mother of the world

If I was the mother of the world, and countries were my children, Israel would be my problem child. The child that was born out of pain and persecution, its birth itself an act of sin as it had to kill in order to make room for its place in the world. The child that had lost its faith in people before it had a chance to grow up.  Being the mother, I wouldn’t know how to protect my child from itself. I see it kicking and screaming and bullying the others and I instinctively know it is hurting and afraid. And I am hurting for it. I see old anger and new anger mixed with fears in my child and I am afraid for its future. I see my child using its talents and brilliance against itself building walls of security, dividing and exploiting and reigning over its victims. I have seen the body of my child grow more powerful as its soul is contracting. How can I stretch the mind of my child so that it can understand that happiness cannot unfold in a vacuum?  How can I teach my child it is human and that being human means being strong and being weak at the same time? How can I teach my child it doesn’t have to negate the others in order to be? That it doesn’t have to continue to destroy in order to continue to be? That in fact it can only grow into adulthood  as it learns to share the land and the waters and the skies and as it learns that there are no real others, that in our humanity we are essentially the same?  How can I teach my child that it has to let go, that it can inhabit the space between the sea and the Jordan but not own it in any true sense of the word? That ultimately it will also have to let go of all its anger and all its past pains and see in the other his mirror imagine.  That in the end, the answers do not lie in possessions, identity and self-defense, but in community, exchange and vulnerability, and that otherness insofar it is not illusionary is not a thief but a brother.  How can I teach my child that only the future can bring redemption for the past? How can I teach my child that it is not possible for him to fight, undo, or even completely understand the past?  That all one can do with the past is accepting it?

How can I teach my child all these things when my child is raging in anger and won’t listen?  How can I teach my child before it is too late, and my child has destroyed himself in its attempts to destroy the other?