Editor’s Note: In July 1998, Daniel Gordis moved with his wife, Elisheva, and their three children to Jerusalem for a one-year fellowship at the Mandel Foundation. A few months after the Gordises arrived in Israel, they decided to stay permanently.)
In New York last month I had occasion to be interviewed on National Public Radio. It still amazes me how many people listen to talk radio, and of those, how many find the time to search the web in order to write e-mail comments on what they’ve heard. I was pretty flooded with responses to the interview (www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/11182002), and rather struck by one particular theme that appeared in many of the letters.
The following is typical — I use it as the example because it was somewhat less inflammatory than many of the others:
”Listening to you on the Leonard Lopate show, I couldn’t but be amazed at your disregard for the lives of your children.
“When the neighborhood we were living in deteriorated to the point that it was no longer safe to walk the streets we moved. We could have stayed, worked with the neighborhood association, joined the block watchers, etc, but in the meanwhile we had images of our children coming home from school mugged, bloodied, or even killed. It wasn’t worth it to be heroes….
“How will you feel if one of those suicide bombers kills your child when you could have avoided it by moving back to the States? Israel does not need you, it has many, many people who will fight the good fight, and in any event the problems are caused by forces beyond your control. Doesn’t your family come first?…Richard”
Well, Richard, I didn’t answer that e-mail until today, because I didn’t really know where to begin. But today was the kind of day in Israel that clarifies everything — why we’re here, why this isn’t anything like the neighborhood that you left, and why we’re not killing our children, but giving them something to live for.
We were at a bar mitzvah at the Kotel this morning. After the service was over, I grabbed a cab to head back to the office for a meeting. The news was prattling about something that ”even we were unprepared for.”
Uh-oh. That was the first I’d heard about the attack in Mombassa. Details were sketchy, and the only way the news could get any information was to speak on cell phones to Israelis who
were actually at the site.
One woman, just shy of hysterical, told the story of the explosion, and recounted how it took just under two hours for the first Kenyan ambulances to arrive. (Tonight, Israelis still can’t believe that. We get to these disaster sites in two to three minutes, though admittedly we have a lot more practice.)
When asked what she expected would happen next, she said, ”I assume Israel will send doctors, medicine and soldiers, and then they’ll bring us home.” And she was right. The news immediately cut to an airfield, where five IAF planes were being loaded with the medical equipment and personnel that the Kenyans couldn’t seem to amass, and shortly thereafter, the planes and their cargoes were on their way.
You see, Richard, this isn’t some dumpy neighborhood somewhere in the States that makes no difference to anyone but those who can’t get out of it. This is what we call home.
Muslim extremist evil knows no borders. We’ve known that for a long time. Remember Munich? Remember New York?
Muslim terrorism isn’t about the settlements, or the ”occupation” (which may or may not be a bad idea, depending on who you ask, but certainly isn’t the root cause of all this terrorism), but about Israel herself and about Israelis and Jews wherever they may be.
