When my mother spoke to Sofi, she proudly reported that they’d brought in a big doctor with sunglasses, from America, to fix up Daviko’s head and face, stitch by stitch.

The next afternoon, my mother hoisted me into Aharoniko’s van, and we went to Tel Aviv to visit Daviko. We went into a room where everything was white, and there was Daviko, connected to some kind of machine. His head was all bandaged up, and only one eye was showing… he looked so funny.

When his mother, Sofi, and my mother went out to the corridor, I said to him, “Tell me something, Daviko. Your father says that adukim are coming here and praying for you. What are they like?”

Daviko’s one eye smiled, and he said in a weak whisper from his stitched-up lips, “They’re dati’im… they have books… they stand around the bed and mumble something… they’re funny.”

“Oh, dati’im,” I said, nodding wisely. “What kind of job is that?”

Daviko’s eye got tired and stopped smiling. “Dati’im,” he said through his nose. “They’re a little weird, you know.”

Chapter 2

It was two months before Daviko finally came home to the moshav, with a scar decorating his cheek. Oh, how we laughed to see him. That scar… if it could talk, it would probably tell you to keep away from horses.

From time to time we would smirk in Daviko’s direction and say, “The adukim are praying for him, the poor thing,” until we were rolling with laughter. But for the most part, we forgot about the accident. And soon enough we stopped noticing Daviko’s scar, even though his face never looked quite right.

With time, the horse went the way of all horses, and Varsano bought himself a tractor. But Daviko did even better; when he was 16, his father bought him a moped.

Half a year later, Sofi got sick — it was that terrible disease, my mother told me — and in a matter of weeks she got very, very old and left this world for some Other World, we weren’t sure where. Daviko came to the funeral, dragging his moped and crying his heart out, and I have no idea how, but out of nowhere, four adukim in a rusty rattletrap of a car popped up in the little cemetery. They said some strange words, and everybody said “Amen” after them. Well actually, it wasn’t everybody — only the ones who knew what was going on.

“Those are the adukim,” Daviko the orphan explained to me. “They prayed for me once, that I should live, and now they’re praying for my mother because she died… that’s what they do.”

Two months before we were inducted into the army, Daviko was speeding along the sandstone path that leads to Isaacito Pardo’s cowshed. He was good with his hands, and Isaacito had asked him to fix a window in the milking area. Just then, Varsano’s tractor came out from one of the orchards and slammed into Daviko’s moped. Daviko did a few somersaults in the air before he landed on one of the main water valves of the yishuv. Magen David Adom came and rushed him to the hospital. I saw it all from a distance. Varsano was beside himself. His mustache turned white overnight. “Just don’t let him die, the poor thing… just don’t let him die,” he kept moaning. “I think he broke a few ribs. My horse almost killed him once, and now my tractor almost killed him,” he sobbed.

Fortunately, it turned out that no ribs were broken, and the injuries were mostly bloodless, but Daviko’s left cheek had come down on a piece of barbed wire that was sticking out from the water valve, and it had cut him deeply. If Sofi had been alive, she would have told everyone how “they brought in that doctor from America… the number one expert in the world, he really knows how to do stitches.”

Moshavniks have this simple faith that doctors from America, with sunglasses, know everything. How wonderful.

I don’t know whether the doctor from America came or not, but two weeks later Daviko came back to the moshav with a new scar that surpassed the old scar from Pochino in every way.

“Vai, vai,” Daviko chuckled. “Soon they’ll make me a professor of scars in the medical academy… I don’t know what they want from me Up there in Heaven.”

When I heard the word Heaven, I said, “Don’t tell me they came again…”

“The adukim,” Daviko laughed. “They came, all right. They have prayers for everything. Prayers for accidents, prayers for scars, prayers for pneumonia…. My mother, zichronah l’vrachah, used to say that they know how to talk to Heaven.”

The moshav kids cheered for us that winter morning when our time came to report for army service, and we went off in Aharoniko’s van to the induction center.

There was an undeclared war between us moshavniks and the kibbutzniks, with each side trying to prove it was better, more athletic, more motivated, more attractive. At the end of the day, the kibbutzniks always won. They had more pilots, more paratroopers, more officers.

But Daviko’s two scars didn’t stop him from doing well in the army. From a private he became a corporal and then a second lieutenant, eventually a captain and then a major, and finally a colonel. He grew a short beard, and his scars discreetly hid behind it.

At 35, he still hadn’t thought of getting married; he was a career soldier consumed by military ambition. His official address was still in his father’s house on the moshav. He would park the jeep in front of the house, and strut up to the front porch in his uniform. Aharoniko would be waiting for him, taut with anticipation, holding a tray with a cup of cinnamon flavored tea, three spinach bourekas, and two hard-boiled brown eggs, with a proud smile that stretched from here to the highway. “If your mother were alive, she’d be so proud of you….”

By that time, I was far away from the moshav. But my friends from those childhood days were still there.

Chapter 3

After 40 years away from the moshav, I found a letter in my mailbox. “Dear Yaakov,” it said. “You are invited to a reunion of the chevreh from Moshav Beit Halevi…. Please be prompt; we have a full program prepared. Don’t forget to bring old stories, memories, or whatever nostalgic items you have stored away. We’re meeting on Daviko’s lawn.”

