We're beginning our fourth day back from Israel and I woke this morning with my head filled with thoughts, prayers, musings about that war-torn country. My first thought was of the students in the yeshiva in Jerusalem that were killed and that will suffer the trauma as a result of the killings - we visited several Israeli schools while there, and I wondered if it could have been one that we had seen.
I read the article in the Times and of course, it wasn't. Of course, it was one of the Ultra-Orthodox schools, a school that promotes a religiously zealot Zionism in favor of the settlements - altogether a different sort of institution than the ones that we were able to enter. Do you get it? Do you see? The blatantly militant Islamist enters the religiously extreme Zionist school and opens fire. The pain of the situation for both Israel and the Palestinian territories is their own extreme factions. The majority of the people in both lands would be content/able/relieved, if not happy, to live in peace, but the extremists on both sides are condemning their brothers and sisters to war.
I find myself sitting at my laptop with tears on my cheeks this morning for those who are suffering on all sides in that little piece of God's land. We Christians are traveling the Lenten journey right now - we are in the season that recognizes wilderness, that remembers times where God feels absent even if S/He is not, but my heart cried out - why does wilderness have to be so painful? Moses was lost in the wilderness for 40 years. This year Israel will celebrate its 60th year as a nation. When will it end? Can it reach the Promised Land?
No comments:
Post a Comment