SHUVOO NEWSLETTER
Issue No. 31 – March 8th, 2007
DAYS OF OUR LIVES
The street barricaded by police,
Jerusalemites wait patiently as a
bomb sapper inspects yet another
suspicious package.
(© Ashirah Yosefah Photo)
Dear
Friends of Shuvoo:
Our
multi-part series entitled “To Be a Jew” will resume, IY”H, next week. I have preempted Part V to give you some
personal glimpses of daily life in Israel in these difficult
times. The popular media does little, if
anything, to portray the day to day realities we face in Israel, so I thought to share with
you a few recent incidents that have colored my life and the lives of my
friends. I faintly recall that there
may have been or may be a soap opera by the name “Days of Our Lives, but not
even a primetime soap opera could pack so much trauma, intrigue and incident as
does a single day in Israel. In the eyes of some, we’re respected, in the
minds of others, we’re vilified, but one thing is for certain, life in our
country is far from boring.
Attempted
terror attacks are on the rise yet again, the ceaseless minute ebb and ever
growing flow of attempts to murder innocent Jews. Most of these attempts are foiled, thanks to
daily miracles, but even one attack succeeding is too many. The Torah tells us that for he who saves the
life of one man, it is as if he saved the whole world. Can the inverse of this also be true?
Earlier
this week, IDF soldiers in the Golan found 10 anti-personnel mines just inside
the Israeli border. The mines were
thrown there from the Syrian side of the border, most probably on Shabbat.
Burglaries have
been occurring in many neighborhoods throughout Israel… yet another form of
intimidation and violation. Unbeknownst
to them, a family in Tsfat was robbed as they conversed and sang with friends
around the Shabbat dinner table. My own
neighborhood has had break-ins of late, and friends in Ramot, already been
victimized by theft, have installed a bell that rings each time the door opens.
A friend
from the North who was a guest at the same Purim seudah I attended took an
Egged bus home from Jerusalem
Monday night, arriving very late due to heavy holiday traffic. A short distance from her busstop, an
explosion rocked the bus. The driver
shouted for people to get out of the bus, “FAST.” Being one of the first out the door, my
friend saw gasoline lying in the street and smoke rolling out from the
bus. She fled for the comfort and safety
of her home a few blocks away and did not wait for details.
One of the
women who attended a meeting with me this evening has a daughter learning in a
beit midrashah in Migdal Eder, a picturesque community about a 25 minute drive
south of Jerusalem,
just past Efrat and the turnoff to Bat Ayin.
A couple of weeks ago the girls were fired upon by Arab terrorists while
they studied in the beit midrashah. This
past Shabbat, firebombs were hurled at the security guards at the entrance to
the community, and once again the girls found themselves laying on the floor
taking cover until the coast was clear.
Not the ideal learning environment, but these young women would not
think of leaving or changing schools.
Two weeks
ago and a five minute drive away, Ezra Levanon, a musician and 43-year old
father of three, was brutally stabbed to death as he prayed in the forest near
his Bat Ayin home. People attending his
funeral said that even the heavens seemed to weep as rain and fog blanketed the
site where the body of this peaceful, deeply spiritual Jew was returned to the
dust from which it came.
When I
lived in Kfar Eldad, in the Gush Etsion bloc, I used to travel along the road
to Efrat and Bat Ayin almost daily. The
scenery towards the Judean desert was spectacular, with rolling fields, vineyards
and olive groves. Not anymore. A high and massive concrete wall (I believe
they are calling it a “fence?”) gives one the feeling you are driving inside a
tunnel and the beautiful Judean landscape is barred from view … for Jews. Earlier this evening I was told that my
neighbors from Kfar Eldad, a precious young religious couple, were stoned by
Arabs as they made their way home from Tekoa on Purim night. Not even a seven minute drive is safe.
I was
introduced to one of Israel’s
secret police recently. We spoke a fair
bit over a two week period, during which I discovered him to be working long
days and nights, on call 24 hours a day, ready to be whisked away at a moment’s
notice by helicopter if necessary, to do yet another interrogation of captured
terrorists or suspected terrorists. To
my surprise, this man knew Torah so well he could recite the opening passages to
each parsha and knew Shir haShirim in its entirety. Not the usual image one has of members of such
shadowy organizations. Suffice it to say
that he and his comrades are busier than ever these days and don’t anticipate
that the pace is going to let up.
Discovering that I used to be “a settler” added an interesting twist to
our conversation and not a comfortable one.
In an email
to a friend last evening, I shared the foreboding heaviness that lurks behind the
smell of spring in the air and the return of cloudless blue skies. No wonder.
The news reports are far from encouraging: Syrian military buildup on the border with Israel, Hezbollah now stronger than before the
summer war with Lebanon,
Hamas and Fatah fortifying their arsenal of rockets and weapons compliments of
Hezbollah and Al Quaeda, weapons being smuggled into the Shomron in large
amounts. An explosive package called
“war” seems all too ready for a match.
