I heard the news on the radio, I believe it was on Thursday evening of last week. My attention is high when it comes to women’s stories being told and shared in the media. My antennae rise high up to get as much info as possible and my intuition starts working overtime trying to sense the missing bits of the story.
Alas, once again this is a story of one more, young, beautiful, talented, caring, giving, loving woman, a daughter, a wife, a sister and a mother of an eight month-old baby daughter, being murdered allegedly by her husband at the budding age of 32. Stabbed in cold blood by someone whom Michal loved and cared for, and was in love with and felt attracted to, and had a baby with and kissed and hugged and ate and laughed with. Someone whom she met at her professional training in social work with youth at risk. Someone it had seemed with similar sensitivities to hers who seemed to care for mending, healing and doing good in the world.
When I first heard the story on the radio I said to myself that I should make an effort to research Michal’s life story and write something meaningful about her, to her, for her, and for all the women in our midst primarily, who nurtured her, loved her, were her sisters on the way, beyond her real-life sisters and family. And thank God Michal was surrounded by many of those loving sisterly souls.
I never knew Michal personally and I thought I would start by googling her name to find out more. But as I was scrawling down my facebook feed I was taken aback by reading Lili Ben-Ami’s entry “When the heart breaks into pieces” followed by a death notice on the daughter, sister, mother Michal Sela.
That’s when I understood that Michal was only one person away from me. So far away, yet still so close to my life, my circle, my values; the sister of Lili whom I met through my involvement in one of WIZO’s flagship programs for women parliamentary assistants and spokeswomen that I had enrolled in some five years ago.
Unbelievable, I thought to myself. Michal is the sister of Lili, a woman friend, who empowered women to become influencers, and step into their power. I kind of felt that since Michal and Lili were brought up by the same parents they would share a family spirit of womanhood, passed down from their mother and grandmother.
And the more I read about Michal it felt as if Michal was indeed a great woman, caring to light up the world with her smile, to bring light to the world with her gifts and talents, a woman who had come to do good, a social worker by profession, who cared to mend, to heal, to build, and to empower those who needed some extra support on the way, had a challenging childhood, or an unsupportive familial background. It seemed a great many were nurtured and touched by Michal’s support and guidance over the years.
I wonder how Michal’s baby daughter is feeling in her mother’s absence. How she misses the smell of her mother’s skin when she now nurses. How she has to replace the warmth of her mom’s loving embrace with the embrace of loving aunts, grandma, and her mum’s friends when she drinks breast milk donated by women in the Beit Zait area, not from her mum’s warm breasts but from plastic bottles.
And the breast milk kept coming, so much so that the whole freezer was fully packed and Lili asking on fb to please not bring any more.
The abundance of breast milk that reached the family is telling: 20 liters of pumped breast milk is not a small thing. The whitish nurturing fluid speaks tons: It speaks of a chain of woman to woman support, solidarity and nurturing, of the hundreds of loving women out there who have answered the family’s call and stepped out to help the murdered mother, her sisters and the baby-girl in this terrible moment.
From the generosity of these women I sense that Michal’s baby daughter will be abundantly loved, cared for, supported, and raised as if now her mother Michal is orchestrating a number of substitute loving mothers for her baby daughter from high up for her daughter to be raised by a sisterhood of sorts.
Michal’s daughter will grow up to become a woman too, but what of Michal? What of her dreams? What of her wishes? What of her life? Michal’s life mattered, as each woman’s life matters. No-one has the right to cut a woman’s life short, not even her husband, brother, father or boyfriend. A woman’s life has been given to her to live in full, to maturity, to old age and cronehood.
Ladies, as a tribute to Michal’s life, let us all do our best to raise loving kids, stable mentally, and good hearted. Let us give priority to loving kindness, gentleness of heart, and generosity as we mother our sons and daughters.
Let us all try to undo the traumas that we or our partners lived in our childhood, to heal old wounds, and stop the cycle of perpetrator-victim-perpetrator from being recycled.
Lili Ben Ami shared in one of her facebook posts past the murder of her sister an argument Eliran Malul had with his wife Michal, Lili and their sister Noga at their last family gathering where Eliran was arguing that the suffering of the attacker in criminal offenses goes beyond the suffering of the victim due to old stuff that the perpetrator carries from his past.
All three sisters were in opposition to Eliran’s view arguing that the suffering of the victim is larger than that of the perpetrator.
The victim and the perpetrator carry their pain and each is entitled to theirs, but in a society in modern day Jerusalem in the Jewish year of 5780, in October of 2019, it should be our utmost priority to heal, treat and undo old wounds, so that they cannot possess our pain-bodies, and seek to pass on the wound down and further, on to one’s most close ones.
We as a society need to invest time, money and resources to break the cycle of violence against women from our midst. Only our allocating of these resources would prove that women’s lives in Israel matter.
In this Yom Kippur let us discuss about Michal’s life in our communities, in our synagogues and by our family tables. Let us speak about Michal’s abundant giving and nurturing and aim to strengthen these qualities in us. Hand in hand, let us process and heal the destructive powers within us and around us and uproot the violence in our midst, from our homes, synagogues, churches and mosques.
Thank you for writing this, Yvette. 20 litres of pumped breast milk says so much about women’s solidarity. Michal’s daughter will have many carers, all of whom will remember Michal.