Dead Hand in the Sand

We sat on the sofa--me and Noa 12, Tamar 9 and Yarden 7--looking at every photo in David Rubinger's autobiography, "Israel Through My Lens--Sixty Years as a Photojournalist." It was a quiet shabbat afternoon before the week containing both the day of remembrance of fallen soldiers and the 60th anniversary of Israel's independence as a reborn state. This seemed like a way to experience the whole span of Israel since 1948. The photos of Rubinger throughout his life and those that he took from the other side of the lens are almost all in B&W, but that made no difference to these color soaked kids. As I would try to quickly pass the image of a dead Egyptian soldier's hand emerging from the Sinai sand, or the blood-spattered Song of Peace found in Yitzhak Rabins' pocket after his assassination, or a soldier nurse tenderly caring for an injured young Israeli soldier, the girls would call me back. "Tell us about it Savta." What happened?" And I would tell them as unembellished as I could about all the wars Israel was forced to fight, from the time in 1948 when young girls learned to throw grenades at the attacking Arab armies, to the Sinai war and to Rubinger's iconic photo of the Six-Day War of three young soldiers with eyes raised standing before the Western Wall, to the sad brooding image of Golda Meir on the day she resigned as Prime Minister after the Yom Kippur War. We also looked at the ecstatic smiles of Jews arriving in Israel from Morocco and Yemen and the resigned faces of elderly Soviet Jews surrounded by suitcases in a bare room in their new land. And I showed them the moments of peace--of Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin and King Hussein and Yitzhak Rabin.
Children in Israel know more about life than one would choose for them. Our grandkids know that their uncle Alex died protecting their land. They miss the uncle they only know from their fathers and from Alex's smiling photos and from his glowing art. They grow up knowing that they will have responsibilities one day to help protect and to make better the land their parents chose for them. The images that stay in their heads are not those of other children. Their reality is not that of other children in other lands.
Noa, Tamar and Yarden immediately recognized Rubinger's photo of gnarled fingertips pushing into a seam between rough hewn stones where a crumpled white paper protruded from the seam. "It's the Kotel, Savta."
Surrounded by love, reality may be a gift rather than a burden.