Not because 2
I was so unhappy about yesterday’s post that I obsessed about it all through my art class. My fellow students and teacher were very nice about it, although I must have been a real pain. I spent two days on that post and I’m still not satisfied with it. Everything I write seems to come out all wrong.

What used to get me with regard to Hannah Senesh was the old ‘what if’ question: the ‘what if they hadn’t sent her on that fool’s errand’ question; the ‘what if we lost a great poet or playwright’ question; the ‘what a waste’ question.

But that’s all just silly when you think about it. More likely than not, she would never have matured into a writer; more likely than not, she would never have even published any of her poems. I think she was the sort of person that, more likely than not, had she lived, would not have pursued the kind of life that would have made her well-known. She would have been one of those hundreds of thousands of Israelis who, in the early years, quietly and modestly went about building this country. In which case she would never have touched my life, not directly, anyway, not in a way I would have known about.

But she did touch my life and enrich it.

And I only ever heard of her because she was sent on that fool’s errand, and because she ‘didn’t talk’, and because she stood up to the Nazis the way she did.

(So much for being cynical about national heroes, as is fashionable these days.)