Funny how none of the articles about the murder of Dalia Lemkos, who was stabbed near Alon Shvut last week, spoke about Dalia or her family, how no reporter had the curiosity to find out about her. She was killed in the afternoon so reporters had all evening to question their contacts in Tekoa.
Instead, they practiced a kind of obscurantism, restricting our knowledge of the victim. (Curious that the word obscurantism is derived from a dispute between intellectuals and the German monks who wanted to burn Jewish books, like the Talmud, in the 16th century to obscure Jewish culture and learning.)
In The New York Times, the reporter told us about the terrorist being from Hebron, how he was in an Israeli jail for five years for a firebombing. The reporter quoted his Facebook page: “I’ll be a thorn in the gullet of the Zionist project to Judaize Jerusalem.”
We learned nothing about 26-year-old Dalia, who was just getting started in life after finishing college, studying occupational therapy so that she could have a job where she could help people who were sick or infirm or disabled to live in a fuller way.
They didn’t tell us how she loved to bake with her mother, the two of them bringing rich, luscious cakes to parties, and the way she spoke English with an accent – not a Hebrew accent but a South African one because her parents made aliyah from there thirty years ago.
They didn’t tell us how she went to synagogue every Sabbath and smiled at the people in her row before she prayed.
They didn’t tell us how she had to hitchhike to get to her job working with children in Kiryat Gat or that she was the main volunteer at Yad Sarah in Tekoa which lends medical equipment like wheelchairs to those who are sick or injured.
And they didn’t tell us how she liked to help brides look beautiful by doing their makeup for them before their weddings.
They didn’t care that Dalia’s father, Nachum, drives the ambulance in Tekoa (day and night he is called on to make the drive to Jerusalem) and that Dalia’s mother cares tenderly for the elderly.
We would never learn from the articles that when a neighbor had to go to the hospital with a sick child, Dalia stayed with the other young children all night and insisted that the family not pay her.
The articles would never tell us she was the one who cooked the food for her brother Haggai’s bar mitzvah a month ago – fried fish, salad, and pancakes.
No, they didn’t want us to know what a kind, giving, loving young woman she was, on the cusp of her adult life, looking toward marriage and creating her own family.
Instead the newspapers showed a photo of the terrorist and told us that the Palestinian leadership says it is normal and natural to run over a young woman and then stab her to death so that her blood runs like a red cape into the street.
Normal and natural. An act of resistance. When Palestinian leaders calls for their people to take a knife and find Jews to murder, and calls it natural and normal, we have entered the realm of unadulterated evil.
Dalia embodied its opposite and that fact shouldn’t be obscured from the world.