This Monday night begins the Jewish fast of Tisha B’Av: a day of mourning for the calamities that have befallen the Jewish people over the centuries. Among other things, the traditional Tisha B’Av liturgy includes the chanting Biblical book of Lamentations.
Given the profoundly tragic events currently unfolding in Gaza, I offer this reworking of the first chapter of Lamentations. I share it with the hope that on this day of mourning we might also mourn the mounting dead in Gaza – along with what Israel has become…
A Lamentation for Gaza
Gaza weeps alone.
Bombs falling without end
her cheeks wet with tears.
A widow abandoned
imprisoned on all sides
with none willing to save her.
We who once knew oppression
have become the oppressors.
Those who have been pursued
are now the pursuers.
We have uprooted families
from their homes, we have
driven them deep into
this desolate place,
this narrow strip of exile.
All along the roads there is mourning.
The teeming marketplaces
have been bombed into emptiness.
The only sounds we hear
are cries of pain
sirens blaring
drones buzzing
bitterness echoing
into the black vacuum
of homes destroyed
and dreams denied.
We have become Gaza’s master
leveling neighborhoods
with the mere touch of a button
for her transgression of resistance.
Her children are born into captivity
they know us only as occupiers
enemies to be feared
and hated.
We have lost all
that once was precious to us.
This fatal attachment to our own might
has become our downfall.
This idolatrous veneration of the land
has sent us wandering into
a wilderness of our own making.
We have robbed Gaza of
her deepest dignity
plunged her into sorrow and darkness.
Her people crowd into refugee camps
held captive by fences and buffer zones
gunboats, mortar rounds
and Apache missles.
We sing of Jerusalem,
to “a free people in their own land”
but our song has become a mockery.
How can we sing a song of freedom
imprisoned inside behind walls we have built
with our own fear and dread?
Here we sit clinging to our illusions
of comfort and security
while we unleash hell on earth
on the other side of the border.
We sit on hillsides and cheer
as our explosions light up the sky
while far below, whole neighborhoods
are reduced to rubble.
For these things I weep:
for the toxic fear we have unleashed
from the dark place of our hearts
for the endless grief
we are inflicting
on the people of Gaza.
Shalom Rav 
Brant, This is beautiful. I can hardly see for tears….thank you.
Reblogged this on INCISITY and commented:
Thanks as usual dear Rav. Shabbat Shalom
Unforgettable, Rabbi Rosen, so movingly unforgettable. I’ve reblogged it on my Musings blog.
A profoundly moving inditement of a nation/government that has become intoxicated by its power and its capacity for blaming the victim. Thank you for your compassion and determination to speak for and stand with the forgotten people.
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2014 18:33:05 +0000 To: ljkaroum@hotmail.com
Thank you Brant. You speak to our hearts — our broken hearts — and to horror, rage and bottomless grief that we feel. And like Aicha, you don’t hold back. The destruction is total, there is nothing left. Nothing left but to acknowledge the totality of destruction — done by our own hands — and to mourn, repent, and begin to rebuild. That’s Tisha B’av 2014. Did you imagine that your despair and horror could go deeper than what you felt after Cast Lead?
In response I also want to share a passage from my book, Fatal Embrace. This recounts my Tisha B’av of 8 years ago, the summer I went to the West Bank.
“My last night in Palestine that summer fell on the ninth of Av, a Jewish day of fasting and mourning, the traditional date of the destruction of the Temple of Solomon and the beginning of the exile of the Jews two thousand years ago. The book of Lamentations, a source text for our liturgy of mourning, attributed by tradition to the prophet Jeremiah, is chanted that night. It is a harrowing description of a people fallen and traumatized.
Jerusalem has greatly sinned
Therefore has she been made a mockery. All who admired her despise her
For they have seen her disgraced.
Panic and pitfall are our lot,
Death and destruction.
My eyes shed streams of water
Over the brokenness of my poor people. (Lam. 1:8, 4:46–48; author’s translation)
On that night, I sat on a hill overlooking the Old City, in the company of congregations of praying Jews, mostly American émigrés worshiping, I felt, at the shrine of their Jerusalem—a Jerusalem “reclaimed” at the expense of the Palestinian people; a Jerusalem that for Palestinians is also a spiritual and political center; a Jerusalem that is being taken from them street by street, farm by farm, village by village. I stood on that hill and chanted the words as I had every year on this day, descriptions of starvation, rape, slaughter, destruction of homes, and banishment from the land, and, for the life of me, I could apply the words only to the Palestinians. In these words, I now felt their suffering. And my eyes shed streams of water for them, my Palestinian brothers and sisters, and yes, for the brokenness of my own people.”
