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All the Blood must go into the Grave
As clear as this order may seem, at first we fail to understand the sentence and cnnot imagine what it means. Should you take the words symbolically or literally? Blood is a liquid and when hurt, drips from the body to Earth – is this the blood I should gather and return to my body? Shouldn`t it just seep back into the earth? The question too is who gives this order and on what law it`s based. The scene plays out in Israel and it is about one of the biblical laws. The orthodox Jews take this phrase literally from the Torah and feel obliged to pack the entire body into the grave. What belongs however is hard to practice in 2004 – as there`s an undeclared war in the country with many bomb attacks. The bodies are torn to pieces and spread within a large radius. What once was a human whole is torn to bits and has been mixed up with other pieces of corpses and sand. The strictly faithful Jews feel bound to their religious standards and try, despite all of the difficulties, to fulfil the holy words. In the picture we see three people dressed in white in the neon lit West. They belong to the ZAKA organization, which collects corpse particles after terrorist attacks. Any blood is sponged up and the sponges placed in plastic bags. Later the single body parts and the bloody cleaning rags are inspected for DNA and sorted. Only after this sorting can the plastic bags be put aside, with the conscience of the strictly faithful assuaged/comforted.