The Silver Platter

"And his blood was crying out from the ground." -Amir Gilboa

Tonight is Yom Hazikaron. Memorial Day.

One day a year it’s okay to cry for those who gave their lives for Israel. So on Yom Hazikaron we press pieces of tissues to our aching eyes, and dutifully count off the names of friends and relatives, and dream of peace. And the rest of the time, the 364 days that are not Yom Hazikaron, we try not to think of the cost in young lives, the tremendous blood payment that has been made. But then someone mentions how Gal would have loved this, he always loved playing scrabble on shabbos afternoons, and someone else says their fence hasn’t been painted since Ariel… and those pictures of Doron keep cropping up on youtube and one cannot always keep one’s eyes lowered when one passes the piano to skirt the basket of memorial packets put together by friends and family of the loved ones and nobody can hear a bar of Mah Avarech without leaking teardrops a bit and neither can we hear an ambulance siren without flinching or look a hijab in the face without ducking and the pain is constant but in this country it must be pushed aside because who will understand that we all have someone who has died, that we are bound to even the dead we don’t know because they died for us, and after all what is our pain compared to that of the mother who will never hold her boy again? The girlfriend who will never wink at her lover again? The toddler who will grow up with Abba’s picture on the mantelpiece and the knowledge that his father died for his country.

Don’t give me that crap about war being kind. Nor the silver platter nonsense. Dulce et—I don’t believe it. I believe in children growing up, growing old, growing… Do whatever you have to do. Funkthewar, Fuckthewar, just end the war.