Hamakom y’nachem otanu b’toch sh’ar avlei Zion v’Yerushalim.
I read the Hebrew Bible as a Christian…and when words fail me to capture the catastrophic horror that is being inflicted on the Palestinian people by those in power whose own humanity has been corrupted… I, too turn and recite Lamentations to give voice to their suffering.
Thank-you!
God go with you.
Dear Rabbi,
Greetings.
Mourning songs is a not a strategy.
The tragic situation is that the moderate majorities – those who wish to end the conflict by peaceful means – are desperate and radicals dictate conditions to everyone. There is an urgent necessity to create a broad peacemaking coalition of the majority on both sides against the extremes.
Dr. Sapir Handelman – an Israeli that just went out of the shelter because Hamas was firing missiles from a populated area…
Thank-you for this work of “deep calling to deep”. May its threads of compassionate justice knit us back to G-d and to one another and help mend the broken fabric of our world. I will be re-blogging this on A Sparrows Cry.
Pingback: In defence of Hamas | Alister Rutherford
As a Christian I am seeking to empathise with all the suffering of the people of Israel and Palestine. This lament is profound. I share for all those times when that the State (in my case the UK) acts while the people mourn, protest, repent and seek Shalom feeling helpless in the face of power. God of all peoples bless you.
As i write this is it feels that a hymn I wrote back at 9/11 might echo some of your sentiment. The persective is Christian, the sentiment is intended to be inclusive:
1 God’s on our side, and God will grieve
at carnage, loss and death;
for Jesus wept, and we will weep,
with every grieving breath.
2 God’s on their side, the enemy,
the ones we would despise;
God quench our vengeance, still our pride,
don’t let our anger rise.
3 God’s on each side, God loves us all,
and through our hurt and pain
God shares the anguish, nail scarred hands
reach out—love must remain.
4 God show us how to reconcile
each difference and fear,
that we might learn to love again
and dry the other’s tear.
Andrew E Pratt (born 1948)
© 2001 Stainer and Bell Ltd
God of all peoples bless you.
Andrew
Thanks, Brant, for giving us words for our sorrow. I am never quite sure which is foremost, though, my anger or my sorrow. Both extend to our country’s complicity in this horror and my general sense of powerlessness to stop it.
There is irony in some of the passages of Lamentations in that these could as easily be a lament over the destruction of Gaza as of Jerusalem.
5:1-4
Remember, O Lord, what has befallen us;
Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers,
our homes to aliens.
We have become orphans,
fatherless;
our mothers are like widows.
We must pay for the water
we drink;
the wood we get must be
bought.
brant so heartfelt. It also brought tears to my eyes. The world seems so bleak right know. It is painful. I have shared this with others.
Reading your poem/prayer, having just finished reading your book, Wrestling in the Daylight and having returned from a Presbyterian Peace Fellowship trip to Israel/Palestine this past January, I am daily, sometimes hourly searching my heart, my spirit for some more concrete way to forge a path to peace. Our nation, at least our government, seems not to care in any meaningful way, for the slow-death and destruction of the people. We are so enmeshed in the military-industrial complex that we are blind to our complicity in this horror. Thank you for your voice and your boldness. You are heard and you are doing the right thing.
This is my Rabbi. Brant Rosen. I want to say something here about him. In these days when he speaks from so many broken hearts and clear minds.
