Heart-Earned Wisdom: Tiki Barber, Koby and me

Last Tuesday evening as The Koby Mandell Humanitarian Award dinner was reaching its finale Master of Ceremonies Ben Brafman called out. "And now I would like to introduce Seth Mandell and Tiki Barber!"  Applause.

I walked to the podium and looked out over the crowd. Close to 400 friends and supporters of Camp Koby and our other healing programs for those who have lost immediate family members to terror in Israel were sitting in the audience.  

Frankly, all I could think about was how it came to pass that I was standing up there with one of the premiere sports figures of the generation. "Wow", I said to the assembly, "Tiki Barber and Seth Mandell, Seth Mandell and Tiki Barber in the same breath. There's no way this would have happened without Koby."

Tiki Barber to whom I was about to present the Koby Mandell Humanitarian Award is the most successful running back in the history of the New York Giants football team.  After retiring from football last year he is currently a regular on the Today Show, the most popular morning TV show on television.

When I met him earlier that evening I was surprised to see that at 5 feet 10 inches tall he is only a couple of inches taller than I am. "You know it's easy for guys like me to relate to you." I said when I met him, "most professional athletes are huge."

"Yeah", he said, flashing a million-dollar smile, "but I was really fast".

"I was fast too", I said. "Of course I was playing in a different league."

Besides having gained more yards than any running back in the history of the Giants, parlaying that into a regular gig on morning television and being a personable, approachable mench, Tiki's other claim to fame is that he was voted one of People magazine's 50 most beautiful people. He is also involved in several charities gave, with his twin brother Ronde, $1,000,000 to the University of Virginia upon graduation and regularly invokes his single mother's dedication, love and commitment to explain his success. Finally and most important to the Jewish community, he had accepted an invitation to visit Israel from Shimon Peres and spent a week touring the country and speaking to people.

It's hard to explain the confusing range of emotions that flowed through me as I stood there. Koby, a rabid sports fan right up until the time he was murdered by terrorists when he was 13 years old, would have been excited to see me up there. Everyone in that room, including Tiki Barber, was there because of the process that began when he was killed. This, The Koby Mandell Foundation's third Gala dinner, was a symbol of our success in creating, initiating and operating healing programs for 600 children and hundreds of women and others family members who lost a loved one to terror in Israel.  There is a saying in Jewish tradition "If there's no bread, there's no Torah." (Ethics of the Fathers, 3/17.) Which means that without the generous support of North America's Jewish community there'd be no camp and no healing programs for these people who gave so much to allow the rest of us to live and prosper identify with Israel. 

So on the one hand I am filled with gratitude to the Creator and His agents on earth, the hundreds of people who have made our programs a reality. And I believe with all my strength that Koby is looking down from heaven and pulling some strings to make sure we can continue to heal people in his name. On the other hand I miss Koby every day and every hour. His loss is indescribable and continuous as is the loss of any individual and especially any child to terror.

So as I hand Tiki his Humanitarian Award plaque and later when people in the crowd come over to congratulate me on the foundation's success, I feel the pleasure and the pain, the success and the loss, and smile and shake hands and say thank you wondering as I always do how all this came to pass. How this became my life.