{"id":2258,"date":"2015-10-17T23:30:31","date_gmt":"2015-10-17T21:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moked.it\/international\/?p=2258"},"modified":"2015-10-19T08:28:52","modified_gmt":"2015-10-19T06:28:52","slug":"a-short-note-from-a-participating-spectator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moked.it\/international\/2015\/10\/17\/a-short-note-from-a-participating-spectator\/","title":{"rendered":"A Short Note from a Participating Spectator"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mascetti\"<\/a>By Yaacov Mascetti<\/strong><\/p>\n

The last two weeks have been rather difficult in Jerusalem, so I am going to put on hold my personal reflections on Judaism and exegetical messiness, and will just write a few lines on my experience of the violence here in the city I live in. In my posts on Pagine Ebraiche I have been trying, repeatedly and in different ways, to support my need for the Other \u2013 but when all that very complex post-modern meets the reality of people who do not share your belief in understanding, opening up to, listening and speaking in a fertile dialogue, but actually stab and run over and cut apart and joy in the death of Jews, that’s when I put on hold my calm academic self and place the angry personality in forefront. <\/p>\n

I believe in listening, I believe in acknowledging the suffering of the other, but when I am the target of an attack, there is no place to listening and dialogue \u2013 there is only place for self-defense. <\/p>\n

As I was sitting in the General Reading Room of the National Library of Israel here in Jerusalem the other day, an employee of Bezeq, the local phone company, crashed his work vehicle into a bus stop, and then got out of the car and literally butchered a man, and injured another one \u2013 the dumbest thing I did that day was watch, over and over again, the video footage of the attack. It petrified me to see how the anger and evil in a human being can give such fertile fruits, how a man can take another man’s life simply because he represents the enemy, the other side, the country that controls your people and so on\u2026 And as I stared I could really only see human beings doing horrid things to one another \u2013 one with a butcher knife, the other with a gun while defending himself, shooting, stabbing, justifying the senselessness of life with violence. <\/p>\n

Yes, because it is all completely senseless \u2013 you can burn the Tomb of Joseph, you can stab me as I take my girls to school, you can kill a 60 year old man at the bus stop, you can burn a baby alive \u2013 you can. But at the end of the day, you and your actions are as meaningless as you both were in the morning. <\/p>\n

And then there are the stories woven around the events, the stories on the news, the eye-witnesses, the stories told by the leaders, the stories told by survivors, the stories told at funerals by relatives eulogizing the dead. Stories. The verbal envelopment of a senseless reality which is intended to fashion meaning, express it, reveal it, but all it does to a disillusioned reader \/ listener like myself is instill a sense of nausea and disbelief. Personally I am tired of the events, the blood, the lives taken, and of the words wasted in the aftermath. I am tired by and of the rhetoric, the spite, the lack of justice, the blindness. <\/p>\n

It may well be that I am just another idealist, or yet another depressed academic who sees the cosmos through his post-modern eyes \u2013 whatever it is, I am tired of all this blood, all this killing for\u2026 a piece of land.<\/p>\n

*Yaakov Mascetti holds a Ph.D. and teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Yaacov Mascetti The last two weeks have been rather difficult in Jerusalem, so I am going to put on hold my personal reflections on Judaism and exegetical messiness, and will just write a few lines on my experience of the violence here in the city I live in. 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