, next
to me at the bus stop, jostling alongside me on
Yafo, in front of me while I waited my turn to pay a
bill at the post office.

The idea of you was the enemy, and that’s what
Yehuda Meshi-Zahav seemed to embody, the
hatred of an idea, a boy in thick black cloth who
moved like a horse in Jerusalem’s dry white heat,
who leapt from the haredim hurling epithets and
gravel at the police, to the reporters whispering
curses, to the police, thrusting forward his boxy
chin bathed in soft red wisps of hair.

He was an anomaly, a soldier who despised
the military, a pre-state relic who was fluent in
post-state slang, a man born to Yiddish speakers