Point your bullet where ever you like in my body
I will die today, but my homeland will live tomorrow
Be careful, Palestine is a red line.
- Amer Nassar (d 2013, age 17) I will die today, but my homeland will live tomorrow
Be careful, Palestine is a red line.
No land is mine
If land belongs to any one
it belongs to God (not that I believe).
The path to peace
is mindset
not history
is not our destiny,
nor is a text
which people wrote
for social control
and self-protection,
not for neighborly love.
but, as a Jew, I object when synagogues raise children
to make Aliyah – to occupy land and not make peace
and that a two-state solution
is still
out
of reach.
Everyone
needs a home,
a
roof and food to eatbut home need not
mean
Homeland
is a religious concept
that fights peace
- but implicitly -
on all sides.
My
beloved aunt, may she rest in peace,
believed
the land is “ours. We belong here,” she told me before she died.
She was wrong,
and I protect her memory by saying so.
When
I came home to America
which
has always been my home - and I’m grateful for it -
I
was told by some that you just left Home.
To
that, I say Bullshit.I am a middle-class American Jew
with food to eat and medical care.
I have no right to complain
that I am not Home -
or that I don’t have a home -
just
because I’m not in eretz yisrael.
As
Jews, our place in the world
is
to help others -to perform mitzvot -
not to shoot.
That doesn’t mean we don’t protect ourselves
but as we protect ourselves
we place our arms around others
first and foremost
around a table
in a circle
not in front of
or behind
a red or a blue
or a green line.
As
for religion,
how
presumptuous to think that I -or anyone else – male, female,
Christian, Muslim, or Jew -
might know (believer or not) what God wants.
What
I do know is that people
want
peace -and not through war
and hatred
and killing.
We are not born to hate
but to seek comfort
and love
and to give it in return.
-Esther
Altshul Helfgott
4/6/13
4/6/13
