Sitting Shiva 

Mourning for Peace

In Judaism, we spend seven days after the death of a loved one focusing on our memory of that soul.  We cover the mirrors in the household, so the focus is never on us.

Around 7:30 p.m. last night, it was confirmed that a missing-in-action Israeli soldier was dead. I instantly got queasy. The same feeling I had previous to the announcement whenever I let my imagination think about what Hamas or Islamic Jihad might be doing to him if in fact they had captured him.

He was killed by the enemies of Israel AND he is also dead because of the enemies of Palestine.  Yet, all that matters to his loved ones is that he, at 23, is dead. No more. He'll never walk into someone's home again making the inhabitants feel warm, because he is now cold and dead and soon to be in the ground.  Only their memories of him will survive and may those memories always serve as a blessing.

I'll never forgot the picture of him smiling that CNN flashed repeatedly for the hour and a half  I watched leading up to the announcement of his death.  While I watched and feared what might have happened to this very young man, I kept thinking that CNN would eventually start showing close up shots of smiling Palestinian children who were dead as a result of  Israeli air strikes.  With 130 plus Gaza children dead at the time of this post, surely CNN could have found a mother clutching an image of her child.  But Wolf Blitzer just kept going back and forth between the Egyptian truce negotiations (that Israel snubbed) and the story of the missing soldier, Hadar Goldin.  No heart wrenching shots of Palestinian dead children, either alive and happy or dead and gone.

If anyone has found any Internet images of a child from Gaza who has been murdered by Israel/U.S.A.  Please send them to this site via a comment or e-mail them to dnd2007wdvx@gmail.com.

I want to mourn for the strikingly European faces like Hadar's and the strikingly Semitic ones like ___________, ____________, ______________, ______________, etc.

I want to sit Shiva for Hadar Goldin and the other children of Abraham who can no longer breath.

I want to mourn for peace--not mourn peace.


Andreas Rubinstein