This morning, I struggle to put my thoughts in words… I have a headache, and I am reading the Facebook feed of a friend from Israel. He posts each time there is a siren followed by multiple booms. While reading, I called to mind another friend with whom I corresponded in 2001. She shared with me a beautiful piece of writing from her daughter who was a teenager at the time and had witnessed a terrorist attack. I realized, thinking about these things, that how much we do not really understand about what it feels like to live in the middle of a place where this stuff happens. Reading Avi’s posts and realizing how frequent they were, I was humbled beyond words. What could I say that would mean anything?
Yesterday, I sat at my kitchen table with my husband, and we tried to have a discussion about this that made any sense. It got lost in American politics and confusion about religious Israel rhetoric, most of which confuses both of us; and it ended up at “How does it stop?” In discussions like this, it always becomes, at some point, about making someone responsible. for crimes committed against the other side. I don’t think it is ever so simple. What I can say is that for everyone who lives it, on either side, it is terrifying; and we who are not there should respect that.
I often hear people compare things going on in other countries with whatever happens at home and say something to the effect that our American problems are so inconsequential… But I want to tell the truth as I have experienced it over many years of friendship with people who live in Israel–not only Avi but others as well. They have helped me to understand some small bit of their reality, and they have continued to be friends to me and to share in mine. To ignore the gift of their friendship that they have given me and to dismiss my concerns would be to dishonor them, maybe even to drown them in their own situation and take away a precious thing from them: the chance to relate outside it. Perhaps it is not fair of me to assume such a thing; but as a person who experiences my own type of situation that isolates, I can say that these are appropriate words to that situation.
The gift that the Internet has given to us is the ability to care for each other whether we are near or far. I have lamented the inadequacy of words on a screen to be of use sometimes; but they are better than nothing. Certainly, they are as good as words on paper; and that is as good as the biblical writers had at times. We must master the art of encouraging one another!
Perhaps it is in our most difficult circumstances that we come to understand what it means to be together.
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