A prayer for my late father: Eulogy for Yoav Botach

My father was larger than life. Always the most charismatic person in the room, he was a force of nature, a magnet that drew everything to him, a planet that forced all into his orbit.

Even as his health deteriorated over the last months, his broken body always rallied in a way that had agnostic doctors using the word “miracle.”

He was a giant of a man, a business titan who bestrode the streets of Los Angeles like a colossus, a real estate genius with the charisma and good looks of a Hollywood star. A friend summed him up: Yoav was a legend.

His struggle to never quit and always prevail was his defining characteristic. Born in abject poverty as the second child in a family of 13 in Iran in 1932, he was selling carpets and fabrics in the markets of Isfahan from the age of 10 to help support his siblings.

He had only minimal schooling and was proud that he spent most of it not reading books but fighting antisemitic Muslim students and organizing the Jewish kids to fight back.

One Friday night he regaled me with tales of the Jewish wars in Iran and proudly moved my hands over the battle scars in his scalp that proved it. “Feel here, under my hair, at the holes I still have from rocks that nearly cracked my skull.”

He was a Jewish lion, a mighty warrior, a living incarnation of his namesake, King David’s general-in-chief Yoav, instilling fear in all who would do harm to his people. He oozed Jewish pride from every pore of his being.

My friend David Suissa told me after he met him for the first time, “Your dad is the original Mesopotamian man, with strong leathery hands.” And my former student at Oxford, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, wrote beautifully: “He was a heroic figure to me and I saw such a fire and a love in him. His memory is such a blessing to our city of Angels and to this world.”

This defiance of standing up, of being a proud Jew, constituted my father’s irreducible essence. Rarely has a man stood so straight. Rarely has a Jew born in a Muslim country carried himself with such utter disregard for hostile surroundings.

MY GRANDFATHER Ezra, an ardent Zionist, moved his large brood to Israel, where my father spent his late teenage years and met my mother, Eleanor, when she, as a young American tourist, asked a handsome local about the best falafel in Beersheba. They married and began a family in Israel, where my sister Sara was born, and a few years later moved to my mother’s native New York, where Bar Kochva was born, and to Los Angeles thereafter, where the twins, Chaim Moishe and Ateret, and then I, the youngest, followed.

My father arrived in America not speaking a word of English and was often looked down on and degraded, with his dark, Middle Eastern complexion and the broken English of an immigrant.

That he would go on to build a large business should surprise no one. Few worked harder and few were as sharp.

My father rose at the crack of dawn each and every morning, until he was felled by a catastrophic stroke on the night before Hanukkah. And over the next months he waged a battle for life that electrified all who witnessed it.

He would often tell me stories of his work ethic. He drove from Los Angeles to the various flea markets to feed his family. “I was so tired, I took the scissors that I used to cut the fabrics, because I was falling asleep at the wheel. I started to poke my legs until blood flowed. But I never missed the market.”

He never missed synagogue on any morning, either. In his last years, he would drag his broken frame day after day at 5 a.m. and put on his tefillin, eschewing the help of other worshipers that in his later years he was finally forced to accept.

He believed in strength. He never showed weakness. After his first stroke nearly a decade ago, he would become visibly upset at me, as he pushed his walker to shul. I would put my arm out to help him climb the stairs. He would never accept. It might take three times as long, but he would get to the top on his own.

Death to him was a curse, an aberration never to be discussed, an unacceptable tear in the tapestry of nature – “the green” as he called it – whose pristine beauty he loved so much.

On the last Shabbat that we spent together, he struggled in semiconsciousness in his hospital bed to move his unresponsive body and even to breathe. He grabbed my hand, first with his almost useless left arm, and then, moving his entire frame, with his right hand as well, as he seized me with a ferocious grip. My wife, Debbie, stood by watching with tears in her eyes as I sang to him the melodies of havdalah that he so loved.

He adored Debbie ever since I brought her from Australia to obtain his blessing for our marriage, 32 years ago. He stared her down and asked, “Where do you want to live?” Debbie, not missing a beat, replied, “Wherever Shmuley wants to live.” He lit up and laughed, knowing that he had successfully teased this Ashkenazi woman about being the perfect Persian wife!

He loved the Sabbath and he loved song. As I was conducting my daughter Shaina’s wedding, he rose under the huppah and sang the words of Isaiah: “And kings and queens will serve you and care for all your needs. They will bow to the earth before you and lick the dust from your feet.” He swung his hips into a Middle Eastern belly dance, scandalizing the serious, black-clad, hassidic crowd who looked at him in shock. He gave a mischievous laugh, twisting his waist again. He loved every minute of it. And so did I.

When hundreds of thousands of Iranian Jews fled Khomeini in 1979, my father was already an established Los Angeles business figure. He saw it as providential that he had come to the city some 15 years earlier so that he could assist the refugees get back on their feet. He became a patriarch to the Iranian Jewish community and is respected as such till today.

A MAN as large as my father was never going to be a saint and would have been a bore had he not also possessed the flaws that accompany men of biblical proportions. He could be stubborn, uncompromising and, at times, distant.

After my parents’ divorce, I grew up on the other side of America and missed him every moment. When he visited, he could see my pain, and I once heard him say that he thought that I, as the youngest, was especially wounded by the divorce. And that is how I felt, too.

Which is why I am here burying my father in the city that he loved so much, Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives, just steps from his great hero Menachem Begin.

He will now be, as Jewish tradition maintains, of the first to greet the Messiah and the first to rise in the resurrection of the dead.

One day soon when the Creator fulfills his promise spoken through Daniel – “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will wake again” – I will be reunited with my father, who died as the holy Sabbath went out, making a world without him a little bit darker, and a world into which he will reawaken shine with particles of everlasting light.