…The Teaching from Mt. Sinai, specifically the book called Beraishees/Genesis, tells us that after Ishmael was expelled from his father’s community of followers, more than a thousand for sure, he went to live in the desert and became an archer.

And what is an archer? A killer who uses his bow and arrow to kill animals for food and kill other men.

Rashi calls him a listim, a highway man, he who waylays people when they are at their most defenseless and robs them and kills them if he chooses, having no civilized conscience to restrain him.

And so Friday a missiles fired out of Gaza of the Philistines crashed landed on a car which blew apart and sprayed shrapnel on this adorable little boy and killed him.

A week and change ago Chief of Staff Benny Gantz said it was safe to return home and even got poetic about these farmers returning to their seasonal tasks, and boy was he wrong about that; so the people of the communities lining the Gaza zone of barbarism are fleeing again. Again these communities are being abandoned, and today the military analysts are finally focusing on the oddball problem: in this violence, the threat to Israel is less the big rockets — the Iron Dome handles them — but the short-range projectiles, indeed the mortars, against which there is no comparable defense. I think the Red Color warning for those communities being hit with mortars is like 15 seconds and even less.

This is death not by a knockout but a thousand cuts. It is the little stuff which is now killing us…