The Passion of the Boy Soldier

I ran into a friend from college on the bus and when the news came on the radio, I shushed her, to hear if there was anything new with Gilaad Shalit. Then I realized it was okay: if they announced that he had been released everyone would be talking. You wouldn't even need to listen: you would see it on their faces. It would be like a Messianic redemption scene, everyone jumping up for joy, golden light coming out of the clouds, and everything we had lost three years ago when he disappeared restored back to us. No second war in Lebanon, no "Cast Lead Operation." We could wake up and say that had all been a a bad dream, and we brought our child-soldier home.

The talk about Gilaad Shalit surrounds us like a constant murmur, rising and falling, and we move inside of it. On Purim, the tabloids show his photograph as a boy dressed up. "Sad Clown," they scream. "Save me!" his silk screened picture implores at the entrance to Jerusalem, and hung from apartment buildings --"save me!" And we want to save him so badly. At the protest tent in from of the Prime Minister's house, there's a timeline for the days he's been gone with little markers for his first Rosh Hashana in captivity, his second Passover in captivity. My mother says, if it was you, don't you think I would do the same?

The man who is trying to sell me his mattress happens to head the campaign to free Gilaad. I'm lying on my back, checking out the springs, tell him I'm interested in the situation. He sitting on a chair -- a slightly cramped room, and him in his slippers -- he says, there is no "interested" in Israel anymore. There is only sad, happy, angry.

It reminds me of a terrible Hollywood movie I saw with S. before I left. Liam Neeson's spoiled daughter gets kidnapped in Europe and he uses all his most violent, former-CIA-FBI-macho-letter powers to get her back, destroying scores of buildings, cars, killing petty criminals and bystanders, letting her more slutty friends die in the process. The equation of lives just doesn't add up. Some days I think, our caring is no caring at all, if we didn't care when we turned off the electricity in Gaza and the food, and killed children going to school. But then some days I think that this recent bout of complete Gilaad Shalit obsession is some misguided attempt to regain our caring, to believe that we could be good parents after all if only we tried hard enough to get him back, like a magic spell, a resurrection.