Like everything Jewish, there’s kind of a long story. The moment my brother died I left god. I left Judaism. I was a deep, heartfelt believer since childhood. And then I wasn’t. t left faith and hope and belief and all their pretend/pretense. I left the religion that abandoned me. I left the god that bait and switched me. My belief was the best kind – rich, yearning, open, growing, skeptical, expansive, communal, hopeful, forward and good. It balanced my reportorial savage within. And then it didn’t. It, my faith, my belief, my god, my place in my religion, vanished. Without a trace. When my Rabbi, this same Rabbi who wrote these words I hope you read, when he had nothing for me that night and all the awful days and nights after the death, after the death of my beloved brother and my belief in all, I left him, too. He was the last straw. I had paid my Hebraic premiums for decades. I was a good Jew. I raised a good Jew. I married a good Jew. I named my dog after a good Jew (Bernard Malamutt.) I tikkun olamed in my personal and professional life. I asked for nothing back. Nothing. And then my life’s catastrophy happened and I filed a claim. I said: Dear God and Judaism and Belief: I have never filed a claim before. I don’t even know what I need. But I want to die because my brother, the best human being I have ever known, my best friend, my life’s witness and keeper of all my secrets, died. So now what? What do you do for me? What do I get back after being such a good Jew for my whole, entire life? Bring on the comfort, the healing, the words, the transformation from where I am to, well, somewhere else.
Nothing.
There were books – Anita Diamont’s Saying Kaddish and, god help me, good old trope Larry Kushner’s bad things/good people. Only god knows. Find meaning. Grief has a proscribed path so here…just follow these 5 phases and you’ll get ‘there.’ And rituals and prayers and candles and sitting on the couch and platters and platters of food.
Nothing.
So I left. Without a trace. It was shockingly simple and final. After decades of deep, prayerful, relational belief and faith, it was all gone. Like someone with amesia. It’s not sad because you have no memory of missing anything – you just know something is gone. No ache of a phantom limb. No regret. Just nothingness. Groundless, guileless nothingness. And a soul-crushing pain defying description.
My brother and I shared a million things in common besides our wild lion’s hair and mirrored dark eyes. A lifelong urgency to right wrongs and teach and write and make justice – radical and social – as our way of living and life. So when I started paying attention a few years ago to what Rabbi Brant Rosen was writing and saying out loud – about justice, and humanity – I couldn’t help but feel pulled in a bit. And once I really started reading and hearing and watching what this “radical” Rabbi was saying out loud, and once I learned about the terrible price he was paying for just simply speaking the truth with such eloquence and from so deep in his heart – I could not look away.
Today I am still not a Jew. I have no god. I have no belief other than in some giant, unknowable, all-encompassing love and wisdom of which we are all already a part and need seek no further than our quietest heart-truth. But I have a Rabbi. I have a hero grown from the ashes of the faith and god and religion that abandoned me. For Tisha B’Av, for the mourning of all calamities everywhere, upon everyone. For my beautiful brother. For us all.
Dear pamcyt, You describe your personal loss and your feelings of abandonment by God so powerfully that in reading your comment I had a real glimpse of your pain – enough of a glimpse to fill my eyes with tears. I am relieved that you have returned to your Rabbi. Brant Rosen has always struck me as a man brimming with care, compassion and love and an unshakable commitment to social justice. I am a Christian, with limited knowledge and experience of Jewish culture, heritage and values, but from what I do know, Brant practices and preaches the most honest form of Judaism and his ministry can be appreciated by Jews and non-Jews alike. I am sure you would agree when I say that I think you are lucky to have him as your Rabbi.
Your brother sounds like he was an amazing human being. I know it would be utterly futile of me to think I can say anything that could ease your pain. From what I have read of your sense of abandonment by God, for me it evoked words from Psalm 77. “Has his loving kindness ceased for ever? Does his promise fail for evermore?” I am afraid I cannot answer those questions but here in this beautiful city of Worcester in the United Kingdom early on this Sunday evening, I am sending you my love along with my thanks for your inspirational words.
Shalom.
Carl
Beautifully expressed.
Reblogged this on Black and White and in Living Color and commented:
The Word of the Lord…
Thanks be to God.
Reblogged this on A Spirit Filled Life and commented:
A Lament for Gaza
Reblogged this on Musings of a "not so good" Christian and commented:
This is a stunning beautiful and heartwrenching piece. I share it on my blog because needs to be a great deal more compassion from Evangelicals when it comes to the Palestinians and our rabid, no questions asked support of Israel. Please read and share. Thank you Rabbi Rosen
Your words bring a deep grief for this war and the death of so many Palestinians. Thank you Rabbi. I have reposted this on my blog. So many people need to hear this. Peace to you. Mark
Thank you for this Brant. I will share the Lamentation with the Benedictine Sister at St Scholastica Monastery as we join you in observing Tisha B’Av. Bob
Sent from my iPad
>
Is it possible to feel sorry for the Palestinians that they have blown yet another chance to have a state of their own? That they have taken the goodwill of the world and turned it into terror tunnels and rockets aimed at innocent citizens?
