For many years my homepage on my computer was the Jerusalem Post, not because I found them to be the world’s best or most accurate news source, but because I had friends and family in Israel, and Jpost would immediately note if there had been a bombing in Israel, and how many had been killed. But there have been a few years of relative quiet when it comes to bombs that kill Israeli civilians, and so Jpost is no longer the first thing I see in the morning when I turn on my computer.
Today there was a bombing in Jerusalem for the first time in four years, and I briefly considered changing my homepage back to Jpost. I won’t, but I’m so sad that it’s even something I considered.
This is maybe a good time to revisit one of my all-time favorite poems, The Diameter of the Bomb by Yehuda Amichai:
The Diameter of the Bomb
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.–Yehuda Amichai
On a related note: Three kids playing soccer and a grandfather were killed by Israeli rockets in Gaza yesterday. They were not the intended targets, but I’m not sure Netanyahu could have sounded any less sorry when he said, “It is regrettable that Hamas continues to intentionally rain down dozens of rockets on Israeli civilians even as it uses civilians as human shields.”
