And you can send me dead flowers every morning
\nSend me dead flowers by the mail
\nSend me dead flowers to my wedding
\nAnd I won’t forget to put roses on your grave. <\/p>\n
Even at a Sunday afternoon dance recital, Israel is never far from my mind. While watching the tiny dancers and earnest teenagers show grandparents and parents the payoff for all those lessons, my mind\u2014I\u2019m being honest\u2014strayed.<\/p>\n
While serving as a booster seat for my niece, Lauren, who was straining to see her dancing heroes, I looked around and then down. <\/p>\n
I saw them. The bouquet of roses. This led my mind down a wooded path in which the Rolling Stones were into their country thing, back in the halcyon days when the boys were closer to Johnny Cash than disco. The song, \u201cDead Flowers,\u201d probably refers to drugs, but just like everyone else, I can twist the meaning to fit my own reality. For me, the lyrics perfectly describe Israel\u2019s seemingly precarious position in today\u2019s world.<\/p>\n
The weekend\u2019s promised violence from those who simply don\u2019t like Israel is a dead-ringer for the person in the song that strives to send dead flowers to an adversary. One presumes the adversary in question is in some way in a position of some weakness, lashed to a post of whippings and harassment.<\/p>\n
Certainly, the Jews have been harassed for millennia, but we are living in the days of the miracle of the Return. My father grew up in the days when Jews were herded into ghettos\u2014Warsaw, et al\u2014and I grew up in the shadow of Entebbe and the Six Day War. Think of that, the Jews went in one generation from the Holocaust to the astonishment of a hostage rescue in the heart of Africa. They are more than a legend in their own time, they are what Herman Wouk said of the hero of Entebbe, Jonathan Netanyahu\u2026Israel is an ember of sacred fire.<\/p>\n
So if people see Israel and don\u2019t like it (\u201cNakba, anyone?\u201d), they menacingly send the Jewish state dead flowers every morning, dead flowers in letter bombs, and dead flowers to religious celebrations.<\/p>\n
But a powerful truth has emerged, one that pulsates with biblical prophecies writ large: Israel will outlive all her enemies, and she will in the end certainly not forget to put roses on their graves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And you can send me dead flowers every morning Send me dead flowers by the mail Send me dead flowers to my wedding And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave. Even at a Sunday afternoon dance recital, Israel is never far from my mind. While watching the tiny dancers and earnest teenagers…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n