Last summer when I visited family in Israel, I traveled to Jerusalem especially to speak at our sister congregation, Har El. Har El sits in the middle of the city, surrounded by apartment buildings, on a plot of land with a large garden. It is in a very nice area, quite near the Kings' Hotel, the Sheraton and the downtown Super Sol, all of which have been sites of bombings over the years.
The entrance to Har El has an old iron fence that is locked when the synagogue is closed. On Erev Shabbat, when I visited, there was a guard at the entrance, looking in purses. Otherwise, there weren’t any obvious security arrangements
Before the Kabbalat Shabbat service began, I was given a tour. A highlight of the community is their two kindergartens, which are actually multi-age nursery school classes. Just as many people are attracted to American congregations by their Hebrew schools, many people are first drawn to Har El by the kindergartens.
Har El’s rear yard is devoted to a large playground for the kindergartens. It is littered with buckets and shovels, plastic tea cups, small tables and tiny chairs, and all sorts of play equipment. In many ways, it looks like any nursery school playground anywhere in the world. There is one striking difference: The perimeter of the entire yard is wrapped in heavy, opaque burlap, about 8 feet high. Above the yard hangs a series of tarps, also of burlap, shading the play space. When I commented on the burlap, my guide told me that every urban Israeli kindergarten is shielded so that no one on the street can see if there are children at play. At Har El, the yard is also shielded from the possibility of snipers in the adjacent buildings.
In the past several weeks, as my own children were kept inside their schools day after day, I have thought quite a lot about the burlap screens at Har El. Like so many small adaptations in Israeli life, those screens are both an acknowledgment of the risks inherent in Israeli life and a defiant statement that the threat of violence will not stop Israelis from living as normally as possible. Israeli children live under the possibility of threat every single day, but as long as the weather is nice, preschoolers spend most of their time outside.
Here, in the DC area, when our children were under threat, we responded quite differently. Most of us want to believe that the Washington-area sniper is an aberration and that we do not need to make any permanent accommodations to keep our children safe from people seeking to harm them. How could it be worth the investment to shield all our school yards? And yet, because the environment hadn’t been adapted to this risk, our children’s lives were anything but normal for the past few weeks. Games were canceled, recess was inside in beautiful weather, high school students ate in crowded cafeterias because they couldn’t go out for lunch, parents arranged their days around pick up and drop off. In many ways, our children bore the brunt of the sniper threat. We protected them physically but not psychologically; they were constantly reminded that they were so vulnerable that they needed to be locked inside to stay safe.
For just 21 days, we learned what it means to weigh every small decision through this calculus of fear. Where is it safest to fill the car with gas? Is it worth a trip to the mall? Is the backyard safe enough to let the kids outside at home? Can we do without milk for tomorrow’s breakfast? This is the calculus that has defined life in Israel and especially life in Jerusalem for the past 2 years.
Statistically, there is no equivalence between the risk we faced in DC from the sniper to the risk Jerusalemites face from terror. Overall, .0003 percent of Jewish Israelis have been injured in the intifata is .0003 percent, but in Jerusalem it is much higher. Everyone knows a victim; it seems that everyone has just escaped being at the site of a bombing
In the DC area, the sniper hit just .000003 percent of local residents. Virtually none of us personally know the victims. While we pass by the attack locations in our cars, few of us were there moments before a shooting.
As a community, we breathed a huge sign of relief when the snipers were cau ght because now we can return to normal. For now, we don’t need to find out what it takes to resolve to maintain normalcy in face of such a threat. We don’t need to wrap our school yards in burlap or cut down tree lines near gas stations. We can go back to living our normal lives not because we resolve to do so but because the threat is gone.
In Jerusalem, life hasn’t been normal for a very long time. The Har El members I talked to steel themselves everyday to live their normal lives—to go to cafés (albeit ones inside iron gates), to send their children to school, to shop, to attend concerts. Many people told me that they are afraid but they refuse to give in to their fears. They know that nearly anywhere else in Israel is safer but they refuse to move away from Jerusalem. Last summer, as they told me how they refuse to give in to terror, I couldn’t imagine how they did it. Now that we all know what it means to live under the threat of sudden, random violence, my admiration for the simple heroism of ordinary Israelis grows even greater.
Judy Gelman, President