June 30th, '03
Accomodating the Unthinkable

A few nights ago I attended a wedding. As the dancing went on and on, encircling the bride and groom, I found myself wondering: where do they get the energy?

Don't get me wrong. I'm a fairly serious simcha dancer myself. But this crowd, made up largely of single 20-somethings, left me gasping at the sidelines. As I watched them, I thought about how Israeli the whole scene was.

Many of the young men at the wedding were the groom's classmates at Otniel, a yeshiva where, last December, a terrorist sprayed the dining hall with machine gun fire, killing four. That same day, I attended the bar mitzvah celebration of this groom's younger brother. Now, the groom was stepping forward with his bride, both beautiful, both defiant, both determined to go on and build a life that is filled with love, not death.

We accomodate. We compartmentalize. And we try not to think too much as the circles of terror come closer and closer.

On the way home from the wedding, we were forced to make a detour. A man was shot (wounded, but thankfully, not killed) by a sniper, firing on the new road designed to "bypass" the West Bank village of Husan. Police vans now closed off this road, the same one we had driven on the way to the wedding.

And another wedding. My neighbor made Aliya from America together with Tzvi Goldstein, murdered in a drive-by shooting last week. Tzvi had married off his son the night before. He was driving with his parents mid-morning, accomodating their wishes that they not travel around by car at night. When the shot rang out, the father of the groom slumped over dead in the driver's seat as the car careened onward. From the passenger seat, the grandfather frantically steered the car while trying at the same time to remove his dead son's foot from the gas pedal. Pulled from the wreck of the overturned car, Tzvi's parents were hospitalized, but survived to bury their son.

Two of my friends had known Eugenia, an English teacher who was murdered when the #14 bus in Jerusalem was destroyed by a suicide bomber. My friends live on opposite ends of the country. I had expressed my condolences to both of them before I realized they had both attended the same funeral.

Also last week, a seven year old girl was shot and killed while riding in the back seat of her parents' car. When I wrote about her, I didn't know that Noam Leibowitz was the granddaughter of my friend's sister.

I believe that this story is fairly typical. Every citizen of Israel is being touched by the unthinkable madness of terror. In the last 33 months, more than 250 suicide bombers have entered Israel from the West Bank. In a country that, together with the disputed territories, would fit neatly inside Lake Michigan, it reaches us all in one way or another.

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