Howard is a doctor, marathon runner and author. He has written two non-fiction books, My Father’s Compass (2007) and Raft (2009). Carrots and Jaffas (2014) is his first novel. His latest novel is A Threefold Cord (Hybrid, 2107)
My friend from Rwanda has been a teacher to me. I listen to his beautiful voice: his words, exquisitely chosen, percolate unto my being. In those moments I am in harmony with my friend and with my essential self.
My friend from Rwanda lived through war in his homeland. He lost a brother in war. He watches TV images from Gaza. Children climb through the rubble.
I was one of those children, he says.
My friend from Rwanda watches TV and he sees children dying.
He cannot see Hamas putting the children in the way of harm.
My friend does not see self-defense. He does not see intent. He only sees genocide, where I am convinced of the opposite intent.
When my friend from Rwanda sends us footage that uses language of ethnic cleansing, of colonialism, he hurls me into a distance that neither of us wants. He cannot hear my words. Drenched in blood memories, clad hard in his own pain, he cannot know mine.
A gentle lady visited me in a bush hamlet. She was fifty and fair, softly spoken, with an air of sweet naivete.
Sighting my kippah she became excited. She asked, Do you have dreams, visions and prophecy? Almost apologetically, I said no, I didn’t.
In the days and weeks that followed I did have a dream. My Dad was suddenly, quietly present. In the dream I was aware Dad was dead. But here he was, standing at my shoulder, smiling. No words were spoken, none expected. This was a dream; in my dreams nothing is expected. Dad was just there. His gentle smile was a smile of sadness. I knew, as I always have known, that Dad loved me. His smile said that and more. The more was Dad’s sorrow for the world. He smiled in the understanding we shared, that I would have to live in this world of pain, that he had left, and had left to me.
Last night a vision came to me. Or perhaps the vision came as I sat in the early morning sunshine, looking out over the sea. It was a vision composed of words and phrases.
Joy to the world
The Lord is come.
Woe to the world
The Lord is hid.Joy to the world
A child is born.
Woe to the world
A child has died.
****
Blackbird singing in the dead of night Take these broken wings…
In that vision I was aware that words of hope should follow: and learn to fly…but hope eluded me.
*** I spoke to the rabbi and he said.
There is always hope.
The rabbi is not filled with a sweet naivete. He carries the burden of family, every one of his father’s kin, slaughtered in the Shoah. Yet the rabbi counselled hope. He argued for it. He commanded it.
The hand of the Lord was upon me…
And He set me in the midst of a valley;
It was full of bones:
Son of man, can these bones live? O Lord, Thou alone knowest.
***
The soft lady in the bush said: We believe in dreams and visions and prophecy. She spoke the words with the fluency of mantra, with the ordinarinessof a shopping list.
I wish I had the gift of prophecy. The Prophets always spoke of the worst:
I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley.
And they spoke always of hope:
Prophesy, son of man, and say, Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.
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