On Bullets and Prayers

Five years today, on the thirteenth anniversary of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s murder by a right-wing extremist and day of the 2008 US elections, I wrote an overly optimistic blog post that is thankfully no longer online. I had hoped that those elections would repair a divided America, one that has since shattered.

At the time, the assassination did not have that much of an effect on me. I was a religious fourteen-year-old high school freshman, spending the Sabbath in a suburb outside of Pittsburgh, when I heard the news. Growing up in a bubble, my view of Israel had a strongly religious slant and was steeped in familial tradition.

It was only three years later when I spent the anniversary of the death in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv that I first had a glimpse into the aftermath of Rabin’s murder. I had spent my first Sabbath in Tel Aviv, then as a seminary student, and was completely unprepared for the unrestrained crying of people my age in the streets during his memorial.

It represented the beginning of conversations I had with Israelis about the true effect of what the murder meant for a generation of youth. The murder in the name of god had caused countless of my religious friends to lose their faith and become completely secular.

For me, the process of secularization began more earnestly during the 2004-2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip, when I witnessed the open hatred for peace and compromise. I remember sitting in a graduate class about messianism and hearing a religious classmate, with a baby in tow, announce she would bring that baby to a dangerous protest because if something would happen, the baby’s blood would be on the hands of the government.

A scant half-year after I wrote that piece, I moved to Tel Aviv on a Friday evening, symbolically cementing my secular identity. The naïveté in my post of five years ago was a hidden prayer, of sorts, hoping that the breach between the secular and the religious would heal and my inner torment would end. I had prayed for conversation.

I once held the childish belief that political discourse in a modern democracy didn’t lead to internecine violence, a myth the assassin’s bullet shattered. The murder didn’t happen in a vacuum, it was precipitated by frothing hatred towards those who didn’t share the same beliefs.

In the same way, three years ago, I remember when I heard of the first gay teen who committed suicide because of bullying, and the second, the third, the fourth and the fifth. I had just moved to Los Angeles, and while I was openly gay while living in Tel Aviv, my sexuality had never entered my writing. But as one suicide followed another, I saw that just as with Rabin’s murder, words could lead to bullets, pills and bridges.

In my time abroad, I missed what this country had really become. Since moving back to the States, I have seen my naïve idealistic prayer of five years ago fall on deaf ears.

That’s why today, on the 18th anniversary of Rabin’s murder, I have no such prayers to offer. Blogging is a horrible way to attempt change in the world. We preach to the choir and then pat ourselves on the back for the ensuing horde of unfettered compliments.

The mantra of hope is neither robust nor endurable. The hope for peace died with the single pull of a trigger. The hope for acceptance is dashed with single derogatory epithet. It will take courageous people of action, like Yitzhak Rabin, to ultimately effect real change.