Dear Family and Friends,

I am writing to share some reflections triggered by the terror attack in Jerusalem last night—which touched us personally, even though, thank God, nobody in our family was at the scene of the attack. We first heard about it when Jocelyn came home after dropping off our son Chanan at a bus that would return him to Yeshivat Har Etzion, where he enrolled this past fall in a program that combines Torah study with service in the Israeli army. On the drive back to our home in the Ramot neighborhood of Jerusalem, Jocelyn saw and heard dozens of ambulances, turned on the radio, and found out that a terrorist had struck the Merkaz HaRav Kook yeshiva in Jerusalem’s Kiryat Moshe neighborhood, one of the leading centers of Torah study, and of Zionist thought and activism, in Israel. Shortly afterward, Chanan called to tell us that at least half a dozen students had been killed, and the count was rising. Knowing that news bulletins around the world would carry headlines about a “fatal terror attack on leading Israeli yeshiva” or “Several killed in attack in Jerusalem ,” Jocelyn and I called our parents to let them know we and our six children were fine. I ended my conversation with my mother-in-law by saying, somewhat more emotionally than is my style, that we’re okay, but that somewhere in Israel , probably not so far away, there are many people who cannot say the same for themselves and their families.

This morning, Chanan called from yeshiva to tell us that one of the people killed in the attack was a young man of 19, the son of Tzemach Hirschfeld. I immediately flashed back to seven years ago, when our son Shmuel was born on a Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. The Brit milah, the ceremony combining covenant and circumcision, is performed one week after birth, on the boy’s eighth day of life, which meant it would take place on the Sabbath—when traditional Jews do not engage in activities such as driving cars. We lived at the time in the small town of Eli, which did not have any residents qualified to serve as a mohel and to carry out the circumcision; we therefore needed to find someone with the appropriate training who would be willing to spend the Sabbath in our town, away from his family, from sundown on Friday night until nightfall on Saturday; one of our neighbors suggested that we get in touch with Tzemach, an old friend of his whom he described as a skilled and experienced mohel, a wonderful person, and the proud father of a large family (I think he had nine children at the time; the number subsequently grew to thirteen ). I called Tzemach and asked if he would be willing to spend Shabbat in Eli; he readily agreed, and when I asked whether he wanted to bring any of his children, he said, in words that stuck in my memory, that he would be happy to “bring an exemplar or two” with him. He did, in the form of Yonadav, who was the same age as our Chanan. The Brit went smoothly, Tzemach proved to be not only skilled in his craft but also a person of exceptional character, and we parted fondly at the end of Shabbat. We saw each other only once since then, but I’ve thought of him on several occasions. The most recent was this morning, when I learned that Tzemach must today bury his “exemplar,” Yonadav.

Later this morning, we learned that a second victim (there were eight killed in total) is the son of a teacher at the Horev high school from which Chanan graduated last June. Shortly afterward, we heard from a close friend, Abby Hazony , about Shimon Balzam, who studies at the Merkaz Harav Kook high school where the terrorist struck last night, and whose sister goes to the same school that Abby’s daughter Shira and our daughter Tzipora attend. Shimon was shot, and is in a condition the radio was reporting as anush—a term that comes from the root enosh, meaning “human,” and that drives home the point that mortality is an inescapable part of our humanity. It roughly translates to “critical condition,” and is a word Israelis hear all too often. What it actually means is that one cannot know whether Shimon will, in the coming days, be added to the list of those killed in the attack, or whether we will read in the newspaper months from now that he is returning home after a seemingly miraculous recovery, with the hope of resuming something akin to normal life.

This morning, as I was thinking about the families facing these tragedies, I was brought back to a seemingly trivial episode last Friday evening, when I was rushing to synagogue to attend services welcoming the Sabbath, together with my son Shmuel (soon to be seven), and my four-year-old, David. As we were walking on the sidewalk, I saw a sharp branch from an overhanging vine poke Shmuel next to his left eye, and instantly felt a flash of pain in my left eye, as if the branch had struck me. My pain disappeared when I realized that it was not me who had been hit, and my worry faded within a few minutes when I saw that the only wound to Shmuel was to his pride. Afterward, I felt oddly content, knowing that at least in that one moment, I had been a genuine parent, feeling my child’s pain as my own and wishing only that I could have protected him from its source. And then I realized (my mind wanders quite a bit during prayer services) how rare it is as parents to experience this kind of empathy, and from there I started thinking about how much rarer it is that we can genuinely empathize with the feelings of our friends and neighbors, and even more so with those people whom we do not know. I thought about how great leaders actually feel that kind of identification with the suffering of their people, and how great humanitarians experience a connection to individuals whom they barely know, or perhaps have never even met. I even found myself imagining what it would be like to live with such a developed sense of empathy.  

This morning, I felt a small taste of it, as the anonymous victims of last night’s attack turned into young people whom I knew, or felt that I knew, and as I found myself thinking about what it must be like to be their parents or loved ones—though I am sure that having not gone through anything like this, my imagination is far too pale to be up to such a task. It was with this feeling that I went to my son David’s nursery school this morning for the party celebrating the children’s “completion” of the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible—whose stories they heard told over the last several months, apparently quite memorably, as evidenced by their impressive ability to answer the questions asked to them by their teacher, Dina Barnett. As part of the celebration, parents were asked to give their children the traditional blessing, which for a boy begins with the words “May God make you like Efraim and Menashe,” and continues with three verses from the Torah: “May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord shine his countenance upon you and be gracious to you; may the Lord lift up his countenance to you, and establish for you peace.” When I say these verses every Friday evening, to each of my three boys and (with a slight variation in wording) to each of my three girls, they are usually words to be gotten through, as the dinner table and family conversation beckons. This morning, sensing the fragility of life, I actually meant them—not only for my David, but on behalf of all the parents in Israel, who are doing their best to keep their children safe and sound in a country in which this is not always so easy—and who must cope with tragedy when the peace for which we work and pray is shattered.

May the upcoming Sabbath, and the days and weeks to come, be for you a time of peace and tranquility, a time of community, a time to share with one another and to strengthen one another.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dan