Hell. Hold. Head.

I held my son today. Hauled him up by his armpits so I could gaze into his beautiful face, plant kisses on his cheeks. Today, I watched a man holding a headless corpse of a young child in much the same way, a fiery hell behind them.

I looked at the headless Palestinian child, and the mix of horror and tenderness with which the man held them. I looked at the flames and smoke. I thought about Israeli soldiers and drones, their bringing of hell to the people in the video on my phone.

I thought about Israeli soldiers and I thought about hell.

I thought about my son and holding children. I thought about telling my son, when he bumps his head, my love, watch your head, it’s precious cargo. Every inch of him a treasure. And this child, blown apart in a hell of Israeli devising. Every inch of this child burnt, much of the child severed.

I thought about these words: Hell. Israeli. Palestinian. Child. Head. Headless. Holding.

I was not raised to believe in a hell, but awareness of it soaked in via cultural osmosis, and the possibility of eternal torment terrified me as a boy. Many times my father could only comfort me to sleep by reminding me over and over that as Jews, we did not believe in that fearsome place, that it couldn’t touch me because it was not mine. An oversimplification of course. Many many Jewish texts and religious thinkers posit a time of torture and horror after death for the sinful. To this day, you can be threatened by rabbis and others with a fate in Gehinnom, an eerie valley near Jerusalem where, in the early common era, trash and bodies of criminals were burned. The Israelis have built a bridge over it, so you can pass over the valley without ever descending into it. 

When thinking about the religious value of Jewish cohesion, what we call Ahavas Yisroel, the love of Jews for each other, for the community, I for many years thought of a story by IL Peretz in which a Hasid has a nightmare where he is increasingly alone in a palace of ice. The Hasid wakes from his nightmare crying, “Oh Master of the Universe, I would rather burn for an eternity in hell with the People Israel, then spend another minute in this place!”

For years, this is the standard I held myself to. To love my fellow Jews, even if it damned me. 

I still love my fellow Jews. It has indeed led here, to Hell. I did not know, but should have, that Zionism would bring us here, that the government and soldiers of Israel would be so desperate to kill and punish the Palestinians for the crime of being their neighbors. Now we are here, with Palestinians living in a hell, trying to get free, and a state calling itself Israel stoking the flames with bombs made in the USA. And where does that leave us Jews?

I hold my child, and raise him as a Jew. I kiss his head; praise in Yiddish, his cleverness. Yiddisher kop, I say. Good Jewish head. The Palestinian child I see in my phone, headless. Behind my eyes. In my soul. Headless, small corpse. 

I want this war over. I want a free Palestine. I want us to hold our children, to raise our children to love who and what they are. And I want the martyrs to look down on their murderers, who will be, I hope, in Hell. God save us. God save the people Israel, from ourselves, from Zionism. From Hell.