After the war, Pick described the calm bravery of combat engineers at the canal crossing, who erected and maintained the tactical bridges under intense artillery fire. Suddenly he added laughing, “I was sort-of lightly wounded there.” “How’s that? What’s ‘sort-of’?” I asked. Continuing to smile, Pick replied, “Well, it was not for the record. The concussion of one near-miss artillery explosion knocked out my false teeth! They got lost in the dark. I couldn’t eat hard food the rest of the war.” A young Canadian immigrant, befriended by the Pick family, had volunteered for tzan-ha-nim, the parachute corps, when entering military service. Meir Weiss, an exceptional fellow, was intelligent, strong, insightful. He had studied at a Hesder Yeshiva, guided at Moshav Argaman. Widely read, he loved Shakespeare. During the savage 1973 battle in Sinai at Chinese Farm, Meir’s unit deployed to defend the road supplying the counterattack crossing the Suez Canal. He was killed in action along with many comrades. A few months later, Pick and I visited the remnants of his unit now based in Samaria off the Nablus road to the Jordan River. Meir and others were later reburied at Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem. Leaders of the country attended, and of course family members and friends of the fallen. During the eulogies Pick did not bow his head. Later I asked him about this. “Meir knew the price we pay,” Pick said without blinking. “His was a good way to die in these times. We’ll remember him.” In Ein Kerem, poignant echoes from the past rubbed against our anticipations of the future. I felt the vibrations constantly from the earth and atmosphere, my work, conversations, books, the news. I grew to think of Pick as a Jewish Zorba, as life affirming as the Greek, but with a deeper sense of history. Both exhibited toughness bred of survival, defiance, humor, and love. He had a particularly focused side, a clear objective – growing the health and strength of Jewish people and their connection with the Land of Israel. Aaron Pick was a sophisticated political animal, a family man and good friend, and, of course, a survivor, one whose horrible experience in WW2 had tempered and strengthened him, rather than the opposite.

Inheritance, teacher of the way

Part Two: Exploring the land

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