A Soldier’s Mother

The Chi­nese philoso­pher Lao-Tzu once said, “A jour­ney of a thou­sand miles begins with a sin­gle step.”

This is what A Soldier’s Mother has done. The blog was estab­lished by a mother to doc­u­ment the activ­i­ties of her son, Elie, a young sol­dier. He began his three years of ser­vice in the Israeli army in March 2007 .

Read­ing the blog made me real­ize how lit­tle I really know about Israel and its cit­i­zens’ way of life. All that I know is what the West­ern news media report and that is almost always the most neg­a­tive aspects. But, of course, any­one who is in con­tact with the peo­ple who actu­ally reside in a par­tic­u­lar coun­try will hear dif­fer­ent sto­ries! Blogs, at their best, can be pow­er­ful trans­mit­ters of infor­ma­tion that lead to a more com­plete under­stand­ing of a par­tic­u­lar topic.

All moth­ers miss their sons when they go off to serve in the armed forces, no mat­ter what coun­try they rep­re­sent. And yes, deep down, each mother does bat­tle with her own fears. This blog­ging mother says, “Per­haps, despite the wor­ries, my son is right. This is an adven­ture, a new road he will take. I should be excited for him. I should be (and I am) very proud of him. In other coun­tries, 19-year-old boys are drink­ing and dri­ving and focus­ing on girls. It will be years before they grow up while here in Israel, they are given respon­si­bil­ity, life and death decisions.”

Mother shares the joy of phone calls and too-short vis­its, and the bad times when the news reports are scary. But Mother repeat­edly pushes her fears away. She “decided to be a mother who wel­comes my son home with hap­pi­ness, but, more impor­tantly, one who keeps the fears and wor­ries from over­whelm­ing him … ”

One of Mother’s recent posts, Two Rights Don’t Make a Wrong, is hon­ored with the Post of the Day Award. I invite all of our read­ers to con­sider Mother’s thought-provoking dis­cus­sion of young men and women in the Israeli army, and how her son made his own choice.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to A Soldier’s Mother!

Review by Bar­bara.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Post of the Day Award, The Ris­ing Blogger

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