Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(156)
“O brother Palestinians! Remember! When the Muslims, the Arabs, the Palestinians, make war against the Jews, they do so to worship Allah. They enter the war as Muslims! The hadith does not say, ‘O Sunni, O Shiite, O Palestinian, O Syrian, O Persian, come fight.’ It says, ‘O Muslim’! For too long we have battled ourselves and lost. Now we will battle together and be victorious.
“We are fighting in the name of Islam, because Islam commands us to wage war unto death against anyone who plunders our land. Surrender is the way of Satan!”
COME HOME
But then, after his final word, the camera stayed on the prime minister. His gaze held. And the camera held. At first it seemed like an awkward broadcasting mistake, but it was no accident.
His gaze held.
And the camera held.
And then the prime minister did something so outrageously symbolic, so potentially kitschy, so many miles over the top, it risked breaking the legs of its intended recipients just as they approached the necessary leap of faith.
He removed a shofar from beneath the lectern. And without any explanation of its meaning—its biblical or historical significance, its intent to awaken sleeping Jews to repent and return, without even sharing that this particular shofar, this twice-curled ram’s horn, was two thousand years old, that it was the shofar discovered at Masada, stashed in a water hole and preserved by the dry desert heat, that its inside contained biological remnants of a noble Jewish martyr—he brought it to his lips.
The camera held.
The prime minister inhaled, and gathered into the ram’s horn the molecules of every Jew who had ever lived: the breath of warrior kings and fishmongers; tailors, matchmakers, and executive producers; kosher butchers, radical publishers, kibbutzniks, management consultants, orthopedic surgeons, tanners, and judges; the grateful laugh of someone with more than forty grandchildren gathered in his hospital room; the false moan of a prostitute who hid children under the bed on which she kissed Nazis on the mouth; the sigh of an ancient philosopher at a moment of understanding; the cry of a new orphan alone in a forest; the final air bubble to rise from the Seine and burst as Paul Celan sank, his pockets full of stones; the word clear from the lips of the first Jewish astronaut, strapped into a chair facing infinity. And the breath of those who never lived, but whose existence Jewish existence depended on: the patriarchs, matriarchs, and prophets; Abel’s last plea; Sarah’s laughter at the prospect of the miracle; Abraham offering his God and his son what could not be offered to both: “Here I am.”
The prime minister aimed the shofar forty-five degrees, sixty degrees, and in New York, and in Los Angeles, and in Miami, Chicago, and Paris, in London, Buenos Aires, Moscow, and Melbourne, television screens trembled, they shook.
TODAY I AM NOT A MAN
“The hardest thing to say is the hardest thing to hear: forced to choose between my parents, I would be able to.
“And I’ve talked about it with Max and Benjy, and if forced to choose, each of them could choose as well. Two of us would have chosen one, and one of us the other, but we agreed that if forced to choose, we would all choose the same one, so that we could stay together.
“When I did Model UN a couple of weeks ago, the country we were representing, Micronesia, suddenly came into possession of a nuclear weapon. We didn’t ask for a nuclear weapon, and didn’t want a nuclear weapon, and nuclear weapons are, in pretty much every way, horrible. But there’s a reason people have them, and it’s to never have to use them.
“That’s it. I’m finished.”
He didn’t bow, they didn’t clap. No one moved or spoke.
As always, Sam didn’t know what to do with his body. But the organism that was the roomful of family and friends seemed to depend on his movement. If he started to cry, someone would comfort him. If he ran out, someone would follow. If he’d just go talk to Max, everyone would schmooze. But if he continued to stand there, fists balled, they would continue to stand there.
Jacob thought maybe he could clap his hands, smile, and say something lame, like “Dig in!”
Julia thought maybe she could go to Sam, put her arm around him, and touch her head to his head.
Even Benjy, who, by virtue of never giving it any thought, always knew what to do, was motionless.
Irv longed to assume the authority of the family’s new patriarch, but he didn’t know how. Was there a five-dollar bill in his pocket?
From the middle of the room, Billie said, “Yet.”
Everyone turned to her.
“What?” Sam asked.
There was no sound to overcome, but she screamed: “Yet!”
O JEWS, YOUR TIME HAS COME!
The cheering would continue long after the Ayatollah lowered his final raised arm of solidarity. Long after he made his way behind the temporary stage, surrounded by a dozen plainclothes bodyguards. The cheering—the applauding, the chanting, the hollering, the singing—would continue after he was greeted by a line of his closest advisers, each kissing him, blessing him. After he was put into a car with two-inch-thick windows and no door handles and driven away. The cheering continued, and intensified, but without a gravitational center, the crowd moved outward in every direction.
Wolf Blitzer and his panel started discussing the speech—without the time to digest the translation, they just pulled quote after quote until they’d reassembled it out of order—but the camera stayed on the crowd. The mass of people couldn’t be contained by Azadi Square, which pumped them through the connecting streets like blood, and it couldn’t be contained by the camera’s frame.