I felt something tugging at my heart. I’d traversed many decades on life’s pathways. I hadn’t seen some of those old friends for 30 or 40 years; I’d subsisted on fragments of information about what they were doing, what they’d gained and lost, who’d been born.

Suddenly my feet were itching to fly over the green, fragrant clover field, and Varsano’s bell was echoing in my ears: “White bread, dark bread, don’t forget to pay.”

When I walked into the middle of Daviko’s lawn on that chilly evening, there was a collective gasp from the chevreh. Most of them hadn’t known. Most of them hadn’t heard. They just stared at me, dumbstruck.

“I’m gonna faint, I don’t believe it, Yakoviko’s a dos, an aduk…” someone finally said.

Old Aharoniko spoke up next: “Come here, you big oaf, so you turned dati, come have a glass of cinnamon tea like your Ima makes so well, I made sure to save you plenty of bourekas.  It’s all kosher Badatz.” Of course.

Daviko and I had a long hug, trying to bridge the gap of so many years of physical and mental separation between me, the aduk, and him, the military man decorated with medals. And then they sat me down in the middle of the lawn and peppered me with questions. “Why? What happened? What was missing? Did you have some kind of life crisis? Did you have a dream that scared you? Why would a boy from our moshav become religious?”

Go try to explain to them.

When the clamor settled down, Colonel Daviko the Bachelor sat next to me and we laughed together about the time he got kicked by Varsano’s horse Pochino and his mother made sure they got a doctor from America, and about the two scars that couldn’t stop his career.

And then, just like an eight-year-old kid, Daviko asked me, “So you want to tell me that you pray to the Heavens like the adukim… and now you know all about that job, and how to be an aduk?”

I gave him a long look, and with a touch of melancholy I envisioned him 40 years earlier, running and cavorting like a little goat in the clover field. Like that little goat, he had no clear destination, no knowledge even that there was supposed to be one. How could I explain to him, this army officer, what happens at the end of the road?

I scraped out a few lame words of explanation, and Daviko cut me off. “That’s okay, Yakoviko, you chose okay for yourself. I remember those adukim from the hospital,” he said. “They’ve got some great prayers. I’m alive, that’s a fact.”

Chapter 4

One morning Aharoniko called me at the office. “Yakoviko, come to the moshav. He’s dead. My boy is gone, he’s gone…. The army had a training exercise, he was riding in a jeep, the driver lost his balance, and they fell into a ravine, in Midbar Yehudah. He’s gone, my boy, he’s gone. He didn’t leave me grandchildren, it’s all gone… come, Yakoviko, you’re like a son to me.”

Daviko had a proper military funeral. An army rabbi led the service, putting artificial pathos into his voice with a lot of trills that were lost on the IDF soldiers and elderly moshavniks in attendance. Aharoniko leaned on his cane, unable to cry, because he would fall apart if he did, a man over 80 years old left with nothing. I put my arm around his shoulders and tried to comfort him. He almost broke all the teeth he still had, trying to say Kaddish.

The sun slowly set. The soldiers went back to their bases, the old moshavniks went back to their homes. Daviko was buried in the military section of the moshav’s little cemetery. We stood by the grave for two hours, Aharoniko and I, unwilling to surrender to the darkness, the gloom, and the hopelessness that threatened to envelop him.

“It’s over, I have nothing left,” he sobbed softly.

“Listen to me, Aharoniko; I have something important to tell you. We are Jews; we believe in life after death. There’s a place called Olam Haba, where all the neshamot live. Sofi’s neshamah is there, and Varsano’s, and now Daviko’s neshamah is there, too, with everyone else who went there. I don’t know if it’s any comfort to you, but when our time comes to leave This World, we’ll meet them there in Olam Haba, and if G?d has mercy on us, we’ll dance and rejoice there, and all our scars will be healed… believe me, Aharoniko.”

Aharoniko rested his head on my shoulder and cried.

“I like what you said, Yakoviko,” he finally managed to speak. “Sofi always said that the adukim know it all, that they have prayers for everything, and that in the end, they’re the ones who are right. And you know, Yakoviko, I really believe that G?d loved my family. You know why? Because the adukim were always there for us when we needed them. When the horse kicked Daviko, when the tractor knocked him down…When Sofi got sick and left us… and now,” he jerked his head toward the fresh grave, “now you’re here too. Thank you, Yakoviko. Thank you for coming.”

All the way back to the city, I berated myself: “Rasha merusha! How could you be so wicked? You became a baal teshuvah and you left them behind, you never shared the wealth you discovered! Only when Daviko left this world were you there for him, only when Aharoniko had nothing left did you tell him about the World that’s waiting just beyond. Rasha!”

And to this day, when I think of Daviko and his scarred face, I think my inaction is the deepest scar of all, a scar that refuses to heal. —

Moshav Beit Halevi, located in the Hefer Valley not far from Netanyah, was founded by olim from the Balkan countries and is named after Rabi Yehuda Halevi. It is home to about 200 families that earn a living growing fruit and flowers for local and international trade, and raising milk cows and chickens. It is my birthplace, and was my home until the age of 20. My childhood experiences there remain part of me today, and the characters, descriptions, and events in this story are authentic

(Originally Featured in Mishpacha, Issue 713)