Cleaning Up After The Bomb
Stories
Lectionary Tales For The Pulpit
Series IV Cycle C
On March 27, 2002, at a little after 7 p.m., a young Palestinian male sauntered into the lobby of the Park Hotel in the coastal town of Netanya, and made his way to a banquet hall where 250 guests had congregated for a Seder meal at the beginning of Passover. Moments later, he detonated the bomb strapped to his waist, killing himself as well as 26 others. Over 100 were wounded in the attack.
Of course, the scene for the next two hours was absolutely chaotic. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, in black, full beards and curls, were inside on the crime scene collecting all the bits of human flesh they could find as required by rabbinical law, and removing the body parts from the hotel in lumpy plastic bags. Medics were performing triage, helping the wounded, setting broken legs and arms. Police, as a security measure, were looking for a second bomb -- just in case. Detectives and crime scene investigators had also arrived and were trying to piece together what had happened.
Reports from the scene say that all of this activity took place in relative quiet. There was no shouting and hysteria. The people on the scene knew what had happened and they knew what they had to do and they did it.
The last crew on the site was the cleanup gang. Women cleared away the Seder dishes, while others mopped up the blood. Furniture -- what was left -- was rearranged as before. The marble floors were polished. Within a few days, the damaged tiles had been replaced, and the room restored to its former appearance.
Outside, no flowers or memorials marked the spot where the carnage had taken place. It was as though nothing had happened. The horror of the past had been removed; only the present and the future could now be addressed.
This rapid-recovery policy in part has its basis in the Jewish laws of the dead that stipulate that burials must take place in a timely manner. Yet there is another rationale behind the cleanup process: Like wiping graffiti off a wall, the quick cleanup is designed to say to the persecutors, the homicide bombers, and their enemies: "You cannot break our spirit; we will persevere."
It may seem trite to compare this horror to the events of our own lives -- we who live in relative security in our homes and who do not have to face the hardships of either the Palestinians or the Israelis. But there's a principle embedded in this story that applies to us as well. As we walk on our Lenten journey -- indeed as we walk through life -- we will trip some moral, ethical, and spiritual bombs of our own. We've wept with sorrow at the damage our actions and words have sometimes caused. We are sometimes our own worst enemy and when we stand surrounded by the damage we've caused, or when we're caught up in a maelstrom of abuse and violence as the victims, we wonder what we're going to do next.
What we're going to do is clean up. We can start by turning our lives over to God through Jesus Christ. And when we do, the Apostle Paul suggests that we begin fresh as a "new creation."
Delaying action is not good. The cleanup should start immediately. Now. Today. Remove all the reminders of the past carnage. No memorials. We look instead to our future as a new person in Jesus Christ.
Of course, the scene for the next two hours was absolutely chaotic. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, in black, full beards and curls, were inside on the crime scene collecting all the bits of human flesh they could find as required by rabbinical law, and removing the body parts from the hotel in lumpy plastic bags. Medics were performing triage, helping the wounded, setting broken legs and arms. Police, as a security measure, were looking for a second bomb -- just in case. Detectives and crime scene investigators had also arrived and were trying to piece together what had happened.
Reports from the scene say that all of this activity took place in relative quiet. There was no shouting and hysteria. The people on the scene knew what had happened and they knew what they had to do and they did it.
The last crew on the site was the cleanup gang. Women cleared away the Seder dishes, while others mopped up the blood. Furniture -- what was left -- was rearranged as before. The marble floors were polished. Within a few days, the damaged tiles had been replaced, and the room restored to its former appearance.
Outside, no flowers or memorials marked the spot where the carnage had taken place. It was as though nothing had happened. The horror of the past had been removed; only the present and the future could now be addressed.
This rapid-recovery policy in part has its basis in the Jewish laws of the dead that stipulate that burials must take place in a timely manner. Yet there is another rationale behind the cleanup process: Like wiping graffiti off a wall, the quick cleanup is designed to say to the persecutors, the homicide bombers, and their enemies: "You cannot break our spirit; we will persevere."
It may seem trite to compare this horror to the events of our own lives -- we who live in relative security in our homes and who do not have to face the hardships of either the Palestinians or the Israelis. But there's a principle embedded in this story that applies to us as well. As we walk on our Lenten journey -- indeed as we walk through life -- we will trip some moral, ethical, and spiritual bombs of our own. We've wept with sorrow at the damage our actions and words have sometimes caused. We are sometimes our own worst enemy and when we stand surrounded by the damage we've caused, or when we're caught up in a maelstrom of abuse and violence as the victims, we wonder what we're going to do next.
What we're going to do is clean up. We can start by turning our lives over to God through Jesus Christ. And when we do, the Apostle Paul suggests that we begin fresh as a "new creation."
Delaying action is not good. The cleanup should start immediately. Now. Today. Remove all the reminders of the past carnage. No memorials. We look instead to our future as a new person in Jesus Christ.
