I posted this on facebook this morning. Don't like posting the same stuff on both places, but 1) I feel deeply and strongly on the matter of Israel and Gaza 2) there are different constituencies between this blog and facebook.
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The Book of Lamentations is one of the masterpieces of human art. The art of articulating suffering; the art of living without hope but beyond despair; the art of using words to persuade us that for some experiences there are no words; the art of looking on a devastated land, a crushed city and a people broken by a violence disproportionate, ruthless and revelling in its triumph, and doing so through the lenses of tears that will not stop flowing.
The Book of Lamentations is one of the great gifts of Jewish faith to a world that always needs reminding of the sorrow we visit upon one another. It represents the heart cry of a people who want to live. The deep spirituality of such suffering is a call for compassion, the anguished cry of the suffering in the face of the taunts and cheers of the enemy is a sound every human being should recognise and seek to comfort.
When I see the flag of David waving and crowds cheering missiles and shells raining on Gaza, I am reminded of the Book of Lamentations, and a people shattered by the cheering of their enemies. And when Mr Netanyahu tells me the problem is a terrorist Hamas organisation that uses people as a human shield I share his outrage, but not his ruthless intent to destroy the shields, because they are human beings. People compelled to be human shields are by definition powerless, and the slaughter of the powerless is precisely what the Book of Lamentations immortalised in words that come from the heart of a people who know.
No, I have no answers to Hamas' ruthlessness, nor Israel's ruthlessness so I pray as the Prophet did that God will silence the song of the ruthless.
Kyrie Eleison
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