{"id":193894,"date":"2026-06-18T08:15:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T16:15:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193894"},"modified":"2026-06-18T08:15:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T16:15:05","slug":"saba-is-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193894","title":{"rendered":"Saba Is Here"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the morning of October 7, 2023, a retired major general rides south out of Tel Aviv with a pistol in his lap and his wife at the wheel. Noam Tibon<\/a> (b. 1962) commanded paratroopers, a brigade in the West Bank, the northern border with Lebanon. He served thirty-five years and then he stopped. The army has other men now. This morning none of them come. His son Amir, a journalist at Haaretz<\/a>, calls from a reinforced room in Kibbutz Nahal Oz<\/a> and tells him the terrorists stand outside the window and that this might be the end. Tibon takes his pistol. Gali drives. The family calls him 911 because whatever you need, he does it.<\/p>\n

Gali drives fast. Police stop them. She tells the police they are going through, and they go through the fields in the jeep. On the road they pick up a young couple who ran from the music festival, and they stop for soldiers bleeding at a roadblock, and Gali takes the wounded to a hospital while Tibon catches a ride toward the kibbutz with a friend, another old general, Israel Ziv<\/a> (b. 1957). Ziv drops him at the gate and drives on to Be’eri<\/a>, where the killing is worse. Tibon walks in with the first soldiers. He knows the ground. He points the way. The clearing goes house to house, and an open shelter door means the people inside are dead or gone.<\/p>\n

Inside the safe room, Amir and Miri hold the handle of the door and keep the girls quiet. Galia is three. Carmel is one. The room is the girls’ nursery, built of the special concrete every border home keeps for the rockets. The parents speak in low voices about the chance that all four of them die in this room. The phones lose their charge. Ten hours pass.<\/p>\n

At four in the afternoon a hand knocks on the window. Amir, it’s Dad. Then the older girl breaks the silence she has kept all day. Saba higiya, she says. Grandfather has come. That is when they cry for the first time.<\/p>\n

Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924-1974) built a whole anthropology on a single wound. Man is the animal who knows he dies. He carries the knowledge of his own end inside an animal body that wants to go on, and the terror of this drives him to build what Becker, in The Denial of Death<\/a>, calls a hero system. A hero system is a scheme of cosmic significance, a set of rules that tells a man what counts as a life worth its mortality and what part of him survives the grave. Cultures are hero systems with armies. Religions are hero systems with priests. A man earns his worth by playing the local game of heroism well, and he defends the game with his life, because the game is the wall between him and the void.<\/p>\n

Watch the word the child uses. Higiya. He has come. He arrived. The whole story turns on a man arriving in a particular room at a particular hour with his particular body. The Israeli officer trains for this word. The command an Israeli officer gives is acharai<\/a>, after me. He does not send the men. He goes first, and the men follow the back of his neck. Tibon spent thirty-five years learning to be the first body through the door, and at sixty-one, with the army absent, he is the first body through the door again, now for two granddaughters asleep in a nursery.<\/p>\n

Arrival sounds like a plain word. The word holds a different thing for each man.<\/p>\n

For the Calvinist<\/a> who waits on the providence of God, arrival is the second coming, the return no general and no jeep can hurry. The body in the room is a vapor. What comes, when it comes, comes from outside time, and a man’s work is to stand ready and leave the timing to Him.<\/p>\n

For the Theravada<\/a> monk on his mat in the forest, the craving to arrive anywhere is the rope that ties a man to the wheel of birth and death. The grandchild he loves is a knot to loosen, with tenderness, and not a line to defend with a gun. To arrive, for him, is to stop arriving. The end of the road is no road.<\/p>\n

For the Singularitarian<\/a> in the server farms of the Bay, arrival is the morning the machine wakes and a man no longer has to die. He freezes his head against that morning. He does not drive toward a window with a pistol. He waits for the curve to go vertical and carry his pattern across the gap that flesh cannot cross.<\/p>\n

For the man who filmed himself that same morning crossing the same fields toward the same kibbutz, arrival means the gate of paradise swinging open for the martyr. He drives the opposite direction inside the same word. His hero system pays its highest wage for his death in the act of killing<\/a>. Tibon’s pays its highest wage for his death in the act of shielding. The road between the two runs short. The two immortalities face away from each other.<\/p>\n

Becker spent his last book, Escape from Evil<\/a>, on this short road. The evil men do, he argued, grows out of the heroic and not against it. Men kill for their immortality. They kill the carriers of a rival scheme because a rival scheme is a rumor that their own might be false, and the rumor cannot stand. So two hero systems meet on the border of Gaza, and one sends a grandfather with a handgun to put his old body between children and the killers, and the other sends a young man with a rifle and a camera to turn the killing of children into worship. The frame does not make these equal. It tells you where to look. Both men reach for the same thing. You judge them by what the reaching costs other people.<\/p>\n

Most hero-system essays catch a man at the top of his climb. Tibon is on the way down. He did his heroism. He gave the state its thirty-five years and the state gave him a pension and a chair at the north Tel Aviv cafes. Becker has a name for what an old man wants. He wants to be the cause of himself, his own father, the source. The deepest version of that wish, when a man can no longer be a soldier, is the grandchild. The line goes on. Something of him crosses the gap. On October 7 the wish and the emergency arrive in the same phone call.<\/p>\n

And the army does not come. This is the part the documentary about him, the one wrapped in the flag of a family and not a country, leaves a little in shadow. Tibon’s whole life rests on a promise. The Jewish state guards Jewish children so the safe room holds, so “never again” is a wall and not a prayer. At 7:22 that morning he texts the chief of staff that terrorists stand inside the kibbutz, and the answer comes back: they know, they sent troops. The troops are late by hours and short by divisions. The hero system fails at the one hour he built his life around. So the system shrinks to the size of one man. A pistol. A jeep. A wife who drives through the fields.<\/p>\n

The morning after, Tibon says, he woke a different man. He turned on the custodians of the failed promise. He marched against the government. He went into politics and said he might fix the army that left his grandchildren ten hours behind a window. Read this as the same hero system carried on by other means. He does not leave the temple when it fails. He stays to repair it. The man who drove south with a pistol now drives at the institution that left the road empty.<\/p>\n

The makers of the film about him insist the story is universal, family and not flags, a grandfather and not a country. They are half right, and the half they miss is the half that gives the story its weight. There is no love of family that floats free of a hero system. The room is concrete because the state poured it against rockets. The word the child cries is Hebrew. The kibbutz sits on the Gaza fence because men once decided Jews would farm that exact dirt as an answer to the century that tried to erase them. Edward R. Murrow<\/a> (1908-1965) stood at Nahal Oz in the 1950s and filmed the same command post, now rusted, that Tibon passes on his way in. The love is real and the flag is real and they are the same act seen from two distances. A man does not climb out of his own hero system into a clean human universal. He loves his own, in his own tongue, on his own ground, and that local love is the universal thing.<\/p>\n

Go back to the window at four in the afternoon. Strip away the frame and look at what is left. An old man stands in the sun outside a nursery on the worst day his country has known. He has crossed a road full of the dead. He puts his knuckles on the glass and says his name in the oldest role a man holds. Inside, a three-year-old who has not made a sound since dawn hears him and tells the room her grandfather has come. Each hero system on earth reads that knock a different way. In his, the highest thing a man can do is be the body that arrives. He arrived.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the morning of October 7, 2023, a retired major general rides south out of Tel Aviv with a pistol in his lap and his wife at the wheel. Noam Tibon (b. 1962) commanded paratroopers, a brigade in the West … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israel"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t