Self-control: Fixing ourselves, making world better

It was her eyes that really captured me; there was an intense sadness there mixed with pain, and yet every now and then a flash of fire that seemed to suggest … defiance? 

As the woman was being interviewed on the television news, the screen was focused in close, showing only her face. She was speaking about her son who had just been killed in a terrorist bus bombing. A tear rolled down her cheek as she described the dreams and aspirations her son, Yosef, would never realize.

The camera panned around what must have been his room, and I noticed a soccer ball in the corner. The cameraman must have noticed it too, because he immediately panned in on the mud-speckled ball, conveying the tragedy of lost dreams, and reflecting the price of war. 

Then the camera panned back to the mother, a close up of her face, just the eyes, brimming with tears as she broke down and sobbed.

There is nothing more powerful than the love of a mother for her child, nor as painful as the tragedy of that love torn apart by the child’s untimely death, especially by violence.

Indeed, it is for this reason that we learn the sounds of the shofar blast from the sobs and cries of the mother of Sisera, one of the Jewish people’s arch-enemies, whose mother, waiting for his return from battle, begins to cry upon realizing that he isn’t coming home. Just as the love of a mother can never be broken, Hashem loves us no matter what we do.

And then this mother began repeating again and again, “If I only I could have taken his place … I would be proud to have taken his place and I am proud of him for all that he has done.” It was at this point that I realized, as the camera finally panned out showing the woman, and not just her eyes, that I was listening to the mother of a suicide bomber, who not only was proud of her son for the death and destruction he had rained upon so many innocent families the day before, but actually desired to do the same thing.