Posted at 8:30 AM, Wednesday, March 12, 2008

I have been spending a lot of time looking at a photo in an old album. The photo is of a little boy named Avraham David Moses. Pictured with him is his proud mother Rivka, a classmate of mine from Oberlin College who left a privileged life in America to live modestly as an Orthodox woman in Israel. In the photo, Avraham David is close to his first birthday, tow-headed and adorable, gazing down at his smiling mother. I took the photo in the spring of 1992. Last Thursday, Avraham David was one of eight students at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshivah to be shot dead by a Palestinian terrorist. He was 16 years old.

This event has already been politicized both by the right and the left in Israel. Right-wingers blame the moderate government of Ehud Olmert for the episode, while left-wingers point out that the yeshivah is the intellectual center of Israel's religious right wing. Neither of these arguments can do much to bring comfort to Rivka or the other bereaved parents. My friend Rabbi Gail Diamond, a lecturer at the Beit Midrash rabbinical school in Jerusalem, e-mailed me on Sunday with the news. She had attended the funeral, along with at least a thousand other mourners. This isn't the first time Gail and I have known someone who has been a victim of terror. When we were roommates in Jerusalem in 1991-1992, we both used the services of a marvelous chiropractor Moshe Gottlieb, originally from the Bronx. He who was killed along with eighteen others in a bus bombing in 2002.

Here in South Australia, our normal weather pattern of four or five hot days followed by a cool change have been disrupted. Instead, we have endured nine hot dry days, and there is no end in sight. It is already the longest March heat wave in history, with at least seven more days to go. Firefighters are on full alert this morning, with strong north winds predicted that could fan a small spark into a horrifying blaze. The still, hot air reminds me of parts of Israel in the summer. We stay indoors, avoid the sun, drink endless quantities of water and pick lemons off our tree for lemonade. In Israel, the weather will just start turning towards summer, and the really hot weather should arrive around Pesach, near the end of April. Right now, the rainy season should be coming to an end, and the land should be sprinkled with wildflowers.

In May, Israel will celebrate its 60th birthday, but it doesn't feel like much of a celebration. The dream of a Jewish state has long been fulfilled, but the dream of a Jewish state at peace seems more elusive than ever. The national president of the Women's International Zionist Organization spoke in Adelaide recently about the plight of residents in Sderot, who have only 15 seconds' notice to get to shelter when a Qassam rocket is fired from the Gaza Strip nearby. WIZO is trying to raise money to create a counseling center in Sderot for parents in crisis, but it's hard to imagine what kind of counseling can really be of help when bombs are dropping around you every day. Astute writers have commented on Hamas' warped arithmetic in firing rockets from residential areas with the full awareness that Israel will retaliate. They appear prepared to offer up their own civilians as victims in return for the sympathetic international publicity they expect these deaths to attract. When I was a child, the PLO seemed like the most frightening possible terrorist entity. But at least they were a political, not a religious group. It is hard to imagine how Israel can ever make peace with Hamas when Hamas is dedicated to Israel's destruction as a religious principle.

I was deeply struck last Shabbat by the prophetic portion chosen for that day: "Can a land pass through travail in a single day? Can a nation be born all at once?" (Isaiah 66:7) Even before I knew that Avraham David Moses was among the victims, I was moved to read Yehudah Amichai's poem "The Diameter of the Bomb." I hope a day will come when it won't be so timely.

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and beyond,
making a circle with no end and no God.