For Vivian Silver, whom we failed — remembering a lighthouse of a human being
Vivian Silver, center left, marches in a demonstration with Women Wage Peace, an organization that she co-founded that centers women in Israel-Palestinian peacemaking. Courtesy of Kenneth Bob
KIBBUTZ GEZER – There was a funeral this afternoon. Like nothing you can begin to imagine. A funeral in a place I love, for a person I love. Family. A funeral for a person who built this place, then set out to build the impossible, a Holy Land of peace.
A funeral for a lighthouse of a human being, whose life was like absolutely no other. And whose death was literally, profoundly, horrifically unimaginable.
Vivian Silver was the biggest person you’ve ever met. Not in height, certainly, but in heart. Barely contained within that tiny body was a person who never took the word “impossible” for an answer. She was so fearlessly ahead of her time, doing the unheard-of decade upon decade, that the rest of us consistently failed her trying to keep up.
Vivian could be steely and caustic when it was called for. Just as she could be warm and sensitive and comforting, loved and loving, with a sixth sense for when and how to support people, her countless friends, her children and grandchildren, or someone she’d never before met, someone who felt otherwise unseen, alone.
She was a person who would never surrender. Not to hatred. Not to despair. Not to supremacism. Never to darkness.
A lifetime ago when we were all new here, Vivian took charge of construction for the entire community, from the ground up — a borderline-scandalous job for a woman in a hidebound kibbutz movement mired and moving backward in cementing ultra-traditional male-female roles. She had already served as the first woman in the kibbutz movement to hold the position of mazkira (socialist-speak for chairperson) of the community. Later, campaigning for women’s rights, she founded the groundbreaking Department to Advance Gender Equality of the United Kibbutz Movement.
For Viv, that was only the beginning.
In 1990, she and her husband, Lewis Zeigen, moved to Kibbutz Be’eri, just three minutes from the border with the Gaza Strip. A one-of-a -kind visionary, a hands-on driving force in a staggering array of projects to address and heal the wounds and injustices of the peoples of the Holy Land, she worked tirelessly to bring Arabs and Jews together, helping to forge ties and working relationships between Bedouin and Jewish Israelis in the Negev, fostering contacts between Israelis and Gazans, striving for a shared society for Arabs and Jews throughout Israel, co-founding the Women Wage Peace organization. At one time, she was in charge of construction on Be’eri, making sure that the conditions and wages for Gazans working on the kibbutz were fair and fully met.
Even after she retired, Vivian volunteered for the Road to Recovery project, driving several times a week to the Gaza border to take Palestinian cancer patients to Jerusalem for treatment.
At the funeral on Thursday, the some 1,500 mourners gathered on the lawn at Gezer were testimony to my cherished friend Vivian’s life and work. Jews and Arabs, secular and religious, urbanites and kibbutznikim, speaking a shared language of long hugs and clear respect. Vivian had taught us all, by example, that the only hope for this country, the only future for this country, is Arab-Jewish cooperation on the basis of equality.
I was standing beside Avrum Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset and a founder of a new Jewish-Arab political alliance/party called All Its Citizens, based on the principle of equality for everyone here. He was scanning the diversity and the cohesion of the crowd, nodding at what it could mean, and what it had already meant to us.
“Vivianism,” he said.
“I call myself a conditional Zionist,” Vivian once said. “I believe in the right of the Jewish people to have a state, as long as we give the same right to the Palestinian people. This could be such a haven to both of our people here.”
There has never been anyone even remotely like Viv. And we failed her.
We failed to do enough to build the world she imagined. We failed to build a Holy Land that was safe for people to carry out the herculean mission of just living out ordinary lives, lives of growth and sweetness and naches and the dependable horizon of a future.
On the morning of Oct. 7, murderers from Hamas, as many as 70 or more, swarmed into the lovely western Negev kibbutz of Be’eri. Before leaving with hostages, they massacred more than one out of every 10 people on the kibbutz, infants, children, innocent women and men, at least 130 in all. One of them was my friend Vivian. The violence of the killing was such that it took nearly 40 days before her remains could be identified.
Words fail. That’s what words do, these days. Fail. But not only words. Ideologies have failed us. Fundamentalist religions have not only failed us, but have turned many of their believers murderous. We’re all on our own now, starting from scratch here. We have no government to rely on. All we have is each other.
From this day on, I’m committing to a different direction. Never to darkness. Whatever I can do, if only in a small way, for reconciliation and cooperation. There’s even a word for it:
Vivianism.
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