It’s a warm summer day. The kind most of us should be spending at a pool, or on the beach. A light breeze plays in the air, perfect for playing ball. My kids aren’t playing ball, nor are they at the pool. They stand on a crossroads dotted with olive trees and worn stone fences falling over themselves with time - and they wait.
At each crossroads they stand, by the dozens, by the hundreds, silent. Many hold Israeli flags; some wear orange shirts, but it is the silence that gets to me. Faces etched with one more slap of grief. Faces far too young for such expressions. Faces that remind me of old pictures from another war, pictures we don’t want to remember or forget.
There is a slow stirring of dreaded expectancy. Heads turn south as the first army jeep comes into view. Like a chamsin breeze, throats dry. Tears unwanted and unbidden surface. The ambulance, the cars, engraving a line of sorrow stretching into the Judean hills. You reach with your heart trying to penetrate, to touch those within this chain that reaches backwards in time as well as space. Another young life, another young death.
Both slowly, yet too quickly, they pass. Silence, no cries of anger or grief, silence until the last car with blinking lights has disappeared from view. Silence - the country is silent, the world is silent. Slowly, reluctantly people begin to move, to try once again, to resume “normal” lives. The silence lingers within us, and we hold on to it as something precious
Tonight as I put my youngest to bed I will hold his hand - silently pouring all the love I have into those small five fingers.
