Let Us Not Hurry to Our Doom
In the aftermath of her country’s 1982 war in Lebanon, the Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch tried to represent the suffering it had caused. For the past month, three lines from her poem “Get Out of Beirut” have been ringing in my ears:
How many children do you have?
How many children did you have?
It’s hard to keep the children safe in times like these.
It has been difficult to think deeply about the current war amid so many competing expressions of communal rage, more difficult still to hold multiple horrors at once—to grieve both the young people slaughtered at the music festival near Kibbutz Re’im on October 7 and the entire families lying under rubble in Rimal and Khan Younis.… Seguir leyendo »