Today, November 20, is Universal Children's Day, which is a day meant to be a day of activities promoting the welfare of children, along with being a day of understanding and fraternity between children.

In the newspaper today there was some article with a bunch of boring statistics about children. In addition, more interesting, was 2 op-eds written by children.

One was written by a ten year old from Sderot. She spoke about her wishes for a peaceful life with no Qassam rockets. She asked why everyone else deserves a normal life, and we are concerned with the children of Gaza not having their lives disrupted (by stopping flow of electricity and gas for example I assume she meant) and children all around the world have their rights to normali situations protected. Yet regarding Sderot nobody cares and they have no normal schedules, yada yada yada.

The second piece was written by a 13 year old girl from Hertzliya. She starts off describing her life. Clearly her family is from the upper class of society in Israel. She talks about getting a good free education including (she says) private tutors through university. She says her rights include a weekly allowance along with extracurricular activities.

She says from a very young age she always went to a lot of concerts. She hears a lot of classical music and goes to concerts and her parents host concerts in their home. She goes to the opera a lot and to meuseums. She travels with her parents abroad fairly frequently, including a recent trip to the United States.

She is asked about her feelings on what the children of Sderot live through. She expressed dismay over their situation and said they deserve to live in peace and security and not to have to wake up to air raid sirens.

When asked about her dreams, her response was startling. She said her mother is a lawyer and her father is a medical scientist. They get home form work late frequently. Her father travels abroad often and she often does not see him at all. Her dream is that they would be together more, that they should have conversations around the dinner table, especially on shabbat.

She continues, "we never had a shabbat dinner with candle-lighting, not even once. At least 5 times a week I eat pizza in the mall with friends. I wish we would be more of a family. With parents that had more time for their children."

Her parents give her whatever she wants. She is cultured from a young age with all the culture of high society. She is clearly from a wealthy family because the average middle class family cannot afford to provide her with everything she describes having at her whim. Yet all that she has, all she wishes for is to have a more connected family. She wants better relationships with her parents.

I wonder if she would give up all her creature comforts to get her wishes..but she has all that money and no satisfaction. And even more surprising to me is that she wishes for a classical shabbos dinner...