I do not want to write about the horrific deaths of the three Israeli boys. I had other things I planned to talk about this week, but I do not feel that it would be right to talk about anything else, anything more trivial.
I do not want to talk about horror, or violence, or the hollow feelings that watching the news over the past two days has left with me.
There is nothing, Not. One. Thing. I can do to ease the parents’ pain; to undo the senseless, vile, killing; to make anything about this situation in any way better.
Nor can anyone else, although many people are trying, in all the wrong ways: by creating Facebook groups calling for revenge, by killing a young Palestinian boy, by marching through the streets chanting for the deaths of people based on their ethnicity.
None of this will assuage one drop of the pain caused by these boys’ loss. It will not ease the fear felt by many parents, or even the more general fear of anti-Jewish feeling or actions by some Arabs. All that feeling seemingly must go somewhere, and I understand that people are desperately looking for a place to spend it, to get rid of their fear and horror and sick,sick, worry. But pouring it out in the streets like sewage bursting its pipe—how can this happen?
I don’t want to talk about this. About any of this. In addition to the sorrow of the loss of those children, I now feel harrowed by the horror of seeing racial violence in the streets of Israel, by Jews. In seeing some people, whom I otherwise had respect for, advocating its rightness. But I think we have to talk about it.
The family of slain Israeli teenager Naftali Fraenkel has been a model of dignity and yahadut (Jewish values) in their tragedy, saying it would be “horrifying and despicable” for the Palestinian boy to have been murdered in revenge, and the boy’s uncle, Yishai Fraenkel, said, “There is no difference between blood and blood. A murderer is a murderer, no matter his nationality and age. There is no justification, no forgiveness and no atonement for any murder.”
Must we make the families of the murdered be our rebukers in their time of sorrow? What a terrible burden to place upon them.
How did we get to this place?
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