It’s hard to do the same thing, every day, for four weeks and here we are: the twenty-eighth day of the Omer. Doing the bigger things consistently every day for four weeks, like exercise, healthy eating, a good night’s sleep — that’s hard enough. Just counting each day should be easy but it’s not. It requires as much intention as even the most sublime of aspirations.
It’s been 227 days since hostages were brutally kidnapped from Israel on October 7. We are well into seven months of the brutal and destructive war between Israel and Hamas which has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, journalists and aid workers. More than 600 Israeli soldiers from across Israel’s social, economic, ethnic and political spectrum, have been killed in this war that currently, shows no signs of ending.
In three weeks the Omer counting will come to an end but the human toll of this savage war will continue. We will count when the counting is done not in days but in drops of blood and human life.
Like God said to Cain after he killed his brother Abel:
וַיֹּ֖אמֶר מֶ֣ה עָשִׂ֑יתָ ק֚וֹל דְּמֵ֣י אָחִ֔יךָ צֹעֲקִ֥ים אֵלַ֖י מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָֽה׃
“What have you done? Your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground!
Rashi, quoting the midrash, notes that in Hebrew the word “blood” is plural, meaning, “his blood and the blood of his descendants” which are none because he is dead. When we take one life, truly, it’s as if we have destroyed a whole world.
The hatred and the seemingly interminable killing is madness; political leaders among Hamas and the Israeli government who cling to power for power’s sake while others suffer and die is madness; we all are in its clenches. 227 days; 28 days; days and nights of unimaginable human suffering. We have done this to ourselves. The texts are clear. Ultimately, God calls upon us to uphold the Law, not to twist it into a weapon of war — a perverse holy war for a Jewish Moshiach or a perverse holy war Jihad for Islam.
Enough! Why are the lunatics making the decisions? Raping and killing whole families? Bombing to oblivion whole families? Dangling corpses in front of a nation? Attacking humanitarian food supplies? Enough of this disgusting, unholy, evil behavior!
Ceasefire talks and hostage release, crashed upon the rocks of an idolatrous pursuit of power by corrupt leaders who only want what they want for themselves and will take the people down with them.
“But the whale rushed round in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down.” (Herman Melville, Moby Dick).
We count and we hope. We march and hold signs and write letters and make calls and we hope. We flail with all our limbs to not be seized by the jaws of hate and we hope.
The late Israeli poet Dan Pagis, from the maelstrom of the Holocaust to Mandatory Palestine in 1946, wrote “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car” perhaps as a letter to the future, to us, to dare to answer a mother’s silence amidst the reality of war that knows no dimension nor boundary:
Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car
here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i
(translation by Stephen Mitchell)
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