Halvayah.

When you're in a foreign country, learning the language, words come up in every day life. It's really different from sitting in a high school classroom with posters of different countries on the wall and a pull-down map. There are words that come up that are fun to learn, like melafafone, which is a cool word, plus it means cucumber, so it's delicious, too. And then there are words that might be useful, but you might still wish you'd never been in the situation where you had to learn them--tipul shoresh (root canal), for example. Or halvayah--funeral.

Rosh Hashannah this year was strange and sad. I traveled to my cousins' house in Even Yehuda on Wednesday afternoon. In Israel, trains and buses don't run on Shabbat or on chagim (holidays), so I had to get in early before the chag started Wednesday evening. We had a delicious, if subdued, Rosh Hashannah dinner (my cousin Sarah might just be the best cook I know). On Thursday morning, we all--me, my cousin Noam who is my age and was visiting from the States, his dad Yossi, and Sarah and Moti all went to the hospital to visit my Uncle Chaim.

Uncle Chaim was 90 and adorable. When my mother was my age, she also traveled to Israel, and Uncle Chaim was her Israeli father. They had a really special connection, which they kept up through all the years. Each time our family was in Israel we visited with Uncle Chaim, and he visited us several times in the States, too. This past year he's been sick and in and out of the hospital, which was difficult for everybody, especially for his daughter Sarah and his son Yossi.

I had visited him in the hospital a few months ago right after my birthright trip. It was strange to see him in a hospital bed, but he was conscious and alert, speaking, and happy to be leaving the hospital that week--which he did. Before my sister left Israel to go home, we visited our cousins, and Uncle Chaim was able to join us for dinner. This was about a month ago.

But Thursday was awful. Every breath was labored and difficult. He wasn't speaking. Noam and I spent the entire day there.

On Friday morning, Yossi and Noam went to the hospital to visit Chaim. He must have passed away a short time before they walked into his room, because they were the ones to find him. My cousins said that soon after, they heard a shofar being blown in the hospital and felt like Chaim's soul was ascending to heaven along with the shriek of the shofar. Because it was still a chag, and Saturday was Shabbat, we had to wait until Sunday for the halvayah--funeral.

It was my first Israeli funeral. The cemetary was very crowded, since it had been a 3-day chag and lots of people had passed away, and needed to be buried on Sunday. Usually, you don't wait in Israel--as soon as the person passes away, you bury him. When it was finally our turn for the rabbi, we all piled into this room that was empty except for the body in the front and a few benches lined across in the middle. The body was wrapped in a white cloth, because you don't bury people in caskets in Israel. It was weird because I could see all the contours of Chaim's body: his limbs, the rise of his nose, dips and bumps. The rabbi told the men to stand in front of the benches and the women to stand behind them. I thought this was strange, because everybody at the funeral was extremely secular, especially my cousins, and so was Uncle Chaim in his life. Usually it's only in Orthodox Judaism that men and women are separated, but I guess this cemetary was for everybody. Also, sometimes in Israel, people are either completely secular about things, or rather religious. There's much less of an in-between than there is in America.

The rabbi said a few words, and then a friend of Sarah's read something that Sarah had written. The whole thing was in Hebrew and a little difficult for me to understand, but it was very poignant and sad all the same. Sarah and Yossi, Chaim's children, and their children, Chaim's grandchildren, all stood in the front with their arms around each other's shoulders. Then they wheeled the body, still in the cloth, to his plot, and we all followed. They placed the body in the hole, and then anybody who wanted to was invited to help fill in the whole with dirt. It was so strange and sad and a little horrible, to stand there and watch piles of dirt dumped onto his body. I cried.

And then we placed stones on the grave as a mark of respect, and drove back to my cousins' house where they are now sitting shiva (the 7-day period of mourning). I'm back on the kibbutz until the end of the week, when I'll travel to my family again for Yom Kippur.