Yom HaShoah 5786 — A Reflection from Wartime Israel

There is a question that keeps surfacing in me, beneath the sirens, beneath the news, beneath the fatigue of a war with no visible end. It is not a sophisticated question. It is almost embarrassingly simple. Why do they want to kill us?

I am the daughter of Shoah survivors. I grew up in the long shadow of that question. And now, eight decades after the worst answer in history, I live in a country where missiles rain from the sky, where the stated aim of our enemies is our annihilation, and I find myself asking it again. Not with philosophical distance. With bewilderment. With something that feels almost like grief at the poverty of human imagination, that this is still, still, what some part of the world reaches for.

I cannot answer that question logically. I have stopped trying. Some hatreds are not logical. They are inherited, cultivated, weaponized. They answer a need in those who hold them. Understanding them does not dissolve them.

What I can do, what we can do, is refuse to let that question be the center of our story.

Because here is what I know: to tell only a story of victimhood, without any opening toward Hope and Life, is unbearable. It is also untrue to who we are. The intention of Israel is written into its very hymn. Hatikvah. The Hope. Not........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)