Yesterday
a bus with 27 people from my neighbourhood headed to Kiryat Arba and Otneil to
make shiva calls to the Ariel and Mark families.
There
are few things less comfortable than watching people you do not know, but truly
feel for, mourn their needless and inexplicable loss. You want to comfort them
but since you don't know them there is really very little you can say. Instead,
you stand quietly and let them pour out their grief and their pain, while you
listen. All the while you are trying to look at your feet because you feel like
a voyeur. Your heart is hurting because your greatest fear is experiencing similar
loss and if it can happen to them, then it can happen to you.
And
as you drive in and out of these small, protected communities you see all the soldiers
trying to keep these people safe living on land that was first purchased by our
ancestors in biblical times. In my case that makes me even more anxious because
one of those soldiers is my son.
"Hallel
(Ariel) wasn't just murdered," says her mother in American English,
"she was massacred." She unfortunately proceeds to tell us exactly
what the 17-year-old terrorist did to her daughter. I surely didn't want to
hear it yesterday and now I want to do whatever I can to stop hearing it repeating
over and over again in my head.
"Go
inside and see the bedroom (where it happened)," she suggests. I don't
know why she suggests that but who am I to question how she expresses her
grief? I don't go inside.
And
despite everything that has happened in the past five days she is talking about
hope and the need to keep going. All I can think is that I doubt I could go on
under such circumstances.
However,
we are met by exactly the same message when we get to the Mark house. This
shiva has wall-to-wall people because all of the 10 Mark children have many visitors
– not just their own friends and family, but people like the Ra'anana bus
crowd.
"We
must stay strong; we cannot lose our faith," says the daughter who I watched
the day before cry inconsolably on a YouTube video of her father's funeral.
The
same message.
This
isn't theatrics; They aren't looking for attention. This isn't for the cameras
and the media. There are no cameras because, outside of Israel, there is very
limited interest in this story. To the greater world there is no story in a
13-year-old girl about to go to her last day of school before Summer break, get
mutilated while sleeping in her bed in her house. "Well, look where they
live," think the news followers outside of Israel, "she had it coming."
And
what about Rabbi Mark off to visit his mother for Shabbat. He must have been
looking for trouble as well.
The
funny thing is that the people who commit these atrocities don't have a greater
purpose in mind either. The 17-year-old who killed Hallel wrote on Facebook
that he wanted to die a martyr ….. and go off to his 70 virgins. That's an
honourable reason isn't it? He didn't do it to protest his frustration against Israel
or Jews. He simply wanted 70 pliant lays.
Of
course that's not a story for the media either. It would ruin their
international construct that Jews in Israel are getting what they deserve.