by Sarah Shapiro

Sarah Shapiro of Jerusalem is a frequent contributor to these pages, most recently with her interview with Mrs. Miriam Brovender (Feb. ’01).

It’s a mysterious thing, this impulse to live here. Like other things that are so much a part of me that I take them as givens – such as my maternal instinct, or the desire for a roof over my head, or coffee first thing in the morning – this inner prompting to be in Jerusalem has proven itself to be as inexplicable, as unchanging, as the natural inclination of a compass to point north.

If I stand aside and try to observe this phenomenon objectively, it arouses an awe in me for my own inscrutable self. What was it that drew me as a young woman, and held me here though I was alone, separated from family and home in America? What in the world was it which told me to marry someone who intended to stay in this turbulent Middle Eastern land where Ground Zero is everywhere, where bombs have been going off since my arrival twenty-five years ago; where for as long as I’ve been a mother, I’ve bid the children a secret unsaid goodbye whenever they leave the house? Where prices are high and salaries low, where people joke that in this country, you can’t count on making a fortune but you can surely count on losing it?

This inner compass is a mystery, but something else strikes me as stranger, still: that so many other Jews feel the same way. People from cultural backgrounds as different from mine as China’s, or Ethiopia’s, or Italy’s – whether we speak of those who were raised in accordance with religious tradition or those, like me, for whom Judaism once seemed no less foreign than Zen – experience that identical impulse, as if we‘d all been made in the same factory. This country may be accused of racism, but the fact is that the Jewish State is a veritable Benetton ad for racial and national diversity, as has been the case down through the centuries, ever since the first Jew, Abraham, heard a divine call to “Lech Lecha… Go, to the land that I will show you.”

* * *

It has been said that the best way to love something is to realize it can be lost, and this was self-evident when I was in Manhattan the week after September 11^th. Love was in the air.

Here in Israel, that kind of love has had three thousand years to grow.

On Saturday night, we heard the explosions, watched the ambulances from our kitchen window, heard the sirens in our sleep. The next morning in an act of defiance, a refusal to be intimidated, I took a number 18, the line I’ve been too afraid to travel on since the double suicide bombing of two number 18’s a few years ago. The long, so-called “accordion” double-length bus was packed. There were about a hundred fifty people on board, almost all of whom were traveling in silence, bearing a remarkably similar facial expression, which I then realized was on my own face, too: stillness.

I was a standee. When a news report came on loudly over the bus radio that there had been a suicide bombing of a bus in Haifa in which at least ten were killed, the elderly man in the seat in front of me asked, “What? Did he say in Haifa?” I nodded. He threw back his face, raised his arms palms up and yelled, “Elokim! Elokim!” [God! God!]

Last night I attended the funeral for a fifteen-year-old boy who was killed in one of this week’s four suicide bombings. His mother, who kept falling as she was escorted to the cemetery, was crying, “I can’t bury my son! I can’t bury my son! I’ll die!”

This morning I went downtown and got a cappuccino in the Rimon Café, where a number of customers had been seriously injured, then walked over to the spot where candles of remembrance had been set up. Two Newsweek photographers, a man and a woman, were trying to pass through the police barriers, and I chastised them. “Look, lady,” the woman snapped. “We’re just trying to record this so people will know what’s going on here! The Palestinians pull out the dead children for us to take pictures. I don’t understand what these Israelis are thinking! Isn’t there anyone around here who wants some PR?”

Groups of store owners and workers were busy up and down the block installing large new windows for the store-fronts that had been shattered.

Glass crackled under my feet. I looked up and second and third story windows were also blown out. Red-brown blood spattered the nearest brick wall.

I thought for the umpteenth time of an incident that occurred in the early nineties, when the Oslo Peace Process was still going strong. A speech given by Yasser Arafat before a closed gathering of Arab ambassadors in Stockholm, was secretly recorded, translated from the Arabic, and published by the Norwegian daily Dagen, then by The Jerusalem Post, which delayed publication of his remarks until the report could be verified. Arafat had been taped telling his audience that Israel would “collapse in the foreseeable future. We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem… We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a Palestinian State. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion. Jews will not want to live among Arabs.” Then he added: “I have no use for Jews. They are and will remain Jews.”

As I turned to go, I caught sight, in a blown-out storefront of a silver goods shop, on an otherwise empty, charred display shelf, of an eight-branched Chanuka menora. Someone had stuck it there though there was no glass anymore in the window to keep it from being stolen.

A sudden joy flickered through me like fire. In a few more days, in windows throughout Israel, the lights will be burning.

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