- May 8, 2002
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Hi all!
There was yet another suicide-bombing here yesterday. (Did you see the pictures of the charred remains of that passenger bus? 17 people were murdered.) But it happened way up north, far from suburban Jerusalem where I live. My office is in downtown Jerusalem. I've heard automatic weapons fire and several bomb explosions over the years from as close away from my office as 2 blocks. I've been delayed getting home (to the eastern suburb of Maaleh Adumim; the "Inn of the Good Samaritan" and the excavated remains of a large 8th century CE Byzantine monastery are there, see <http://www.jr.co.il/ma/tourism.htm>) several times because one of two junctions that I have to pass through is closed because there was a bombing or one was foiled.
How do I deal with living in this kind of reality (a warped one, if you ask me, where instead of protecting their children with their lives, parents happily send them to take others' lives; go figger)? Believe it or not, I don't think about it all that much. I just shut it out, don't let it get to me (not even a little, because if I let it get to me even a little, it would gnaw away at me until I was a nervous wreck), and go about my business. 11 years ago, when Saddam the Wicked was raining SCUD missiles down on us, a friend of mine asked me if I was worried. I told her that what I was worried about was whether the chocolate chip cookies I had baked that morning were burnt. I was serious. Whether a SCUD falls on me is totally out of my hands; I can neither affect, influence, nor control that. But if the cookies are burnt, well, that's up to me entirely. I figure that when God decides that He wants to see me up close & personal, it won't matter what I'm doing or where I am; when your number is up, your number is up & there's nothing you can do about it. (Omar Khayyam writes, in verse #48 of his Rubaiyat:
While Rose blows along the River Brink,
With old Khayyam and Ruby Vintage drink.
And when the Angel with his darker Draught
Draws up to Thee - take that, and do not shrink.
There's something in the last two lines that I like.) So I go about my business, I ride the buses, I go to Jerusalem's open-air market, I walk along Jaffa road & the downtown pedestrian mall. These are the things that I do and I'll put my faith in God & keep on doing them. Lenin, as evil a man as they come, but a genius nevertheless, who should be studied, defined terrorism. He said that the purpose of terrorism, very simply, is to terrify, to instill fear, enervating, paralyzing, thought-blocking, fear. Killing, he said, is incidental and useful only insofar as it causes and instills fear. I am not going to let the b*st*rds make me afraid, I will not give them that credit. We beat them & tell them, "F*** you!" by not being afraid. Psychologically, this is very important.
One of the worst aspects of living amidst all this insanity is raising children in it. God has been very, very good to my wife & I & has blessed us with two marvelous boys, just over 1.5 & just over 5.5, respectively. (The baby who was blown up along with her grandmother in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikva on May 27 was almost exactly the age of our youngest boy; stuff like that makes me cringe.) We tell our oldest boy that we do NOT hate Arabs, only the terrorists. (Bigotry & hatred are two things that our boys will not learn from us.) We tell him that the police & soldiers we see all around are there, "to keep us safe." A couple of months ago there was an incident that broke my heart. In a (Jewish) neighborhood of Jerusalem, a 5-year-old boy (about the age our oldest boy is now) was on his way home from a friends house where he had been playing, right down the street from his house. He noticed a traveling bag on the sidewalk, went to a payphone, managed to climb up to it & dial the Israeli equivalent of 9-1-1 & report it. It turned out to be a bomb & rather nasty one at that. Thank God, the kid knew what to do, but ach, it broke my heart that a 5-year-old should have to know such things! When the unholiness here gets really acute, I like to read Isaiah 65:16-25. It comforts me.
Be well!
ssv
There was yet another suicide-bombing here yesterday. (Did you see the pictures of the charred remains of that passenger bus? 17 people were murdered.) But it happened way up north, far from suburban Jerusalem where I live. My office is in downtown Jerusalem. I've heard automatic weapons fire and several bomb explosions over the years from as close away from my office as 2 blocks. I've been delayed getting home (to the eastern suburb of Maaleh Adumim; the "Inn of the Good Samaritan" and the excavated remains of a large 8th century CE Byzantine monastery are there, see <http://www.jr.co.il/ma/tourism.htm>) several times because one of two junctions that I have to pass through is closed because there was a bombing or one was foiled.
How do I deal with living in this kind of reality (a warped one, if you ask me, where instead of protecting their children with their lives, parents happily send them to take others' lives; go figger)? Believe it or not, I don't think about it all that much. I just shut it out, don't let it get to me (not even a little, because if I let it get to me even a little, it would gnaw away at me until I was a nervous wreck), and go about my business. 11 years ago, when Saddam the Wicked was raining SCUD missiles down on us, a friend of mine asked me if I was worried. I told her that what I was worried about was whether the chocolate chip cookies I had baked that morning were burnt. I was serious. Whether a SCUD falls on me is totally out of my hands; I can neither affect, influence, nor control that. But if the cookies are burnt, well, that's up to me entirely. I figure that when God decides that He wants to see me up close & personal, it won't matter what I'm doing or where I am; when your number is up, your number is up & there's nothing you can do about it. (Omar Khayyam writes, in verse #48 of his Rubaiyat:
While Rose blows along the River Brink,
With old Khayyam and Ruby Vintage drink.
And when the Angel with his darker Draught
Draws up to Thee - take that, and do not shrink.
There's something in the last two lines that I like.) So I go about my business, I ride the buses, I go to Jerusalem's open-air market, I walk along Jaffa road & the downtown pedestrian mall. These are the things that I do and I'll put my faith in God & keep on doing them. Lenin, as evil a man as they come, but a genius nevertheless, who should be studied, defined terrorism. He said that the purpose of terrorism, very simply, is to terrify, to instill fear, enervating, paralyzing, thought-blocking, fear. Killing, he said, is incidental and useful only insofar as it causes and instills fear. I am not going to let the b*st*rds make me afraid, I will not give them that credit. We beat them & tell them, "F*** you!" by not being afraid. Psychologically, this is very important.
One of the worst aspects of living amidst all this insanity is raising children in it. God has been very, very good to my wife & I & has blessed us with two marvelous boys, just over 1.5 & just over 5.5, respectively. (The baby who was blown up along with her grandmother in the Tel Aviv suburb of Petah Tikva on May 27 was almost exactly the age of our youngest boy; stuff like that makes me cringe.) We tell our oldest boy that we do NOT hate Arabs, only the terrorists. (Bigotry & hatred are two things that our boys will not learn from us.) We tell him that the police & soldiers we see all around are there, "to keep us safe." A couple of months ago there was an incident that broke my heart. In a (Jewish) neighborhood of Jerusalem, a 5-year-old boy (about the age our oldest boy is now) was on his way home from a friends house where he had been playing, right down the street from his house. He noticed a traveling bag on the sidewalk, went to a payphone, managed to climb up to it & dial the Israeli equivalent of 9-1-1 & report it. It turned out to be a bomb & rather nasty one at that. Thank God, the kid knew what to do, but ach, it broke my heart that a 5-year-old should have to know such things! When the unholiness here gets really acute, I like to read Isaiah 65:16-25. It comforts me.
Be well!
ssv
