Yesterday we attended a ceremony our friends had invited us to. They had sponsored an ambulance that was deployed to Israel just in time to be used in the current war with Hamas. A model ambulance was parked outside the Jewish Community Center for our inspection. Bright yellow with Hebrew and English words all around the body of this “emergency room on wheels”. Magen David Adom is the organization that builds and ships these life savers to Israel. Impressive organization, impressive community, impressive friends so generous. Our friends began this process over a year ago after their last visit to Israel, never imagining the horrors to come on October 7. Their timing was serendipitous or providential. You decide.
Twenty yards away an armed security guard dressed in all black stood in the shade, his firearm conspicuously not concealed. Hmmm, I thought about the fragile times we live in here and now in Tucson and the rest of the country when an armed guard is needed to protect a peaceful blessing of an ambulance at noon on a Sunday, the fourth day of Channukah, the second week of Advent, the third month of a grisly war in Gaza, the 6,000th year of so called civilization. The security guard’s presence gave me mixed feelings. On one hand I was glad for his presence; on the other hand I was agitated that any armed guard needed to be at such a seemingly benign setting. A knot tied itself in my stomach with small anxious hands.
The ceremony was led by a woman who had been a commander in the Israeli army in the 1980’s. She spoke with genuine authority tinged with grace, dignity, and humanity. Tears welled up as she spoke of the ambulance drivers who were killed while they responded to the carnage at Kibbutz Be’eri, as well as the ensuing need for both blood for injured adults and mother’s milk for the infants orphaned. How low, how depraved can human beings become? To kill the target and then target their rescuers for more killing. I don’t want to know the horrible answers that need rank order to find out which sadistic torture killing is the worst… somehow all in the name of a god, religion, or political objective I can not recognize. The ‘both sides do it’ argument is often true; yet Horror does not respect any borders since it emanates from depraved hearts long fermented in bitterness.
We applauded the brief speeches and headed inside the JCC. Many times we had driven past this enormous structure but never been inside. The scale of the building had the effect of making me feel small, humble, and hushed as we proceeded to the nursery of all places where tables were set up for us to eat and watch a video presentation. The irony of adults learning of the horrors of war in a child’s setting was not lost on me. Finger painted art adorned the walls and toys were put away in cubbies along the walls. On the screen in front an Israeli commander of the ambulance squad gave first hand accounts of the horrors his drivers faced, adding that his drivers were also fired upon and killed. Thinking of kindly old Mister Rogers’ saying, “When you are in trouble, look for the helpers.” In this scenario the helpers were also murdered. So then what? Look for the helpers’ helpers?
A young doctor followed up. When he was younger he’d been a MDA ambulance driver in Israel during another conflict, the Second Intifada. He pointed out that his crew responded to all calls, whether the wounded were Jews, Palestinians, male, female, children, whatever. In the traumatic moments when life is teetering on a razor’s edge, somehow humanity is all that one sees. He spoke of working not only for the Israeli medic teams but also for the Red Crescent, the Red Cross of Islam, until such work became too risky for him. Imagine the irony of a Jew rescuing a Muslim during an armed conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Or the reverse. Why is that so hard to visualize? The mental torture comes from trying to unravel one irony after another that surrounds one act of compassion. And blood? Would you reject a pint of blood for your injured child if it were Muslim or Jewish or Gentile blood? Having read this far into my post, I know you would not. And yet, later on compassion is often ground down to powder by legalism and isms of all kinds… and blown away.
During this same doctor’s residency at a hospital, in Tel Aviv I think it was, he was treating an Israeli child and a Palestinian child for the same rare disease. Once again he told us of the same pleas from two different mothers who only wanted their children to survive. From different cultures, voiced in different languages, the same mother’s heart plea gasped for her child. Humanity surfaced at the door step of death, where all the superficial differences melted away. Grief is the same in all languages. When will we ever learn that the security we long for does not come from guns and bombs, knives and bullets? Not from walls, prisons, fences, poisons, gases, biological warfare, weaponized rhetoric. Nope. It arrives when humans act out their humanity in sustained shared compassion.
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