An Article Sent to A Paper

Some Type of Reprieve

Several days before I left Israel only four weeks ago, I had confronted death on the road during a Saturday bicycle ride. As I return to Israel, flying high above the dark Atlantic, I am returning to a country embroiled in conflict in both the north and the south. Images from papers scattered here on the floor attest to the conflict that I am returning to.

How precious is life? As children we are taught so many things. My brother in Connecticut has three children ranging in age from two to eight. They are warned about touching a hot surface. Told not to play too close to the end of the driveway. Slathered in sunblock when they go outdoors. As an educator I endeavor to find ways to sensitize my students to the needs of those around them. I “sneak” in lessons that deal with the fragility of life and the importance of valuing all living things that they come in contact with.

When I came upon the man who had been hit and killed on his bicycle across from the National Tennis Center, my world stopped. I later found out that he was forty-six and like me, had been out for a joyous weekend ride. A car had strayed across the white line killing him in a horrific fashion. I happened to come upon him minutes after he had been hit. Minutes before the ambulance arrived to perform some perfunctory services on a lifeless body. There were two other riders there to whom I offered my “help.” Sadly they told me that he had already died. How precious is life? Though I do not cry all that often, I sat there on this busy road crying for a few moments on the shoulder of a man I had never met. Then I slung my bike over the guardrail, headed down a culvert, across some agricultural fields slowly walking much of my way back home to Givatayim.

Two days later I left for Connecticut. Since the nineteenth of June, until today the 14th of July, I have been in my New England state of birth. Yet always, I have one eye towards Israel. I quickly scan the oldest continuously published paper in the nation for articles or snippets about Israel. I sometimes go to the library or to friends to check out the news on the internet from an Israeli point of view. Having lived in Israel now for over seventeen years, it is also my home and the land and people are part of me.

During my stay in Connecticut, Hamas successfully killed and then captured a soldier. The photo of the young man looked in many ways like my stepson who served as an officer in the IDF. I thought of his parents. Thought of his friends and watched how this story developed. I called my wife who was teaching in a clarinet festival in Safad and asked her how people were reacting and found out that in many ways the country had once again come together in support of the actions that the IDF began to wage. However, I noticed that this story stayed off the front pages except for a picture or two depicting the shattered lives of Palestinians essentially caught in the cross fire.

Now news of the Middle East has moved solidly onto the front page. War and the potential of a greater conflagration has made this story- the story. Even Larry King was devoting a show to this and people in my family were questioning my sanity traveling back there now. Luckily my wife and step-son had left the day before this fighting started and she is now visiting her family in Florida.

Yet I am returning. It is certainly not the known that has me so worried as Tel Aviv is out of reach of the current weaponry employed by our current combatants. It is the unknown and my belief that our enemies do not feel as I do that life is more valuable than pride. That land and boundaries are arbitrary and manmade. That life is something incomprehensibly wonderful. I realize this is perhaps harsh and controversial sentiment, and I realize too that in the United States there are many to whom this also applies as I am well aware of the number of young dying today in our inner cities. What is wrong with the way in which we, the adults, are teaching our children? There, to me, appears to be a worldwide lust for violence, a worldwide need for domination that takes form in a myriad of ways. From what I see on television to carnage acted out on the road, death is nothing more than a sound bite. Our concern is for the now and the past is a vague memory or a made for TV special.

I have no solutions to the conflicts that plague Israel because I have come to believe that my neighbors do not view the world as I do and are more bent on destroying what they can’t have instead of defining a viable place in this world that they can have. I feel only sadness for those who have died and fear that more families will be forced to suddenly confront the ephemeral nature of our time on earth and the true preciousness of life.