My friend, Sam Shapiro, in this exceptional piece in the Forward, writes of deaths and more importantly the lives of the friends she lost and the world lost in the Hebrew University massacre.
I lost two friends in the Hebrew University bombing last Wednesday.
You lost them too; they were studying to be day-school teachers, and they would have been amazing — warm, passionate, intellectually charged. I don't blame you for not mourning them or for not remembering their names, Marla Bennett, 24, and Ben Blutstein, 25. Two people were murdered in terrorist attacks the day before, nine were murdered the day after, then two, then 14.
We are getting used to the images of a mangled restaurant, bus or street corner; the blood-spattered flesh, the chaotic spray of shoes and bookbags, the neon yellow of the volunteers' vests. We hold our breath during the body count and feel very sorry, but what can we do? It is not possible to remember and mourn even a fraction of the 605 victims. The media knows this. It's hard to imagine that a terrorist attack that killed five Americans anywhere but Israel would be off the TV screen by Friday, but how many times can the same story be reported?
The story of the deaths — innocent young people senselessly killed — are all the same, but the story of each life is unique, containing its own irreplaceable particular magic. My friends wanted to teach. If we take time to remember their lives and learn from them, we can give them a chance to do that
The article is very much worth reading in its entirety.
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