My new column is up at the Daily Beast:
The news photos of Nadav Ben-Yehuda arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport from Nepal shows a gaunt-faced young man with one hand bound heavily in bandages. Ben-Yehuda became a hero, one could say, because he chose not to conquer the mountain.
I feel personal gratitude to him. Ever since I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air—more precisely, ever since I mainlined the book’s horrors directly into my nightmares—I’ve believed, or wanted to believe, in the theoretical certainty that an Israeli mountain climber would act as Ben-Yehuda did. Three hundred meters from the peak of Mt. Everest, he turned the theoretical prediction into reality.
Before I talk about Ben-Yehuda, a word more about Krakauer’s book. As you may remember, it’s a first-person account of the disastrous 1996 climbing season on Everest. Too many people reached the top during the same opening in the weather, which ended in a savage storm. Nine climbers died while Krakauer was on the mountain. Several people made desperate efforts to save others, even dying in the attempt.
This is just the setting of the nightmare. The nightmare, as Krakauer unflinchingly relates, is that climbers repeatedly left still-living comrades lying in the snow, deciding that they were too far gone to save and that the attempt would cost more lives. As if to make these decisions even more haunting, one of those they’d left for dead awoke hours after he was abandoned, stood up, and lurched into camp. He was nearly left for dead again before he made it down far enough for a helicopter rescue.
I’m sure that everyone who reads Krakauer’s account is disturbed by it. I suspect that other Israeli readers had the same reaction as I did: The feeling just past disbelief that one has when hearing about cannibalism. Israeli climbers, I thought, would have died before leaving someone behind. In the abstract, such a choice might arguably be mistaken, resulting in more deaths. But there are things that a person’s culture and upbringing don’t allow him or her to consider. You may consider this to be Israeli chauvinism, but I thought that, at least in theory, it was a correct reading of the people with whom I live. In general, they are blessedly unclear on the concept of individualism. …
Read the rest here.
Great post. Sadly, the event was ignored by the MSM.
Great Stuff Gershom,
Thanks. After going to a Catholic grade school, I transferred to a liberal Jewish high school as a football [American] player. It was quite a culture shock…while the kids I went to school with did not have this esprit de corp, I met exchange students from Kibitzes and they had spirit this in spades. I liked them a lot.