Five men come through the windows of the house in Ofakim a little after seven on the morning of October 7, 2023. They carry rifles and grenades and they tell Rachel Edry (b. circa 1958) and her husband David (1955-2024) that they are the police. Within minutes they break the phones, search the rooms, and take the family up to the second floor. One of them holds a grenade near Rachel’s head. They tell David he will not be alive by morning.
Four hours in, near lunchtime, she does the thing that makes her famous. She offers them food. Tea, coffee, Coke Zero, cookies, the date-filled maamoul she bakes, and then chicken. If they are hungry, she reasons, they will be angry, and an angry man with a grenade kills the cook. So she feeds them. She bandages a wounded one and sits stroking his hand. She sings with them. She tells one to lie down because he looks tired. A gunman says she reminds him of his mother. She answers, “I am really like your mother. I will take care of you. What do you need?” Each half hour she says she needs the bathroom downstairs, and each trip lets the police outside the window count her still breathing.
She keeps five armed men fed and calm for close to twenty hours, until two in the morning, when the counterterrorism unit comes through the door and kills all five. Her son Eviatar, a police officer who grew up in the house, stands outside in the dark through the whole night under orders to give no sign that the woman inside is his mother. Both Edrys walk out alive.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave us the way to read what happened in that kitchen. In The Denial of Death he argues that every culture builds a hero system, a set of roles and standards by which a man earns the sense that his life counts in the order of things and will leave a mark death cannot erase. The hero system answers the question no animal can answer for itself, which is how to live knowing you die. Culture hands each of us a script for significance. We step into the role it offers and we feel, as long as we play it well, larger than our own extinction. Heroism, in Becker’s telling, grows straight out of the terror of death.
Most of his heroes are men on battlefields, men with fortunes, men who raise cathedrals or build theories. The kitchen almost never enters the account. Rachel Edry puts it at the center.
Her hero system has an altar, and the altar is the table. Her oldest daughter says the house was always open, that the mother cooked for uncles and neighbors and friends, that anyone hungry knew he could come to Rachel’s house and eat. For forty-two years Rachel ran the canteen at the Tze’elim army base, and the soldiers called her the mother of the soldiers because she fed them and joked with them and worried over them. She names the value herself, in her own words, after the fact. Welcoming the guest, hachnasat orchim, she calls a mitzvah she takes seriously. In her world a woman earns her place in the cosmos by keeping people alive at her table. The kitchen is where she becomes someone death cannot cancel. When the men came through the window, she had four decades of rehearsal for the only role she knew how to play, and she played it on the men who came to kill her.
This is where Becker turns sharp. The five men in her house carried a hero system of their own, and it ran on the opposite fuel. In Escape from Evil he argues that men make evil out of their own hunger to live forever, that we enlarge our own life by spending someone else’s, casting the death we fear onto a victim and standing taller on the corpse. The martyr’s road to immortality runs through killing and through dying in the act. To the man with the grenade, the dead Jew is not a tragedy. The dead Jew is the coin that buys his paradise and his name. His deathlessness needs her death.
So two immortality projects met in one kitchen, and a tray of cookies sat on the line between them. Hers ran on keeping the room alive. Theirs ran on emptying it. She understood, without any theory, that she could not win the war in the room, and so she fought the only war her hero system knew. She fed the enemy to keep him from completing his.
Sacred words do not survive the trip from one hero system to another. Take the word everyone reaches for about her, which is courage. To the commando who came through the door at two in the morning, courage wears a trigger and ends with five enemy dead on the floor. To the men he killed, courage wears the grenade and ends with the man’s own body gone in the service of the cause, the death sought rather than survived. To Rachel, courage wears an apron and pours tea and lasts twenty hours without once raising its voice. Three men could stand in that house and all three could swear by courage, and the word would point three different ways. A Spartan would read her tray of maamoul as surrender. A Japanese officer raised on bushido, for whom capture is the deepest shame and death the clean exit, would not find her in his lexicon at all. A trained hostage negotiator in a Western police service would recognize every move she made, the feeding, the small talk, the slow burning of the clock, and would call it textbook de-escalation and grade her work, and he would be right and he would also miss the whole of it, because for him it is a procedure and for her it is a sacrament.
The word guest splits the same way. Among the Pashtun, the code of melmastia holds that a man who crosses your threshold falls under your protection, and you will die before you let harm reach him, even if he is your enemy and the law wants his head. The Bedouin guest-right runs the same direction. In those worlds the host shields the guest. Rachel turns the code inside out and uses it as a weapon of the weak. She cannot make the killers her protectors, so she makes them her guests, and she binds them with the oldest courtesy she owns, betting that a man eating your chicken finds it a little harder to shoot you across the table. She does not honor the guest. She conscripts him.
And the word hero itself will not hold still. To the five men, the hero of October 7 is the one who dies killing the people of Ofakim. To the people of Ofakim, the hero is the grandmother who refused to die and would not let her husband die and sent five killers out of the world by holding them at her stove until the state could arrive. Israelis reached, almost at once, for Yael from the book of Judges, who gave the enemy general milk and a place to sleep and then drove a tent peg through his skull. The comparison flatters and it also misreads. Yael killed with her own hand. Rachel killed no one. She held the line and let the men of the state do the killing, and she has said she did not always expect to come out alive, and she kept saying Shema Yisrael under her breath the whole time, calling on Him to get her through the night. Her hero system did not ask her to strike the blow. It asked her to keep the room alive long enough for rescue, and to trust God and the police in that order.
Becker would point, last, at what the country did with her after. The hero system does not only set the standard. It pays out the reward, and the reward is symbolic immortality, the face that outlasts the body. Israel paid Rachel fast. Her likeness went up on a Tel Aviv wall in the pose of Rosie the Riveter. She became a character on the country’s biggest satire show, a meme, a mural, a tattoo on strangers, a magazine cover, a name signed to a modeling agency, a woman hugged by an American president on camera. The state chose her as a torch-lighter for Independence Day. A frightened nation took the worst day it had ever known and pressed one grandmother and a plate of cookies into a shape it could carry, and that act of pressing is itself a death-denial device, a way for millions to feel that the day could be survived because here is the woman who survived it. The meme keeps the terror at arm’s length. That is the work the meme does.
Her husband got no such role. David came home from the bomb shelter for his sixty-eighth birthday and met a grenade against his skull and the sentence that he would not see morning. He saw morning. He did not recover from the night. Over four months he stopped speaking and stopped feeding himself, and Rachel bathed him and dressed him and fed him as she had once fed the soldiers and the killers, praying to Him not to take the man away, and then the man was gone. He had no hero script to step into. The culture had a role ready for the wife and none for the husband, and so she lived twice and he lived once and then could not.
The cookies did not soften her. She calls the house the site of a pogrom and says she sees the terrorists when she closes her eyes, and she has gone back to live in that house anyway, because it is her home and her kitchen and her spot, and a woman whose whole worth runs through her table does not abandon the table because killers once sat at it. That is the hero system holding under the worst weight it will ever bear. She fed the men who came for her life, she buried the husband the night took from her by inches, and she went home to bake again. The role asks no less and offers no more, and she has not stepped out of it.
