Fall and the Harvest Moon
Friday gratefuls: Mary, my physical therapist. Nerve glides. Home exercises. Spinal stenosis. Tamed, but not gone. CBE. Mussar. All the mussar folks. Luke. Anne. Marilyn. Nancy. Ginny. Ellen. Sally. Janet. Jamie. The Shema. Israel. Keshet. Geoff. The international rules of war. The IDF. Palestinian civilians. Israeli civilians. Exercise. Evergreen Market. Sugar Jones. Easy entrees. Safeway. Ruby and her good work for me. Snow. A hard freeze. Cold night. Dreams may come. Black Mountain Lodgepoles with a Frosty look. Stars.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Core muscles
One brief shining: Mary attaches a band to my raised legs and harnesses herself to it, then pulls back with her body weight, about 110 pounds, to create gaps in my lumbar vertebrae so my nerves will be happy and not angry.
Mary, my physical therapist, is a compact woman. Five feet two and a hundred and ten pounds. An adopted Korean. She’s going to Korea next year for the first time. I’d say she’s maybe 26, 27. We talk about my son and Seoah, about Korea and its evolving attitudes toward women. And Korean women’s evolving attitudes toward their historic role. I admire her grit and her independence. She lives in a cabin on someone’s property in Evergreen and has for three years plus. On her own. She’s a good therapist. She listens and she teaches with kindness. A good find in case my body continues to give me fits. As I’m sure it will. She says we’re making good progress.
A week from today is my appointment with the Lutheran Spine Center. The doctors there are physiatrists, docs who diagnose the cause of pain and develop treatment plans for it. Mary is the practical, right now approach to acute care. The Spine Center will develop a plan for how I deal with the stenosis long term. Good to have both available and especially good to get into Mary early so I can alleviate my symptoms right now.
None of this detracts from the good care I got in Korea. The orthopedist there and Mr. Lee took an acute and painful situation, turned it around so I could continue my trip with limited pain. They have my gratitude.
I’ve attached four paragraphs* from a very useful article in the New York Times this morning. In it the author, Amanda Taub, makes quite clear what several centuries of human observations of war and its consequences have done to adjust our understanding of how and why wars should be fought. I found it useful for sorting through the confusing and contradictory feelings I’ve been having. Yes, Israel has a right to fight back and defend itself against Hamas. Of course it does. And, further, what Hamas has done in murdering civilians and taking hostages contravene the international laws of war.
What Taub’s article makes clear though is no matter the why of Israel’s justified response it must still follow the international conventions which ensure protection of civilians. Hamas’ crimes do not justify similar crimes during Israel’s invasion and bombing of Gaza.
Several questions will arise once this war comes to an end. What is a viable and permanent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma? Why did the IDF fail to act earlier and quicker? What happened to Israel’s vaunted intelligence gathering? Why is Netanyahu still in power? Why are the far-right officials in the Israeli government still there? What direction can Israel take to ensure a long and lasting peace? Yes. All these questions will be front of mind the day hostilities cease. But now, right now, the question is how to restrain the IDF from acting against civilians. And that must happen. For the future questions set out above, yes, but more importantly for the protection of Gaza residents. Now.
*”Two principles are particularly helpful. The first is that the “why” and the “how” of war are separate legal questions. The justice or injustice of a cause of war does not change the obligation to fight it according to the rules of humanitarian law.
The second, related principle, from which much of humanitarian law derives, is that civilians are entitled to protection. Armies and other armed groups cannot target them directly. Nor can they disproportionately harm them in the course of pursuing legitimate military goals. And those obligations still apply even if the other side violates them by targeting civilians themselves…
The core principle of jus in bello is that civilians cannot be targeted for military purposes, or disproportionately harmed as a means to a military end. That’s true regardless of the legality of the underlying conflict, and regardless of whether the opposing side has itself violated humanitarian law.
“The most straightforward way to think about that is just that the protections are protections for human beings,” said Tom Dannenbaum, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University who is an expert on humanitarian law.” This NYT article by Amanda Taub