We as jews in Israel don’t have to apologize for living.
I think you need to understand this.
The Gazan residents have been taken captive by Hamas and if anything Israel is doing them a favor by trying to lift the siege of Gaza by Hamas.
It’s a very sad situation – but you need to keep it in perspective-
The perspective of thousands of years – not just what endears you to fareweather friends.
thanks for your rational response to this one sided garbage.
rabbi rosen whoever you are, please write a lamentation for the 200000 syrians killed by their own government, the hundreds of thousands left homeless–
what is a people to do if rockets are constantly rained down on them? Do you prefer to see jews with bowed shaven heads being marched meekly off to slaughter? Do you get it that this is what the Palestinians want, what they are taught. I am appalled by your website and the one sided trash it reflects.
Reblogged this on Rabbibrian's Blog and commented:
My dear friend and colleague, Rabbi Brant Rosen, has written a powerful interpretation of Lamentations Chapter 1. Tonight this will be my lament, a lament about what has happened to our people and a lament for the suffering of the people in Gaza. Hearing about corpses of children in Rafah that are being stored in ice cream freezers is an image that I can’t get out of our mind. In the words of our liturgy, What has become of us? Meh Haya lanu!
Thank you for your profound words of the heart. Sharing on my interfaith ministry FB page.
Lord, have mercy on our souls because with our Federal Income Taxes we are supporting this “incremental genocide”, a term used by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe.
We pray for the civilians of Gaza who have no safe shelter from Israeli bombs.
We pray for the families of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, age 16 and Mohammed Malka, age 3, and so many others killed in this war.
And in the words of Canadian Jewish Holocaust survivor Ursula Franklin, when speaking against Israel’s 2009 attack on Gaza said, “Never again means Never again for all people, Lord let it be thus.
May all attacks on Palestinian and Israeli civilians cease.
We thank God for the good peaceful people of faiths, the Jewish Voice for Peace, the Christian Peacemaker Teams, Muslims and others who are outraged at the slaughter in the Gaza strip.
Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer!
Dear Rabbi Rosen,
I, too, cried at your beautiful, heartfelt Lamentation for Gaza. Then I thought that there must be a parallel elegy for the innocent Israeli civilians maimed and killed in busses, in cafes, at Passover Seders, the innocent civilian kindergartners who have but fifteen seconds to run for shelter to avoid being killed by a rocket, etc. In my search, I began to understand your philosophy.
What surprises me is that you are still in Evanston. I would think you would now be in Gaza taking the place of an innocent civilian human shield, so that he could be freed to strap on a suicide vest, become a martyr and get his seventy two virgins in heaven.
Pretty poem,completely devoid of the facts..gaza has been bombarding southern Israel non stop for years…preaching hate and death to Jews ,building terror tunnels at great expense..for what?….look here..Israel has plenty fault..but they would leave gaza live in peace and openly free………but Hamas put their people in to the fire and brimstone of this war…nobody else
Aaron,
You are talking here with totally deaf people who like to think he is/they are liberals (modern?) and as so they go against Israel with all their hearts.
I did not hear anthing from those people when for 15 years and more rockets have been fired to south of Israel as a daily routine , the opposite many of them say it OK by Hama’s to fire them as part of their “war for freedom”. O yes those tunnels have been built for peace reasons going into Israel… Even Egypt did not let them having free pass. Not on the ground roads and not by tunnels. Even during fighting days food and other staff went into Gaza from Israel WHILE Hama’s fired rockets on Erez junction. And my heart is with Gaza children and I am sure we could do more to try to prevent the last war but I am not sure that that could work with Hamas, even Abu Mazen do not trust them.
And it is very popular by Jewish Liberal to forget that Hamas calls officially to destroy my country.
( sorry for my mistakes in English….I am Israeli Jewish and proud to be)
brant, once again, touching words. previously subscribed, i sought your wisdom on the current crisis over gaza and discovered i’d seemingly been dropped from your blog list so i resubscribed. you are courageous and a model for me. i recall vividly meeting you at the afsc awards and fundraising event around 2011 in chicago. and visiting your synagogue one friday, relieved to finally discover a jewish community where i could safely reply to the question (in effect), what is in your heart? with news of my photographic work in palestine israel. thanks and stay strong.
