view from central park: tehilla r. goldberg

‘Make them feel it’

Posted

Tehilla’s column was filed before Shavuot, before the Orlando massacre.

I was in a taxicab in Israel around the time of the second intifada and the driver was talking about the political situation. Since it seems that Israeli taxi drivers are often prophets in disguise, when they start sharing their minds, I pay attention. This one was commenting about a new government decision that he deemed a grave mistake. “Watch and see, before you know it, it will be Arabs on one side of the street, and Israelis on the other, shooting at each other. It will be like Bosnia.”

How many times have those words come to pass in the years since? Tragically, too many.

Whenever I hear the shattering news of a pigu’a or a terror attack in Israel, I cannot silence the sounds in my mind. The convoys of shrieking ambulances; I can never forget that sound. Living and working near and in the center of Jerusalem, where many of the bombs exploded, I usually knew one had just exploded from the endless, wailing sirens.

How ironic that in the week we were poised to celebrate the holiday of Shavuot, when the Jewish people became a nation — bringing the loftiness of Shabbat to the world, and codifying morality so as to foster the existence of a better world where murder is wrong — the Muslim community is also poised to travel a holy month, the month of Ramadan, yet it has been commenced in bloodshed.

Again, another holiday is marked by bloodshed.

Unlike Shavuot, the Jewish holiday whose centerpiece is literally the Ten Commandments which delineate fundamental truths that must be the bedrock of any moral society, the Muslim holy days are marked by marauding murderers who are trumpeted as heroes.

The other day, I clicked on a YouTube video of a Palestinian kindergarten graduation. The program designed by the school for these five year olds involved playing “kill the Jew.”

Then I watched Ami Horowitz’s social experiment. On the campus of Portland State University, he posed the following question to students:

“Can you help raise funds for American Friends of Hamas?”

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