Finding the right answer

Well, it's now Sunday, and I'm back at the computer ready to begin a new week of blogging. I was trying to think of a topic all weekend and was having trouble deciding. Over Shabbat, I looked into my infant sons eyes and asked myself a truly difficult question: what kind of world will he be brought up in? What do I tell him when he asks me why the Jewish world is the way that it is?

I know that it's the type of question many people ask of themselves at different points in their lives, but when I look around and see the hate that Jews have for each other here in Israel, is it all a misunderstanding? a lack of communication? or have we returned to the time of kamtza and bar kamtza?

Too many Jews want "Peace at any cost". I obviously think that logic is flawed since I just don't trust our "partners". If I truly believed in their sincerity, I would give in to their requests. The problem is that our "partners" believe beyond doubt that the only way for a true peace is when Israel and all the Jews are driven into the sea. That is unacceptable to me. Peace should be the act of both sides being able to live together in the same land without fighting.

Peace is not: lets try and appease the other side by giving them what we deem rightfully ours and hope that they mean what they say about also wanting lasting peace. We need to first see that they are capable of keeping their word and then we can move one step closer to having true peace. We have already made too many concessions and we have gotten nowhere.

Unfortunately, Sharon and his cohorts haven't been very helpful. He has fallen into the trap that many of his predecessors have fallen into and that's wanting history to remember them for bringing Peace at all costs. Does he truly believe that this will work? Is he so far gone that he no longer sees what he spent most of his life fighting for?

So now I come back to my original question…what do I tell my son? While pondering this question, I stumbled across Frum Girls' blog and read her tale of explaining to her son what it means to be Jewish and how lucky we are for what we have that makes us unique as Jews. Here in Israel, there isn't much "fanfare" around Christmas like there is in the states, but we see enough outside "gentile" influences that one needs to continue reminding himself that he is a Jew in a Jewish land and that he must continue to act as a Jew in whatever he does.

I think I now have at least a partial answer….

Thanks for reading….