December 30th, '02
The Key of Life

Last night, my husband and I attended a celebration in honor of the bar mitzvah of our cousin's son. On the surface, everything was normal... there were speeches, a buffet dinner and a few rounds of spirited circle dancing.

But this celebration was in Alon Shvut, a settlement in Gush Etzion. While it's only 20 minutes away from my house up the back roads, the last time I was in the area - for a concert I gave at the nearby Etzion Junction - I hired a driver and a van with special windows. No, not bullet proof (that would have cost too much), but "protected" - an artibrary sort of distinction that gave me the sense of security I needed to travel those roads by night together with my mother, who was visiting Israel at the time.

The evening's celebration opened the only way it could have: with an acknowledgement of tragedy. That afternoon, the community had buried the last of the four young men killed at Otniel two nights before. The Jerusalem Post gave the following dry facts:

Two soldiers and two yeshiva students were murdered and 10 soldiers and civilians wounded when two terrorists dressed in IDF uniforms and armed with M-16 rifles burst into the kitchen of the hesder yeshiva at Otniel in the southern Hebron hills Friday night and sprayed the area with gunfire.

But as my made my way around the room, I heard other details. Turns out that another cousin's oldest son is studying at that yeshiva as part of an organized break in his 3 year army service. At the last minute, he decided to be elsewhere for Shabbat.

Then I heard someone at my table talking about 22-year-old Noam Apter of Shilo. Apter managed to lock the door leading from the kitchen to the dining room, and to throw away the key, before he himself was killed. Thanks to his quick thinking, many other lives were saved.

I couldn't help thinking of something I once heard about the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E. According to this legend, the high priest rushed out of the burning structure, and threw the key to the Temple's front gate high into the air, where it was snatched up by the hand of Gd Himself.

I just hope that Noam gets to see that key, where he's going. And that we all see salvation soon.

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