Memorial for Amit, reflections on leaving Israel

In memory of Amit Schiller, 1995-2023

Amit died a bit over a year ago, after over a decade’s worth of playing the world’s most depressing game of hide and seek with cancer. I took it pretty hard, considering I hadn’t seen him in almost a decade. This wasn’t a coincidence.

We were never exactly friends directly. He was a schoolyard generation behind me - in elementary and middle school, I was friends with his older brother, and he was friends with my younger brother. I had a falling out with his brother when I was fifteen, which event marked the end of my childhood, and after that I’d only see Amit if he was hanging out with my brother or I ran into him in the hall at school. It was an odd relationship - I’d always liked him and still did, even now that I didn’t like his brother much¹. He got cancer a year or two after that, when he was still in middle school.

The last time I saw Amit was at his father’s funeral², about a decade ago. I was in America for grad school by then, and had just flown back into Israel that morning when someone from our high school class told me the funeral was that day. When I told Amit at the funeral that I’d just landed that morning, he answered “we made sure to time this especially for you.” Because even on his worst day, he would never let anything get him down³.

My first ever blog post was about how I think about pride and humility. And there’s something here about that, about him never letting things get him down, not because he didn’t care, but because he chose not to let himself be consumed by it. If humility is thinking of yourself less rather than thinking less of yourself, humility in the face of illness is letting yourself find delight in things, and pride is letting your illness become your focus. Like most virtues, this ends up being good for the person doing it, not just the people around him. And also like most virtues, it can be hard to hold onto.

There’s another important thing about humility here, which is that it’s not the same thing as being a pushover for social forces. Amit didn’t become like that because he was sick, he was always the most excitable and cheery kid around (often to the point of being annoying). He didn’t become cheery to take a stand against being sick, he just didn’t let it stop him⁴. But he had genuine enthusiasm for everything that, from everything I’ve heard, he kept not only through being sick, but through growing into his mid-twenties (which is often harder).

I’ve been thinking about Amit a lot recently, as I’m getting ready for my next big move. I’m in Israel again right now, but I’m leaving soon, this time probably for good. There’s a lot of things that bother me here, a lot of reasons I never quite fit in. But there’s also this good strand that runs through some people here - not the norm, not most people⁵, but some - this naive ability to just get excited about random things. If you’re culturally sophisticated it probably comes off cringey. But it’s great and I love the people who do it, and it’s hard to find elsewhere.

Some more examples: When I was fifteen or sixteen, I ran into some middle schoolers playing around with the light switches in the bottom floor of the school, seeing how fast they could turn them on and off and whether it would burn them. I explained to them that fluorescent lights don’t have a filament and can’t actually burn. They were amazed to find this out and spent the next three years referring to me as “saint Floro” whenever they saw me.

I guess none of these stories not this one, not the one about having lightsaber battles with flashlights in the fog, not the one about giving out sand from the holy land while dressed as superheroes to random guests in a hotel in Bangkok during the physics olympiad - come off as a culturally unique way of doing teenage shenanigans. It’s about the tone and the type, and that’s the sort of thing you had to be there for. And I’m glad that I was⁶. But now I’m done here⁷, and it’s time for me to go.

So going back to the original subject - Amit embodied this as much as anyone I’ve known. He was someone who could carry light in a dimming world and not let it turn it out. And now he’s gone, and the world is a darker place without him. And I hope there are enough people like him to carry it on.

1. A bit like when I went through my sneering at Harry Potter phase (it was populist slop, not nearly as good as the real fantasy books I was reading), but still reacted to someone mentioning Hagrid with “oh I like that guy”. Well not really like that - this was a real person I still had good reasons to like - but the same sort of dissonant residual affection.

2. Who also died young of cancer. That family got a depressingly unfair amount of cancer-related tragedies.

3. Another story like this: My brother (and Amit)’s theater class once started off their annual production with a skit where all the actors are late for the show for increasingly implausible excuses. Amit wanted to make his bit “sorry I was late, I was having cancer”. Unfortunately, the teacher overruled him.

4. There’s a line in Avatar, “pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source”. If shame is how social pressure pushes people to act in certain ways, it follows that having less pride actually makes you more resilient to that.

5. My go-to story when people ask me why I don’t like being in Israel that much: Last winter, I was out for a walk in the park on a rainy days and saw this woman walking her dog who was just clearly having a blast and excited about all the water coming down getting him wet. I asked the woman if I could take a picture of him and she said “ugh I guess… I mean it’s just a wet dog, why would you want to?”
I just can’t with this complete cynicism about things. He’s your dog! You should be excited about him! Or at least understand why someone else might be! How can you be so apathetic and cynical about it?
(To be clear, it’s not about that one dog. It was a very representative interaction for Israeli cynicism).

6. One more story, actually: A while ago I did a rare thing, for me, and made a new friend in Israel. It was the barista at the coffee shop near my parents’ house, who guessed that I’d gone to the same high school as her based purely on my style of getting excited about things.

7. In Israel. Not (hopefully) life.