Rage is durable, tenderness distant

Grief reveals itself as rage. We didn't start this fire.

Every morning I make my first cup of coffee and, instead of getting into the shower while it’s percolating I open the Times of Israel (thank you Seth Klarman) to see if I know any of the faces of the dead IDF soldiers, or their parents, and in my case, their grandparents. I have a “ go bag” packed, not to flee, but to get on the next El Al flight for a shiva, because I know that I won’t make it to the burial. I know one hostage’s grandfather. I keep a basalt grave stone in the shape of a heart in the bag.

Nick Kristof wrote in his October 21st NYT Opinion piece:

Dear Nick:

Grief reveals itself as rage. Rage is an uncontrollable conflagration. Any firefighter knows: remove the oxygen, fire dies. Douse it. Foam it. Whatever it takes. We didn’t start this fire. The oxygen in the room is the hostages.

So, remember,  “the unfortunate past and future events of all of our lives are purely the product of our own decisions, not others.”

The quote above is too true. Yet moral clarity, or “moral myopia” deserves the field of vision of a great futbal midfielder, the kind that looks around him (or her), a dozen times, before they receive the ball, sees all the players, and more important, where they are moving to, knowing in advance where to push the ball forward. In the match, not several seasons ago.

Queen Noor’s post today of your October 21st Opinion piece “We Must Not Kill Gazan Children to Protect Israel’s Children;” column which you describe as “on the tragedy unfolding in Israel which is about to get much worse,” is notable in its glaring omission to look back even only a few days, at the mushroom cloud of rage, and global fear, created not by the Palestinian people, nor their children, nor their courageous journalists, nor their obscenely valorous physicians and nurses who refused evacuation, but by Hamas, a suicide cult with historical aspiration as a modern-day SS Einsatzgruppen death squad/army.

Disregarding the hostages, Jewish children, Jewish women, many rape survivors, and the elderly, does exactly to these terrorized hostages what you fear for the Gazans victimized by their martyrdom-seeking governance: it devalues their misery because they are Jews. The Jewish hostages were not given a choice.

Tell me, Nick, why do you assume, in silence, that the Jewish hostages are not still being raped? Tortured? Maimed? Because they are currency?