The grave of Rav Yaakov Don. (photo credit: Dave Bender)

Not two weeks ago, Rav Yaakov Don was murdered, gunned down, sprayed with bullets from a submachine gun by an Arab terrorist. Rav Don was teacher to four of my sons. He taught at the local high school my children attended. He was beloved.

At the time he was murdered for being a Jew, Rav Yaakov Don was driving his car. He was on his way to the town of Maale Adumim to learn with two of his sons, yeshiva high school students. It was both his habit and his pleasure to do so each Thursday evening.

Not this time. Instead, Rav Yaakov Don, was murdered by terrorists at the age of 49, for the sin of being Jewish, living in a part of the world some people would like to be Judenrein, a Jew-free zone.

Rav Yaakov Don lived in a part of the world once called Judea and still called that by those who would rather be historically and geographically accurate than politically correct. People like me. That’s as opposed to calling Judea part of the “West Bank,” which refers to the West Bank of the Jordan River, a body of water that cannot be seen from anywhere inside of Judea.

About Judea

The Hebrew words for “Jew” (Yehudi) and “Judea” (Yehuda) share the same derivation, as does the Arabic word for Jews, Yahud, in a clear nod to the geographic origins of the Jewish people. Rav Yaakov Don lived in Gush Etzion, where I also live with my family. We are called “settlers” and the word is said with venom by most of the world. We, however, feel we are the indigenous people of the territory, the Yahud, the Yehudim, the Jews, who live in Yehuda.

The death of their beloved teacher was a bad shock to my children, in particular, for my two children who are still in high school. In a country that has seen two terror attacks every day for the past ten weeks, this was the first attack to touch them personally. Rav Yaakov Don was the first person they knew who was not killed but rather murdered, because of hatred and because of evil.

Rav Yaakov Don was murdered for the same reason the 6 million were killed in the Holocaust. He was killed because of his religion. But his murder is in some ways worse than the murder of the 6 million in Eastern Europe, because it happened in the Jewish heartland. Gush Etzion is at the very center of Judea, the heartland of the Jewish people.

The newspapers may have you believe we, the Jews, have no right to live here in this place, or that our living here somehow means we don’t want peace, or don’t care about the terrible lot of others who covet this land. But actually, we live where we live because we believe it is our rightful property. We believe the Jews have a birthright to Judea. We also believe no other people has a birthright to this territory.

If you own a home and someone very, very poor squatted there while you were away (not by choice!), when you came home, it would still be your home. Even if the squatters were quite poor and miserable and had no home of their own. Even if they’d been there for some years.

None of that would matter. It wouldn’t matter what condition their condition was in, to paraphrase Kenny Rogers. Because it would still be your home.

It doesn’t matter what condition their condition is in, to paraphrase Kenny Rogers.

You might even feel very bad and very sorry for them. But that would still not make your home, their home.

The Jews are from Judea. The Arabs know this, too. That is why they call the Jews what the Jews call themselves, albeit in their own language: Yahud.

My kids are not being raised in the politically correct world. Rather, they are being raised in the accurate and historically truthful world. They see themselves as Bnei Yisrael, the Children of Israel, as we are called in the bible, the Bani Israeel, as we are called in the Quran.

The Arabs know who we are and we know who we are, too. It is the world, rather, which prefers to prop up the politically correct lie that somehow, the Yahud are occupiers of Yehuda, when in fact, Jews lived in Judea before there was an Arab people, before Mohammed was a gleam in his mama’s eyes.

And so my kids understood the murder of their beloved teacher as an act of pure Jew-hatred. My kids understand that it’s not about where we, the Jews, build, or how much land we own, it’s that we own any land, build any home. It’s that we exist on God’s earth.

My kids understand this all too well.

And so they see the murder of their teacher in this light.

They see our people, the Yehudim, as having taken a huge hit by evil directed at us precisely because we are Yehudim, Jews. They lost their teacher to evil.

Now, I wrote about this event, the murder of Rav Yaakov Don, in the most politically correct way possible for a parenting blog to which I contribute. I was as strict as possible in leaving my politics out of that piece, because the blog bears the name of an apolitical nonprofit. It would not have been appropriate for me to share my ideology there.

And when I was done, it was still a powerful piece for all that I left out. I talked about how I was baking bread when we got the news of Rav Yaakov Don’s murder.

