14/01/2024
READING A LIST
I have been seeing before my eyes lists of names engraved on walls: There is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, with almost 60,000 names of American soldiers who died in that war. There are the volumes of names of murdered Jews on shelves in a circular bell-like chamber in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial, with the tiniest smattering of enlarged portraits staring down from the walls. There are thousands of names listed on a wall at Israel’s memorial to the armored corp at Latrun, and thousands of terror victims listed on a wall at the Mt. Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem. The symbols of the letters making the names are so flat, so bland, so woefully inadequate to give a sense of the world that was encompassed by each individual.
But the list that I and hundreds of others encountered tonight, at a somber ceremony on a damp, chill, windy night, on the beautiful Haas Promenade which overlooks the lit-up Old City, and the Dome of the Rock sitting atop the Temple Mount, seemed very different to me. This shorter list, of 138 names of hostages still held by Hamas exactly one hundred days after they were kidnapped, were read out, slowly, one by one by one. Only their first names were read, along with the traditional Jewish phrasing “son of” or daughter of”, followed by the mother’s name.
For a moment, without even knowing the face that matched each name, I could feel a sense, a hint, a shadow of the fullness of these individuals–presumably still alive–or rather, a sense of the horrors we could not come close to knowing. This one is curled up in hunger, eating wet toilet paper to assuage hunger pangs. That one is in strong reaction to the lack of proper medicine. This young man’s arm is throbbing at the point where it was blown off as he hurled terrorist hand grenades back at them. That one is desperately trying to keep those hungry, probing hands off her.
This one, the son of his mother, and that one, the daughter of her mother: name after name is slowly read , and it is so hard to fill the space behind each name with someone struggling in thin subterranean air, with someone threatened into silence, someone rushed into other tunnels as the IDF forces methodically advance, someone struggling to deflect abuse, desperation and constant fear and longing.
