In a tiny country where the enemies' settlements are scattered throughout the land and on all sides, it is hard to feel safe. Israel cannot, for all its military strength, provide the illusion of distance. There is no ocean, there is no West, no vast emptiness to choke memory and history with. In America, the beginning of the story has a moment on the ground, like a dead leaf, a nostalgic moment touched with color, but then it is gone. In Israel, it just lies there in plain view.
Nothing seeps into the ground, nothing disappears.
Looking around it is obvious that the process of life, of creating new things, cannot happen without loss. To understand this too fully is crippling. We need the fiction that life and death are separate, that loss is accidental, in order to keep going on with it. Someone can come around and suggest an imperfect remedy, announce in a report that all that was shaken was a window pane or a television set. That it may have been shaken in ways that are not visible, not apprehensible to insurance agents is a given.