By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO –.Most of us parents imagine having to console our children—even when they are adults—at times of stress and angst for them. We listen, our hearts in a bit of atrophy, when they anguish with us about money, their jobs, and, sometimes, their marriages. But it’s not often that we listen to the terror in a child’s voice as she calls from another corner of the world, trying to catch her breath, wondering if she’d be able to make it to the nearby bomb shelter in time.
Again, the people of Israel—the kids, the grownups, the elderly, all who just wish to awaken each morning in their dwellings and plan a normal day—are under a siege of missile attacks, explosions, fires, and the plaintive wailing of sirens. As a parent living far away, I have no premium on fear for my children and other family members who live in the Jewish state and regularly endure these deadly screeds of warfare that literally rain upon their apartments, schoolyards, theaters, malls, highways, and farmlands. For 65 years, this has been the intermittent normal for the citizens of this miracle state that its enemies so envy and hate.
Nor do I possess any divinity on the fear that thousands upon thousands of military families here in our America have and continue to endure as they try to exist in a normative state while their sons and daughters withstand the scorched craters of Afghanistan and elsewhere. Their hearts pound to the dreadful beat of dread while they choose their groceries, while they manage their car pools, and while they try to sleep. Their soldier children do not leave the pockets of their souls for even a breath.
The cellular and cyber advantages today’s parents have accessing their children in war that our grandparents did not have when we defeated the Nazis help a little. But there is nothing a parent can do to really comfort a child being bombed and terrorized short of holding on to her in the flesh.
My daughter was baking some zucchini bread when the latest Palestinian missile attacks (there have been over 12,000 in the last 12 years—DID YOU KNOW THAT, WORLD?) reached the Tel Aviv metropolitan area this day (Thursday). She was contemplating a manicure in preparation for a trip. She was ruminating about her next newspaper article that explores the sympathetic perceptions shared by Israeli and Palestinian mothers. That world, that dream—they are obliterated each time they emerge, like frail flowers, by the blood-lust of Palestinian murderers who think that to birth a nation they must kill another people.
That hallowed day of peace will only come when the Palestinians want their own children to make bread more than they want them to make war.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com