Brant very moving; thank you.
Here is another poem:
I wrote a short poem few days ago which I have been encouraged to append here.
It is called “Crystal Clear Brooks.” Although it expresses my feelings, I cannot but think that the children in Gaza would give anything but their birthright and their pride and their basic human rights for a glass of crystal clear water. And, I think too, of the Bakr children, the sons of fishermen, who were slain while playing on a Gaza beach.
Crystal clear brooks
When the time comes
And the last day dawns
And the air of the piper warms
The high crags of the old country
When the holy writ blows
Like burned paper away
And wise men concede
That there’s more than one way
More than one path
More than one book
More than one fisherman
More than one hook
When the cats have been skinned
And the fish have been hooked
When the masters of war
Are our masters no more
When old friends take their whiskey
Outside on the porch
We will have done well
If we’re able to say
As the sun settles down
On that final day
That we never gave in
That we did all we could
So the kids could go fishing
In crystal clear brooks.
Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters: Why moral perversity of U.S. position in Gaza is stunning
http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/pink-floyds-roger-waters-why-moral-perversity-of-u-s-position-in-gaza-is-stunning/
How dare you, HOW DARE YOU! call yourself a Jew, let alone a Rabbi. Appeasing enemies to the Jewish people. You low class piece of excrement! You should be excommunicated.
you, Brant Rosen, are an abomination
ally to amalek
Take yourself and your congregants to Gaza..
I dare you
so very true – Israel is doing exactly what it accuses others of doing. Thank you for speaking out.
I just read the news of your decision to quit JRC. Although I am not a member of the congregation, after reading some of your political ramblings here and elsewhere, I thank God for your departure. You are truly a sick and twisted individual devoid of any logical moral sense. If you cannot understand cause and effect and attribute them accurately, you cannot possibly equitably judge your fellow Jews in Israel, much less your fellow human beings. And your writings on the Middle East conflict clearly betray a deep, and perhaps deliberate misunderstanding of cause and effect within the historical context of Israel’s creation and its current existentially precarious position vis-a-vis the Arab world – including the Palestinian Arabs.
Somehow, despite terrible losses over the centuries, the Jews have survived all external and internal enemies. Although it sometimes takes what seems an interminable amount of time, the truth does will out. Your departure from the Jewish rabbinical community and from your congregation in Evanston will, in no small measure, contribute to a return of much needed integrity and sanity to the universe.
Did you at any time, during your carrier, protest against Turkey for conquering 40% of Cyprus, cleansing the Greeks from the conquered part and colonizing it with Turks from Turkey? Did you protest when Turkey killed tenth of thousands of Kurdish people? Did you protest when the Russians erased Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, from the face of the earth? Did you protest when the Chinese conquered Tibet and many times killed thousands of Tibetans? I can add to the list but would be useless! You are one of these bigots hiding behind the “humanist” anti-Zionism, like Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Alice Walker etc. David Duke is at least a honest Jew hater he openly says that he hates Jews! I don’t appreciate his position but at least I know that he is openly my enemy. Can you imagine what would have happened if the Jewish brain didn’t invent the Iron Dome? Your problem is that there are NOT ENOUGH DEAD JEWS!
With all due respect Rabbi – your comments are shocking to me as a Jew and American. Please visit Sderot and see the terror that’s been inflicted on those innocent people every day for the last 8 years. I’ve been there and I’ve seen and felt it. A strong safe and free Israel is an insurance policy that the Jewish community possesses. We should cherish it and protect it – not try to destroy it.
This is so beautiful and sad. Thank you for your posts and your commitment to speaking the truth.
I am not Jewish, but this ongoing War troubles me to my very soul. I have struggled mightily to put it into words…but compared to yours, these verses of deep loss and anguish, I have utterly failed.
Thank you for so eloquently expressing the thoughts of so many. A great number of people have honestly wondered *where* the early promise of Israel went. I think it helps to know that even a Rabbi can wonder that, as well. Peace be with you.
