Dibyendu's WallScript

History is not written in straight lines; it bends with exiles, persecutions, and the stubborn will of nations to endure. For the Jewish people, the story of statehood has always been both promise and paradox: a people scattered across continents, carrying in their memory the ruins of Jerusalem, the scriptures of exile, and the dream of a homeland.   Through two millennia of dispersal—from Rome’s conquest to the ghettos of medieval Europe, from the pogroms of Tsarist Russia to the Holocaust in Nazi Europe—the Jews carried within themselves the ache of a motherland lost. That yearning crystallized into the Zionist movement of the late nineteenth century: a conviction that security and dignity could never be guaranteed in exile, that only in their own land could Jews be both free and safe.   And yet, when Israel was finally born in 1948 , it was born into siege. Surrounded by hostile neighbors, its survival was never guaranteed. Every war— 1948 , 1967 , 1973— was not merely a ba...

The legs of the armchair of a peaceful life have long decayed. The old easy chair trembles and rattles when one sits upon it. It feels as if the skeleton of some great life, in its broken, weary frame, still wishes to grow again into blood and flesh. It wishes to begin once more, from the beginning. Entirely new. Whether drifting towards renunciation or the domestic, the human soul forever seeks the root of life. Beneath the mask, the man eventually recognizes his true self. And then begins the task of dragging the burden of the past. Under its weight, sometimes one hard shell of the mind after another cracks apart, sometimes the cells of the brain are scorched layer by layer. Man dies, and man lives. From the breast of the earth, suddenly one night a star falls, or one morning clouds swell across the sky. Today he sits with his reckonings, his ledgers. Paper and pen in hand. It feels as though he will leave behind a balance sheet of all debts and dues upon the earth. He leans toward l...