This is the story of how I got my name, and then some more details.
My mother and father lived in a small village, east of mountain Tavor.
Life wasn't easy, but it was good.
Mom's family lived in that village, her parents, two brothers and a sister.
The place was a heaven for holocaust survivors, a strange mix of Hungarian and Polish jews. Most of their descendants already finished the mandatory three years of army service, and they were all now in the reserve call list.
You couldn't miss the blaring of the sirens that day in 1973.
Yom Kippur, atonement.
My father tried to calm my mother's anxiety, the engineering corps he said are called last.
The first emergency summons that reached the village that day summoned him.
I was a six months old work in progress in my mother's womb.
That and a bad feeling made my mother anxious.
I was born in the stormy weather of that December. Israel was licking its wounds and lighting Hanukkah's first candle. My father was MIA. little hope remained for his safe return if any.
After delivery, protocol is that the mother and the child are kept in the hospital for inspections. Before her due release, my mother got off her bed and started to groom her post-delivery self; mumbling something about her husband coming back today. Her family looked hopeless and helpless at the crazed woman. A widowed mother of a boy with a life threatening heart deformation.
Yup, she's lost it.
That morning near Beer-Sheva, a grizzly, dust covered soldier was hitching a ride northward.
A car stopped, in went that dust bag.
-"where to, soldier?"
That lady lived in kfar Tavor, at the foot of the mountain, so she knew the village he wanted to reach.
On their long drive she told the dust-bag a sad story from that village: there was a young lady there. A widow it seems, as her husband is missing for three months now. And the war's over and all that. And she just gave birth to her firstborn, a son.
The dust-bag, slowly shrinking in his seat, piped "so, I'm a father, you say. Thanks for the news."
She took him to the hospital instead.
Later he told my mother that he remembers waking up on a large rock, after that he started his march north from the desert.
I am named after that big rock - Sela in Hebrew means a large rock.
My brother's name also follow that tradition, naming your child after an object or a creature or something or other. His name is Saar = tempest.
When I was four years old, I got home after kindergarten and I asked my parents to name my baby sister Raqefet once there will be one, after the song about the Cyclamen blossoming under a rock.
Mom called us all "common Mediterranean Indians".
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