Everyone talks about numbers.  How many days, how many hostages, how many soldiers.  

The numbers are always about loss, how much time has passed, how many soldiers have been killed, how many hostages – who knows really.  

i sometimes imagine that there are more sets of numbers than we think of – how many artificial limbs, how many babies born in captivity, how many ptsd victims.  

We don’t always see the individuals.  Each human being.  And their connection to our lives.

Here’s one example.  Giora Leshem, who years ago helped me with translating poems and welcomed me into the literary community, wrote one of my favorite poems about exile, “My mother’s tongue is not my mother tongue.”  It only occurred to me last week that it was his granddaughter who had been captured from the Nova party.  I’ve watched his daughter repeatedly on TV talking about her daughter, Romy Gonen, and noted her familiarity.  But I didn’t put it together.  The personal connection.