A Mother’s Prayer on Election Day

Writer's note: I originally published this column on November 3, 1988, in the Washington Jewish Week. In a bizarre twist of synchronicity, I discovered it this week in a pile of papers I was decluttering. I'm convinced that HaKadosh Baruch Hu sent it to me so I could again make it public.

I have climbed the steps up the steep hill to my children's school many times. Parent-teacher conferences, student exhibits, end of year parties – all have brought me up that hill.

I have come carrying burdens sometimes: a purse, briefcase, or refreshments. But never was the hike so steep, or the burden so heavy, as today when I and others walked alone, and carried only our Israeli identity cards on the way to the voting booth.

Our hearts were heavy, too, for only yesterday the country stood still and watched the funeral procession of Rachel Weiss and her three children, who burned to death on October 30 on a bus attacked near Jericho with petrol bombs, on their way to a family bar mitzvah. A Jerusalem Post article carried a soldier’s account of the tragedy. He related how he saw the woman at the back of the smoke-filled bus and tried to drag her out but she refused, screaming, “I have a baby. What about the baby?” The young soldier was no match for the resisting mother. He left the bus, he relates, “with the last of my strength” and she and her children perished in the flames.

We, the mothers and fathers of Israel, have learned to contain our tears. We cannot afford to fall apart every time a soldier is blown to bits, every time a terrorist attack claims another life, every time a child is brutally injured by flying shards of glass. We have to go on.

I, who live in Gush Etzion and have [at that time – TKG] five children, whose eldest daughter has been on buses three times that were stoned, who have myself been on a bus hit with a petrol bomb, fortunately that did not explode, read about Rachel Weiss trying to save her children and could contain my tears no longer.

It is one more example of the sacrifice and anguish that Jewish mothers and fathers have endured through twenty centuries of exile.

I sometimes catch myself, unaware, observing my own children and the children of friends – young boys on bicycles, girls jumping rope, babies at play – and I ask myself, does tragedy await us? Will these boys grow up to face rioters in the streets of Nablus, because we gave up too little, or Palestinian soldiers on a battlefield, because we gave up too much? Whatever we do, is there any guarantee of peace? Can we depend on anyone else?

Today was the day, our hearts united in sorrow, that we went to the polls to decide who we trusted most to make those decisions. Those of us who have lived for many years in this country have experienced at least several previous elections. We observed the 1973 elections, when many citizens voted in uniform at the battlefront in the wake of the traumatic Yom Kippur War, the 1977 “revolution” when Likud replaced Labor after their twenty-eight years in power, and the 1984 election that followed the civil unrest following the War in Lebanon, to name a few.

In our dilemma, we might have mulled over the extensive agricultural settlement network built by Labor, the signing of the Camp David accords by Likud, the struggle for civil rights by the Citizens Rights Movement, the struggle for religious education by the National Religious Party and Agudah, the fight for social justice by the Communists, the fight for settlement by Tehiya. We hear from the new parties a pledge of moderation from Meimad, a pledge to battle corruption from Hisdai, a pledge to rehabilitate prisoners from Rafi Suissa. There is no veteran party that does not have something to recommend it in its past record, and no new party that does not have something to recommend it in its promises. There is no party that has not made mistakes. But only those who dare to act, err.

Those of us who have made aliyah from elsewhere feel special pride in going to the polls today, as in past elections. We have chosen to throw in our lot with the people of Israel – not only through support from afar, however blessed, but by living the dilemmas and painful choices that can only be the lot of the mothers and the fathers who know that the choices they are making will affect their own children as well as themselves. Our choice this time was one wrought with trepidation. And we may never know whose choice was the right one.

Judaism has a prayer for almost everything. We say a prayer when we see a rainbow, a reminder that G-d will never again destroy the world through water. We say a prayer thanking G-d that our body’s organs function properly. We even say a blessing after a death that brings us an inheritance.

We in Israel have special prayers. We say a prayer when we see the first spring bloom of trees and a prayer as we take tithes from fruits and vegetables that have grown in Israel’s soil. We say a prayer for the welfare of the soldiers who guard our borders and a prayer for the welfare of our State, the “first blossom of our redemption.” And the traveler’s prayer, said all over the world as a spiritual plea to guard one from plane and car crashes, is said by us as a plea to be safe from rocks and petrol bombs.

I, a mother in Israel who would like to see this land whole and peaceful, my people at peace with each other and my children and the children of my Arab neighbors all well and happy and safe, offered my own prayer on election day, and it is a short one: May the leaders we choose be people of wisdom.