Jewish Reconstructionist Federation

“Lebanon, 1983”

On September 12th, 2001, my high school World Cultures teacher told us a story.Graffiti

Once, years ago, when she made an overnight visit to the hospital, she had shared a room with a woman undergoing another in a series of surgeries. The doctors removed glass from her body. She had been a secretary in the Beirut Marine barracks in 1983 and when the van had burst through the security and exploded, she had been saturated by countless specks of glass. Each surgery removed the newest layer.

As her body renewed itself more glass would push to the surface, painfully and unconsciously as if her body was nothing but soil, fetid and subsumed beneath the seeds planted back in 1983.

Read Two Ways to Look at Violence: Part 1