On Purim, let’s learn to love our enemies.

So? You want to wipe out the Jews? There’s a price to pay. And as Purim approaches, and the death of Haman’s (almost Hamas‘) sons, lynched on their ropes of guilt, our ropes of revenge, are right before our eyes, this price shows itself to be even deadlier.

Look what happens to our enemies! 

Only, let’s not ignore that the Torah also teaches us to love our enemies. So which is it? Love? Or revenge?

Having just read how over 44,000 Gazans have been killed since the start of the ‘Iron Sword War’ (oh, how I detest that name! Could anyone think of more macho, phallic bullshit?) as reported by the Hamas-run health ministry, I was triggered to look up how many Germans died under Nazi rule. (I assume I do not have to spell out the correlation.) Apparently, a total of 7,142,558 casualties, an incredible 54.6 percent of the 13,000,000 soldiers Germany mobilized for the war.

Oh, but the numbers people spew, as though anything we are told by baby butchering, burning, mass slaughtering maniacs can be fact.

Indeed. Only, the problem with this oh so convincing argument is that I’m not content with justifying the murder of even one innocent Gazan. Those Germans? Many of them were innocent too.

But the allies did what they had to do, didn’t they? They had to wipe out that evil power.

Possibly.

But what we can change now is our attitude towards the suffering in this war.

Arguably one of the toughest weeks of the war was the ‘coming home’ (in body bags) of the rest of the Bibas family. Strangled, according to forensic evidence. And then crushed by the weights of rocks piled upon them to make it seem like they’d been killed by their own people, the IDF. Horrific, indeed. Very few moments passed without my seeing an orange balloon or a picture or films of the beautiful boys growing up – not that they had the chance to do much of that. One woman, I noticed, driving to work, even had an orange scarf tied to her wing mirror. The whole country seemed to go from yellow to orange in the breath of a butterfly. People’s grief and trauma since the war began exponentially increased, as if the suffering and sorrow and heartache couldn’t get any worse.

But, as a person who knows, sees, works with, eats with and has many friends who are our Palestinian partners for peace (the people who say we don’t have anyone to talk peace with are simply not listening) I felt incredibly uneasy with this ‘orangeness’.

Two children of ‘ours’, of the Jewish people, are strangled, and the heart of the country opens and wails. But we also know, we know, innocent children who are suffering, who have died, in this war, in Gaza. And when it happens, or when, if it is at all, reported, we keep very quiet. Mostly. They belong to ‘the other side’.  And anyway, they’re not our children. They don’t belong to our Jewish family.

Well, actually, they belong to God, if she exists. And our land too, is not our land at all. That too belongs to God.

Each one of us belong to God. I believe God’s heart is breaking all the time, these days, when she sees people choosing sides.

My partner, just three weeks ago, suffered two heart attacks. He was in fact 1% away from dying, we were informed afterwards, if the statistics work that way. He had a 99% blockage which had caused a rise of troponin in his blood at a whacking 7500 percent when it should normally be 0. He works for the Israeli forum of peace organisations, the umbrella body of many peace organisations here in Israel. So it struck me. In the days after, while I’m processing how my husband of only five years nearly died, the father of our beautiful little boy nearly died (and I’m thinking all the time of those hostages who came home to the news their loved ones, their families, had violently perished) I’ve been wondering if the heart attacks happened because all of our hearts right now, the hearts who work and dream of peace, our hearts that keep being broken.

To keep the numbers of ‘our’ dead and ‘their’ dead in our hearts, to usher in the morning with sadness for the evil that has not yet been vanquished, to watch the next generation growing up with pain and hatred, to say goodnight and not know when sleep will come and what nightmares will ensue, that’s where my heart, for one, has been at. For a long time now. My partner, he says he’s doing okay. He’s optimistic. Bibi will fall. Peace will come. Look at Nazi Germany…

And yet… and yet… before peace, before we work together like decent human beings who want our children and their children to live long, healthy, God willing even boring! lives, there’s something we have to do first.

We have to recognise the humanity of ‘the other’. We have to truly mourn the loss of human life when that life was innocent and had the potential for goodness, and we have to learn how to love our enemies. The sooner we do that, the sooner we will discover that many of them are in fact, not our enemies at all.