ben's picture: milchama

ben's picture: milchama
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I haven't been posting much, mostly because of the war, which made the chronicling of everyday life here seem vulgar. The truth is that life in Jerusalem has been completely normal for us, except that it has been shadowed by this awful conflict. They had a child psychologist over at Ben's school to talk about the war - some of the fathers were called up on reserve duty - and they told the children to draw a picture of war. Benjamin has been mostly oblivious to it - we don't talk about it in front of him, and his limited Hebrew protects him too (though his Hebrew is getting much better). So instead of drawing something that spoke more specifically to the conflict he drew this giant mythic bird with two human passengers, one holding a giant Israeli flag - a picture more informed by Harry Potter than by Gaza. Then he erased the word "milchama" (war) though you can kind of still read it on top of the picture, since it isn't really a picture about the war. And this made me grateful that he is protected from knowing about war, and very sad for the children who have been learning about war, first-hand, the past few weeks.
So there is a ceasefire now, and perhaps it will hold, and perhaps it will not. Perhaps to children here war will one day be something abstract and mythic, like it is to Benjamin. I've been listening to a song version of Yehuda Amichai's poem - I want to die in my own bed - which is the deliberately anti-heroic cry of a poet and soldier who fought in WWII and in Israel's War of Independence, and I'm wishing people of the region ordinary joys and ordinary tragedies.