On Thursday night, I heard Paul Simon sing one of my favorite songs ever, “Peace Like a River.” It was a rare moment of tranquility, beauty and perfection in a terribly flawed world. For that suspended moment, I am sure that tens of thousands there with me (like Ami Kaufman) believed that it was a miracle for something so beautiful to be sung. I want to think that we all believed for a suspended moment that that if this musical miracle was possible, perhaps peace too might actually one day flow like a river.
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Twenty-four hours later, it is a river of blood instead that has shattered any remaining sounds of silent tranquility still left in my head.
The news began with television reports of several people killed by a bomb in Oslo government buildings. My stomach sank as the internet began reporting on a second shooting attack. When the news a few hours later reported over 90 dead I thought I had misheard.
And then came the scenes of carnage, reports of a shooting madman on an isolated island full of youngsters, and the calculated moves he made to get there.
As always happens when such terror is breaking on my screen – whether it’s blocks away or continents apart, I feel paralyzed, hardly able to concentrate on much else, be it personal or public; the blank rage multiplied exponentially by the sense of helplessness. All other activities are punctuated by news updates and ever more horrifying information.
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And then I read that former Prime Minister Gro Brundtland had been on the island where the murders took place, either hours or a day earlier, as reported by different sources. Suddenly the horror had a human face for me. Ms. Brundtland visited Israel on a trip with the Elders in August 2009, and I had the opportunity to know her just a bit. In her blogs from the trip, she wrote passionately about the need for justice through non-violence, and the success of non-violence in achieving justice in other places in the world, following the group’s trip to Bi’lin. She wrote about remembering the inconceivable atrocities of the Holocaust, which, she believed:
must also warn us and remind us of the absolute need to build societies based on human rights and respect for every individual, and the rights of all peoples to live in freedom and dignity.
I greatly respect that this person, then 70 years old, having served in practically every possible position designed to help people, over a lifetime spanning public health to politics, came here to see how she and her colleagues could contribute to our struggle for an end to rivers of blood.
I greatly respect that her country was the site and the support for the first (and sadly, only) breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian relations in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Whatever we think of the outcome of those accords now, they were a symbol and a beacon of change and hope for a better world here.
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This brings me to the hardest part: expressing my sorrow that Norway, like so many other countries before it, now has to confront such bloodletting. In the absence of reports to the contrary, Ms. Brundtland seems to have been unhurt, but at least 92 others human beings were slaughtered; the lives of their families destroyed.
It seems terribly cliché to say this, but I’ll say it anyway: Terrorism, the use of violence against civilians for political goals or opinions, is wrong and evil, always and with no possible exceptions.
Most of the time, violence in general is wrong and evil too.
And my heart, filled with pain, goes out to Norway. As an individual and as a citizen of Israel, I speak to a country that I feel has only ever tried to bring peace to mine: The murderer apparently forgot the commandment “thou shalt not kill,” but you, Norway, may you know only “peace like a river, and righteousness like waves of the sea.” (Isaiah 48:18)