«Todos han muerto completamente en vano»

The expression “Todos han muerto completamente en vano” (“All have died completely in vain”) is Shaltiel Abravanel’s uncompromising judgment on death, repeated by Gershom Wald as he struggles to speak about the fallen of the 1948 war. Its force lies in its refusal of consolation: it extends beyond wartime deaths to every death, making the familiar claim that sacrifice has meaning difficult to sustain.

The words in context

Gershom Wald introduces the phrase while acknowledging how commonly people say that those killed in the 1948 war did not die in vain. He had said it himself, as had everyone else. The statement had offered a conventional way to give the fallen’s deaths purpose, and Natan Alterman’s verse had given that hope memorable form: “Quizá por una vez en mil años nuestra muerte tenga sentido”.

But Wald says that it has become increasingly difficult for him to repeat the consoling words. Shaltiel’s spirit, he says, lodges them in his throat. The image makes the disagreement physical: the obstacle is not merely an argument Wald can dismiss, but a pressure that interrupts the act of speaking.

Shaltiel’s universal verdict

Wald attributes the phrase to Shaltiel, who rejects the idea that only particular deaths lack meaning. In his view, all the dead have died in vain: not only those killed in wars, but people who die in accidents, of illness, or simply of old age. The scope reaches from the earliest times to the present, from the first dead to the last.

That widening of the claim is its defining move. The phrase does not single out a failed battle or a particular political cause; it refuses to treat any kind of death as redeemed by an explanation. In setting Shaltiel’s sweeping conviction against the public reassurance Wald once repeated, the passage exposes the strain between mourning and the stories people tell to make loss bearable.

Wald’s act of repetition

Wald does not present Shaltiel’s judgment as an abstract maxim. He speaks it to Shmuel after the old man has stopped striking his head against the wall and has fallen into weak, continuous groans. Shmuel, newly moved by affection and a desire to share Wald’s pain, lays his hand over Wald’s; Wald’s large, cracked hand closes around the younger man’s cold fingers.

The phrase thus emerges in a scene of contact rather than debate. Wald’s confession about death follows a few minutes of silence and an attempted comfort that cannot remove grief. His repetition of Shaltiel’s words shows how the dead man’s judgment continues to shape the living: it makes the customary promise of meaning almost impossible for Wald to say, even as he reaches for a listener who may understand why it has become so difficult.