Daily Inspiration Quote by A. B. Yehoshua

Yehoshua is prying open a civic ritual and showing the raw nerve underneath. The first sentence leans on the comfort of script: fallen soldiers fit an old grammar of meaning. They die "for our sake", on "our mission" - a collective story that turns grief into duty, sacrifice into national cohesion. Even the pronouns do the work. "We" know what to do because the state has trained "us" to know.

Then he snaps the frame. A "random man" in a cafe, a housewife on a bus: deaths that refuse enlistment into purpose. Terrorism, in Yehoshua's Israeli context of buses and coffee shops as recurring targets, isn't just violence; it's violence aimed at the very idea that death can be organized. The attack produces casualties with no sanctioned narrative arc, no uniform, no battlefield. That randomness is the point - it colonizes the mundane and makes the everyday feel complicit, exposed.

The questions are the engine. Yehoshua isn't asking for etiquette tips; he's diagnosing a crisis of mourning. If soldier-death is legible, civilian-death is an indictment: it suggests the social contract can't protect the simplest routines. His subtext is unsettlingly double-edged. He honors soldiers, yes, but he also implies that the state has built emotional infrastructure for one kind of loss while leaving another kind to private shock. The result is grief that can't be redeemed by rhetoric, only endured - and a society forced to admit how thin its stories are against the arbitrary.