To my understanding, in Israel, it has become routine for the relatives of deceased soldiers—primarily their parents, one must note—to hasten to the hospital in the harrowing hours after combat death to have the sperm of their fallen sons extracted and stored. This is no rare, clandestine operation: the practice has not only legal sanction but institutional support, heightened by the emotional turbulence of ongoing conflict, as recently magnified by the Gaza war. Where formerly only the soldiers themselves might grant consent, now grieving families, stripped of progeny and legacy, may demand this macabre harvesting, all in the hope of perpetuating their bloodline—even, preposterously, via future grandchildren generated with the aid of surrogate mothers scouted from advertisements or distant acquaintances. Over 200 such requests have already occurred, one is told, in sharp deviation from civilized norms exemplified by the likes of France or Germany, which rightly consider such acts tantamount to desecration should there be no explicit pre-mortem assent. Parents seeking to become grandparents through such means must, however, endure endless legal wrangling, proving the “intentions” of a son no longer able to speak for himself, and shoulder the logistical nightmare of recruiting wombs-for-hire.

Permit me to be utterly frank, as is my natural inclination: the entire spectacle strikes me as emblematic of the most desperate social striving for immortality, draped in sentimental piety yet reeking, at its core, of bourgeois mediocrity and emotional overreach. How utterly provincial to imagine, at the hour of supreme loss, that one's lineage is owed a future incarnation regardless of the dead’s wishes, as though biology were a mere matter of paperwork and indulgent parental caprice! Is there truly any dignity left in the ceaseless production and consumption of “heirs,” as if children were simple assets—akin to a vineyard or a seaside villa—to be bequeathed posthumously and managed through an estate? Where I come from, one’s legacy is built not through ghoulish post-mortem reproduction schemes, but by the cultivation of family, tradition, and a name unbesmirched by legal and ethical ambiguity. If a young man could not be prevailed upon to reproduce in life, surely it is the height of vanity to manufacture his progeny in death.

The Israelis, ever practical, have managed to blend their inexhaustible appetite for survival with an alarming willingness to disregard the boundaries between grief and hubris. Would the hapless child resulting from such arrangements not carry the weight of an entire family's unfulfilled dreams—reared not for his or her own sake, but as the living monument to the fallen? I shudder at the vision: a multitude of “miracle grandchildren,” wandering like ghostly reminders of wars past, each the product of posthumous bureaucracy and emotional deficit.

Give me heritage with dignity or give me silence. I cannot abide this new cult of continuity, founded not on love or future promise, but on desperate, clinging hands that cannot—will not—let the dead go. Some doors are closed for a reason. It is only the truly privileged—those bred to old values—who possess the grace to know when to withdraw from the stage and let history rest.