On Thursday, Rav Eitam Henkin and his wife Na’ama, child of
Rabbanit and Rabbi Henkin who founded Nishmat, were murdered as they drove
along the road home in the Gush area. They were shot while their four children
sat in the back seat. The children survived. Later this weekend, another couple
was stabbed (the father and another man killed) and their two-year-old is recovering
from his wounds, while a teenager stabbed at a gas station is recovering. Everyone I
pass is glued to their phones, checking the news compulsively.
As the news of attack after attack broke, I
received a staff email informing me that first thing Tuesday, long before we as teachers are supposed to have been trained for it, we’re going to
break into our mentor groups and I will have to mediate my students, a group of
twenty Israelis, Palestinians, and students from the rest of the world, through
a discussion about what Israelis always call “the situation.”
At our school, we’re trying to heal the rift in
Israeli-Palestinian society that can cause tragedies like this to happen. But I
don’t know what to say to these students. I don’t think I can say
anything about what’s happened. I am in too much sadness, and too much on one
side, too outraged by Al Jazeera’s tweet, “Palestinian shot dead after fatal
stabbing in Jerusalem; 2 Israeli victims also killed” as the description of a
Palestinian stabbing two Israelis to death and being shot by police, too angry
at the makeshift use of the Temple Mount as an excuse, once again, for murder
(do your homework, you monsters.
Secular Jews don’t care about the Temple Mount, and most religious Jews can’t
go there—it’s considered sacred ground—the only religious activity of yours we
object to there is your dropping grenades over the side of the Western Wall),
too scared of my father’s decision to walk to the Western Wall over the holiday
and my sisters’ stupid insistence on taking night strolls alone, too angry and
grief-stricken about the parents who have lost their lives and the children who
were attacked.
So, without saying anything, because it’s very, very important
that I not say the things I just wrote (though I hope to heaven somebody else brings them up), I’m going to mediate a peace dialogue. I
don’t know who will inform the Europeans who don't know about recent events, but it can’t be me. My
sister had the idea of having students sit in a circle and one at a time, each
speaking in a row, without interruption, so that people can say exactly what
they want to say (or ask the questions they want to ask). I like this idea, and
I think the only thing I can or should say is this:
I just want to remind you that you know the people in this
room. That you respect them. That you have already spent a year learning and
living together, and that everyone in this room wants a world with human
dignity, and freedom, and equality, and safety, not just for the people they
identify with, but for the whole world. And that’s not so common to find. So
even if someone says something that seems diametrically opposed to your views,
stop and think: they want the same thing that I do. What was it that made them
arrive at this point, so far from mine? And consider what question you want to
ask to understand them better, not what point you want to make so that they’ll understand
you better.
I realize that in my fantasy of prompting my students, my
planning of this conversation, I am seeking comfort. I can’t bring my students
into my small grieving, the swamping insistent anger and fear and deep sadness
I feel on the periphery of tragedy. I can’t demand of them that they change the
world so that I feel that I am. But I can suggest that they take their own grief and make a difference. And I have to figure out how to
help them do it. If you have any ideas… help.
The Second Coming
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.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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