"Going on as usual"

Late last night I spoke with my dear friend Dalit for two hours. Dalit is a world famous ceramic sculptress who lives near Tzfat in Northern Galilee. She
got home in June of this year after a long trip to Central America. At first, when she heard some muted boom sounds, she did not know what they were. Very quickly she realized that these boom sounds were coming from Syria, just a short air distance away from her home.

She could not believe how life in Israel is going on “as usual” when thousands of people are being killed across the border and the world, again, is silent. At first she was not able to sleep at night, having a really hard time hearing these horrible sounds of bombs falling on women, children, the elderly and those who were not able to leave the area. She was having nightmares of the last war Israel had with the Hezbollah in Lebanon, as the terrorist movement rained shells on half of Israel indiscriminately. Yet, like most things in life, in order to survive the horrific reality of life around us, we create our own imaginary “beautiful world.” A few people even said to her “let them kill one another.” Suddenly, the world she knew collapsed. She was questioning the ethics of people she loved and knew very closely for many years.

This is one of the poems she wrote. By next week, God willing, I will translate her second poem.

HEARING THE BOMBS AND ROCKETS
 Don’t you hear the falling bombs and rockets?
 How can we continue to live our daily serene lives
 When in the background are the sounds of tanks
 Where hundreds and thousands of people die daily
 Men, women and children,
 A short “spit” distance away is... hell.
 
But who cares?
“Let them kill one another,” they say.
There are those in this war who see pure profit
And we are such an ethical nation
Does ethics knows the difference between race and color?
Is there such a thing as double (standard) ethics?

And the sound of the bombs,
that accompany my life for months
Flashes in my mind of ghastly pictures
That are coming closer and closer
And they don’t let my soul rest.
The nervous tension in the air is real.

The hate in the area is mounting
Without boundaries and restrictions
It is endless.
And we, as mere mortals
Are human?