Mommy, Do Monsters Have a Soul?

Mommy, does everybody have a soul?

Of course they do, sweetie.

What about monsters, Mommy, do they have souls too?

No sweetie, monsters don’t have souls, but you know there are no such thing as monsters.

But I heard daddy say the people who starve our Chatufim (kidnapped hostages) are monsters. So there really are monsters, right, Mommy?

Oh sweetie, sit down. Let me try and explain this to you.

You remember when we helped people from Gaza that came to see a doctor in Israel, and when we sent winter clothes for children in Syria during their war?

I remember.

You know mommy and daddy try to help as many people as we can, no matter who they are, right?

I know. You even help people who aren’t Jewish, aren’t from Israel, or who look different than us or other stuff like that.

Do you know why we do that?

Daddy told me it’s because everybody was created by God and everybody has a soul and so everybody deserves to be helped. He said nobody should suffer. But what about the monsters mommy? The Gaza people who took Shiri and Kfir and Ariel. Are they people or monsters mommy?

Sweetie …

* * *

Mommy tried her best to explain things to a child who had seen far more than any child should ever have to see. She tried to explain what Daddy meant by monsters, and why sometimes he seems so sad.

And while Mommy was doing that, Daddy picked up his phone and did what he often does these days; he frantically pecked out something on WhatsApp to a group of old friends in America. This is what he pecked:

* * *

Do Monsters Have Souls?

All human beings—ALL—are the stewards of an inner spirit, an inner image and spark of the Divine. This is what gives each of us endless value. It’s what makes all human suffering uniquely tragic; what separates the suffering of people from the suffering of cats and dogs.

We Israelis gave the world drip irrigation, Waze, and the cherry tomato, but all those innovations pale when compared to our “image of God” gift to mankind. Without a doubt, the greatest gift the Jewish nation bequeathed to humanity is the notion that all people are endowed with a Godly soul.

The soul is a soaring gift that comes with great responsibility. It also comes with the understanding that when human beings violate, burn, and mutilate the bodies of other human beings—as they did on October 7^th—and simultaneously try to crush the spirit of their fellow human beings—as they do when they starve and torture hostages, and toy with the hearts and minds of their family members, and all Israelis—they actually violate and mutilate their own inner spirit.

The Gazan people that torture other people; pollute, darken, and extinguish their inner Divine spark, their God given soul. Though they remain human, with every depraved thought, word, and action, they adopt and embrace the perverted values and fetid culture of the monstrous human beast that strives to impose a Jihadi hell on earth, as it dreams of inseminating 72 cats-eyed virgins in heaven.

In Gaza, as in much of the Muslim world, we are witness to millions of Jihad worshipping mothers, fathers, doctors, nurses, teachers, professors, and grandmothers that celebrate the deaths of their own family members, so long as they die in the great bloody spree of killing, burning, starving, torturing, raping, beheading, and mutilating our family members.

* * *

Daddy sighed, stared out the window, and then down at his phone again …

* * *

9/11 was a day Palestinians and other Jihadis celebrated. They look back on those collapsing towers with pride, satisfaction, and a smile. On October 7^th when elderly Jews were being dragged through the streets of Gaza to captivity, and now every Saturday when a few emaciated Jews are released, Palestinian parents proudly point to the masked role models they hold up for their children to emulate. Hamas henchmen are to Gazan kids what Beyonce and Patrick Mahomes are to American kids.

Here’s the truth: No such evil has ever existed.

Nazi mothers cried when their sons didn’t return from battle, mothers in Gaza and Jenin celebrate when theirs don’t.

German hospitals were for healing, Gazan hospitals are torture chambers.

German generals strove to shield their civilians from harm, Palestinian commanders use their own children as flesh and blood shields.

Nazi soldiers tried to hide their crimes against humanity, Muslim fighters film their crimes and proudly broadcast them to gleeful family and friends in Gaza, and across the Jihadi landscape of the Middle East.

There has never been a more darkened soul, than the one that defecates on itself in Gaza, and in countless homes, schools, and mosques across the expanse of the Jihadi crazed Muslim world.

God save us all from those that brutalize and rape their own inner image of God …

* * *

Daddy stopped pecking for a moment and held his spinning head in his hands. He had just heard about a freed hostage describing how young Jews being held in Gaza were chained to cold tunnel walls; alone in the dark for months on end, randomly beaten, fed half a pita a day in front of captors that ate heartily while taunting and mocking their starving captives, just a moldy mattress to sleep on, and a plastic bottle to contain their malnourished black urine. Daddy raged inside. He felt like he was going mad. He clutched his phone, and furiously pecked some more—

* * *

… I’m sick of the term “humanitarian aid.” Humanitarian aid for whom?

For all the teachers in all the kindergartens and schools that gladly allowed their classrooms to be used as storage sites for Jihad weaponry. For all the doctors and nurses that allowed their clinics and hospitals to be used as Hamas shields and command centers. For the thousands of moms and dads that happily stored RPG’s and missiles in their children’s closets, or housed the entrance to a terror tunnel beneath their dining room table. For the tens of thousands of construction workers that built the most advanced underground military complex in history. Did even one nurse, teacher, doctor, truck driver, mom, or dad send even one anonymous Facebook message to the world alerting it to what it’s billions were being spent on? And don’t tell me they would have been risking their lives to do so. BS! Plenty of people do all sorts of stuff anonymously online every day. Brave souls elsewhere have risked their lives in opposing an evil regime. The reason no one in Gaza says anything is because everyone is part of it. Yes, there were some Germans that resisted the Nazi ideology and machinery, but not many. And in Gaza, there are pitifully few, if any.

Today, when gaunt Jewish hostages are paraded through the streets of Gaza on their way to freedom, thousands of frenzied Gazans bring their children to celebrate the pain of the Jews. These depraved spectacles are what pass in Gaza for a festival, or a 4^th of July parade.

Today, not one person in Gaza; man, woman, child, has any right to human rights.

None. They have no right to see the light of day. No right to food or water or medicine or a bed to sleep on. No right to a toilet. No right to a home, electricity, cigarettes, cell phones, sanitary napkins, or heat in winter. No right to see their children or siblings grow up, or their parents grow old. IF they ever had any right to live in Gaza, they have totally forfeited that right. Now they have nothing.

When Gazan men gang raped Jewish girls to death, they were also gang raping their own souls. When Gazan parents thanked Allah for such a glorious son, they were handing their own maggot infested souls back to the shamed Creator from Whom it came …

And you know what? daddy’s pecking finger screamed! The same Divine wisdom that taught us and the world that all people are created in the image of God, also taught us that, “When someone plans to kill your family, you must rise and kill first!” That’s humanitarian aid.

* * *

And with that, Daddy stopped pecking on his phone, hit the send icon, and tried to catch his breath, but couldn’t.

He just sat there and cried, like a child in a dark bedroom, filled with monsters.

An old friend across the ocean pecked back, “I can feel your fury, and your sadness.”

* * *

Mommy too cried, as she hugged her child close.

I understand, Mommy.

There really are monsters. And that’s sad too, because in a way the monsters are also suffering.

God didn’t make them monsters, right Mommy?

They did that to themselves, and deep down inside, it’s like their souls are also sad and crying. Right Mommy?

You know what I think, Mommy?

What?

I think we have to stop them before they create more monsters.

Yes we do sweetie.

Mommy.

Yes sweetie.

I think they want to turn us into monsters too, but we won’t let them. Right, Mommy?

No sweetie, we’ll never let them do that. Never.

Mommy.

Yes sweetie.

Do you think one day the monsters will come for us?