I set my challohs on racks to cool and asked my children to tell me stories about Yaakov Don. I thought it might help them process the shock, the first real loss they’d ever experienced, but not a normal loss. They’d been robbed by terror. Someone who represented all that is good and true had been erased by evil. Evil had been the victor. Good had lost.

I made it about murder, about good and evil, but never did I insert anything about Jewish land rights or heritage. I kept it neutral.

It was a good enough piece in spite of these limitations, which might have made the piece seem artificial, lacking, or somehow dishonest. No. The writing still worked. The piece came together. And I was satisfied.

I called it, What to Do When Your Child’s Beloved Teacher is Murdered.

Rav Yaakov Don, hugging a Torah Scroll at a celebration.

A couple hours later, however, the social media specialist on my work team at Kars4Kids wrote me. He wrote, “I am so sorry to hear about the loss of someone so close to your family!

“With the world so on edge about the recent terror attacks I think this really would pique our audience’s interest. Would you be able to add “how you explain to children their teacher is dead” to make it even more relevant to our audience?”

I looked at his words (his name is Morris, BTW), and I thought. “No. Just no. Their teacher didn’t DIE. He was MURDERED. And there is no way to explain this to children or to anyone else. You want me to write a flipping list piece for this?? How to Explain to Children Their Teacher is Dead in 6 Easy Steps?? You gotta be kidding me.”

Oh, how he loved his students.

But I didn’t write that to Morris. Because I am very good about compartmentalizing and part of my values system is to never say no when asked to do something at work that could help your company or your company brand, in this case, the (apolitical) nonprofit I work for, Kars4Kids.

So I didn’t write any of that, but thought about it for quite some time, thinking if I could do as he asked and be a good sport at work. I could maybe write about encouraging children to talk about their feelings, or maybe suggest that young children draw pictures until they work the grim bloody pictures in their little heads out of their little systems. It would be good for SEO, as Morris had suggested.

But I couldn’t find it in me to acquiesce, to be a good sport at work. Not this time.

He was so full of feeling, so full of life. And now gone. Cut down. Just like that. No. This cannot be explained.

I could not find a way to explain murder/terror to children (as separate from death/dying). I could not find a way to explain Jew-hatred to children. I could not find a way to explain why Yehuda should be Judenrein to satisfy the UN, or the American president, or anyone else.

John Kerry, now, maybe he could have found a way to explain this. After all, it was Kerry who said you could understand the Charlie Hebdo thing, but not the Bataclan thing. Because hey, there can be a rationale for terror. That is, if you’re John Kerry.

Or maybe if you’re a columnist for TIME Magazine, you could explain this thing. If you were someone like Vivienne Walt. She’d know how to explain murder to kids. She wrote about it in the magazine in a piece on the Paris attacks:

In January it had been relatively simple to explain to my child, who was then eight, why the cartoonists had been the target, and why a Jewish supermarket was attacked — grim as the details were. . . Answering questions over dinner on Sunday was more difficult, however. The targets this time were young people having fun on a warm Friday night; people, in fact, who were his age not all that long ago.

Vivienne Walt would find it so much easier to explain terror when the victims are Jews than when they are just plain old regular Parisians.

Yeah.

Morris needed John Kerry or Vivienne Walt to explain these things, because I am so not up to the job of explaining how a beloved teacher could have been killed like that. Murdered like that.

A student leaves a lit candle at the site of Rav Yaakov Don’s murder, in Gush Etzion, Judea.

I’m sorry, Morris. Really sorry to let you down like this. It’s just that I have no way to rationalize, justify, or explain the murder of Rav Yaakov Don. Not to myself, not to the world, and certainly not to my children or anyone else’s children.

I am not the expert on this because I have no wisdom on the subject to share with my readers on what I don’t understand and never will: the evil that allows the world to explain away the murder of a teacher because he was Jewish, because he lived in Yehuda.

He had such a great smile. He lit up the halls of the school. Now those halls are a darker place for children.

This pretense that makes it an okay offense to murder a beloved teacher is something I don’t understand.

I don’t understand it and will never understand it and the truth is, I don’t want to understand it.

It’s enough to recognize it for what it is: evil.

And it’s enough to hug my children and cry with them over the loss of their beloved teacher, to weep for a world so thoroughly corrupt it rationalizes the murder of Jews for living in Judea not 70 years after the Holocaust.