Add to this the explosive tensions in Israeli politics… international
pressures for Israel to capitulate to the demands of regimes sworn to our
destruction… and the daily struggles of getting things done in this Land that
our Sages tell us is one of the three things in life that come with great tsuris
(difficulty).
What a
study in contrasts this land is. All of
the above and more is set against the backdrop of a country steeped in history,
beautiful beyond words, with deserts blooming, Torah flowing, and courageous
people clinging to its hilltops and carving communities out of sand and
stone. We are slandered in the media as
being an Apartheid state, racist, and a host of other unsavory epithets; yet we
daily extend our community and national services to the very people from whose
midst come those who kill and maim our own.
The myriad tensions and inherent joys of living in Israel collide within,
even the strongest admit to “mood swings” every now and then. Some, however, are not so resilient. A couple of weeks ago, within five days and
four blocks of each other, I witnessed two people walk out in the street and be
struck by cars. I could not help but
think, “What were they thinking of that distracted them so?”
Small
glimpses … true glimpses … of normal daily life in Israel. Glimpses that you won’t see on CNN or CBC, or
read in The New York Times.
A few weeks
ago, I wrote and posted an article on the lingering impact of last summer’s war
in the North. Today, I received an email
from my friend Rena that makes the point of that article more poignant. I will close this week’s Shuvoo newsletter
with Rena’s words, with Rena’s permission:
Hi, I sent this in to Tzfatline - our local
email. They have been sending out "be
prepared" articles hoping that people will become proactive. Thought
I'd forward you a copy of it
too. There are few shelters being worked on and to the best of our
knowledge no new ones are being built to house the thousands of Tsfat people
who have no access to any. There are no shelters in the Old City
and only a small one in the Artist's
Quarter. One woman who called the city about what to do in case of need
was told to take her family to the parking lot in the bottom of "The
Canyon." There is no one to talk to and no one to complain to.
I called the Tsaft hot line and asked who is in charge of shelters. I
laughed when they told me that it was still the same fellow as before the
war. He may have been the one who ran from Tsfat when the war broke out
taking the keys to all the shelters with him. It's
all too absurd to comprehend.
Once again as I look out from my apartment window, there are
men here fixing up our local shelter. Workers have been showing up quite often
and much has been done to upgrade the shelter which was almost totally unusable
during the war last summer. We now have an air conditioner to make the
inside more comfortable as well as a mural on the outside to make the
neighbors more comfortable with the building's
purpose.
How good of these folks to make certain that at least 30
people in our building that houses perhaps as many as 150 including all the
men, women and lots of children will have a safe place to be if they can at
least get there. You have to know that to get to this shelter parents
have to grab their children and, depending upon where they live in our six
story building, they will either run down three flights of stairs - or up
two - to get to the entry level of our building, down a long hall and then down
two more flights of cement stairs - some of which are broken - before they
begin to run across an open field to get to the shelter. All of this in
only 15 seconds. Not likely. I've
tried. It takes at least a few minutes to do this just myself.
So, knowing that it's
probably not very likely that I will be able to make it to the shelter, I
wanted to write and thank Moshe and Yaffa, the Tzfatline editors for
the informative articles on what we as their readers can do to become
proactive in making our plans for when another war - lo aleinu - will
occur. It is my hope that people will take these articles to heart and
plan ahead.
Bunkers are being built in Arab cities which themselves are
being fortified - with Israeli money - to protect them from the invading Arab
armies and bombs but it seems that we Jews don't
rate to have that kind of physical protection. Without giving much
forethought to their own security and safety, sadly most families
will be left to fend for themselves if war breaks out again, much as they
were last time.
Please friends, you owe it to yourself, your family and your
community to follow that old motto, be prepared. It is when we arm
ourselves with survival knowledge that we can survive. HaShem has
asked us to do this. He has told us that even though we might
see them everywhere, we are not to rely on miracles.
Therefore, it is up to each of us to do what we can to keep
ourselves and our families safe.
All the best,
Rena
Just
another day in Israel,
wondering how to prepare ourselves for terror and war, while the news breaks
that the official inquiry by State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss has found
that the State was woefully unprepared in Home Front readiness during last
summer’s war, and the Prime Minister’s Office resisted the Lindenstrauss’
requests for documentation and evidence.
Another day where young and old, singles and families persevere and
press ahead with determination. A day
where a Jewish man was stabbed this morning in Jerusalem,
and firebombs and stones were hurled at motorists in Judea and Samaria. Oh, yes, and an ambulance in Hevron was
attacked today by a mob of Arab teenagers.
As each day dawns, there are more terrorist attempts and the coming war
draws one day closer, lo aleinu. Some
days the absurdity of it all seems so outrageous, so blatant, that we wonder
how it is that the world seems so blind… but then so many have been blinded or
blindsided.
“Upon what, then, can we lean? Upon our Father in Heaven!” (Tractate Sotah 49b1)
Shalom from Jerusalem,
Ashirah Yosefah