Brant Rosen…Thank you for you courage, your humanity. You are a rare bird (at least in my experience). Sorry I didn’t get to know you a bit when you lived in Denver. My best wishes, Rob Prince, Denver
Brant, you are truly a Prince of the American Jewish Freak Show. You and your Christianized Jewish flock should be ashamed of yourselves. I really hope that that the Gazan Islamofascists called Hamas that our kids had to fight off, give their blood for, and which instead you write poems of lamentation for will soon come nipping at your ankles in Evanston in the form of ISIS. Or better, someday ISIS in the US will use your kids as protective shields as they carry out their terror acts on the American homeland as your media is now predicting. You spend your life convincing Jews, who are so ignorant of anything Jewish, that Israel was the aggressor. Why don’t you write poetry for the Sderot children who spent their childhood under constant missile attack from Gaza (thousands to be exact), the place that Israel gave up for peace to be the Singapore of the Middle East. Our only crime was having technology to knock down their missiles while their leaders sat in bunkers under Shifa Hospital. You have learned nothing about the tragedy of Tisha B’av. SHAME ON YOU. You are not a rabbi. I want see if you have the guts to post this IN FULL, you sick freak.
With love from Haifa, Israel
Is it possible, just possible, that when one’s contention is that Tel Aviv is as occupied as Jericho, and that an elected government acts on the basis of that contention, it leaves a nation few alternatives in the face of provocation.
Had the government of Gaza ceased its use of human shields and accepted Tel Aviv as part of Israel under the original partition, there would have been no rocket fire and likely a dialogue and furtherance of the peace process would have ensued. It’s even possible that Gaza may have taken on the success of Singapore.
Is Gaza so much a widow as a propaganda effort to exact the maximum anti-Israeli sentiment possible from an increasingly anti-semitic Europe and that part of the US electorate on the left (especially far left)? Is it possible, just possible, that the lack of outrage from the feared Arab Street suggests that what has happened in Gaza is hardly a matter of the Palestinian-Israeli problem but something far larger than is suggested in this effort? Is is possible, just possible, that the lack of criticism (or restrained criticism) of Israel’s Gaza operation by the Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and Russians reflects an especially European outrage moreso because it is Israel involved? 160K died in Syria, and the attention given to it pales next to that accorded Gaza by the New York Times. How much slavery remains present in the Middle East, and nary a word is spoken about it. How many Jews have been kicked out of Arab states simply because they were Jewish–and absent Israel, had no place else to go, yet nary a word is spoken about it. How many Chinese are treated as though they were slaves to manufacture goods sold in the US, yet hardly a word is spoken of it. Yet it is Gaza that gets the attention.
I guess rocket fire on cities now constitutes dignity. I shudder to thing what constitutes being in good graces. Maybe that’s the next pardon when the Hadassah Medical Center in occupied West Jerusalem and the Museum of Art in occupied Tel Aviv are the targets of rains of rocket fire in the hopes of driving the infidels out of the territory seized by the colonial power foisted upon the Palestinians in a fit of guilt by the Europeans.
Im ain ani li, me li? It’s the first verse for a reason.
“We who once knew oppression
have become the oppressors.”
Utter rubbish, but far worse than that is the tragic death, suffering and misery such foolishness condemns human beings to, on both sides.
In WWII my father and his fellow airmen of the USAAF and RAF bombed German cities to rubble, and then bombed the rubble. By so doing, and accepting nothing less than unconditional surrender, they freed the surviving German people, Europe, and the world from a genocidal regime, and ushered in the longest period of European peace in history.
Today, Germany is a thriving model democracy. It’s pretty clear that Germans learned the very hard lesson in WWII they avoided learning in the First World War by limiting that war’s destruction to the battlefields of France, Russia and Belgium.
In the words of Sir Arthur Harris {Germany] “…has sown the wind and shall now reap the whirlwind.” and we haven’t heard a belligerent or bellicose peep out of them since — ditto Japan.
What the people of Gaza need, what would serve them best in the long run, is the total annihilation of Hamas, along with the destruction of their weapons, and weapons making capacity. The complete and utter military defat of that genocidal terror regime is the only hope for peace and prosperity of the people of Gaza.
Pussyfooting will only encourage incessant warfare, festering hatred, and an unending toll in human suffering.
my lament is as much for the destruction of Gaza as for the loss of the Jewish soul.