Breaking News: Three thousand civilians and nineteen
foreigners killed in plane crash.
Imagine that headline after 9/11.
Wednesday, four men were murdered in a synagogue in Har Nof
by two Palestinians with meat cleavers and a gun. CNN, in its first report, lumped
victims and murderers into the headline, “4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians Dead in
Jerusalem Mosque.” A fifth man, a heroic policeman, died after rushing in to
stop the murderers.
It seems ludicrous to fight a PR battle when five men have
died while they were at peaceful morning prayer. But I think that if the PR
battle is won, Israel would find it a lot easier to fight its actual battle and
save lives. The whole world seems to know that Israel is to blame for "provoking" the murder of four men with its actions, while Jerusalemites cry out for protection from a government paralyzed by world opinion.
I read article after article with suggestion after
suggestion, and find myself shouting at my computer, “is that even going to
work? What’s going to work?” The
Ashkelon mayor has paused construction work in the city by Arab workers, but
even while that makes sense, after all the attacks in the past weeks, it also
makes no sense, and penalizes people who just want to build, and to live their
lives in peace. In fact, the one thing it does do is let the monsters know that
their plan is working—Israel is under terror, and it’s terrified, and it’s
shutting down the direction from which the threat is coming. Neighbors are
turning on neighbors? Very well, we’ll fire them and post armed guards. Exactly
what Hamas wants. Israeli society shut down, Arabs and Jews and Druse and
Christians immobilized alike, maximum chaos and mistrust. A perfect vacuum for
their twisted evil.
It’s hard to teach with a vise clamped around my heart. When
there’s a lull in class, like today as students serenely made their Kohlberg
morality cartoons, I fall out of the rhythm of the day and into a daze of
contemplation. Everything seems imbued with an aura of pain. Sometimes I forget
why I feel sad, and have to dig around in my memory to find the source of the
physical twinges at my temples and in my chest. It makes it harder to deal with
average things.
A student throwing shade seems a monument of sass. A
two-minute lockdown after school hours spun into a quiet heart-racing panic alone in
my trailer. A gurney wheeled to an ambulance stopped me short until one of my students explained: his cousin, shellfish allergy. My truant students seem more hopeless than usual, my class clown less funny and more desperate,
Orthodox Judaism more sadistically delighted in misogyny, and even the beautiful
frost on the trailer walkways a slippery accident waiting to happen.
My students don’t know that I’m struggling to focus, nor
that they’re the largest source of comfort that I have for a brighter future. Three
students, in three different classes, asked me to teach them a Hebrew word this
week. I gave each of them “shalom.” It means peace, and hello, and goodbye, and
I also shared its Arabic cousin, “salaam.” The halls of the school ring with
peace as my kids leave at the end of the day, and tomorrow, I am certain I will
hear “shalom” usher in the morning. It gives me strength to rise up from my obsessive news-checking, and go back to work.
The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
...
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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