In the latest issue of my newsletter Blessing the Sea, I am reviewing three war memoirs that teach deep spiritual truths: Matti Friedman’s Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story of a Forgotten War, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Flight to Arras, and Siege in the Hills of Hebron (Dov Knohl, ed.).
War is destructive, but also transformative, like an earthquake piling up new mountain ridges and transforming the landscape. It is also deeply insightful. Disrupting the existing social order, settled lives and laws, the thin layer of civilization that we take for granted, it shines the light into the deepest recesses of the human soul. In other words, war contains a wealth of wisdom about human condition. [ . . . ]
Lane Igoudin | Author, Professor, Dad 