I live on a quiet, tree-lined street in Ramat Beit Shemesh. It’s a pedestrian street, with vehicular traffic allowed only on the crossroads. Up and down the street are grassy parks and playgrounds, and if you walk by during after-school hours you will see the beautiful sight and hear the exuberant noise of children, children, and more children – shouting and climbing and laughing in the streets of Eretz Yisrael.
It’s a neighborhood that’s about as safe as a neighborhood can be, and it’s the most marvelous place to raise children.
My husband and I are always reminded of how lucky we are every time we fly into the U.S. to visit our family. As soon as we land at Kennedy Airport, we give our children The Speech: We’re not in Ramat Beit Shemesh anymore. This is New York. No walking off on your own. Hold our hands. Don’t talk to strangers.
Sure, basic safety applies everywhere, and we teach our children the rules even in Israel, but the overwhelming majority of people they’ll encounter here are good people, people who would walk them to the right bus stop if they got lost, let them use a cell phone to call home, or hand them a tissue for a runny nose, unasked.
I wouldn’t call my children’s day-to-day existence carefree, because no one growing up in Israel can avoid the reality that we have enemies just waiting to pounce. They lived through the sirens of the war last summer; they follow the news avidly now, and come home from school asking if any new attack happened. They don’t need photos to picture the scenes at the Jerusalem central bus station, or by the Old City gates; these are places they’ve been to many times.
But still, there’s always been a small disconnect. At least for me. I’ve been able to comfort myself each time – oh, but this happened in East Jerusalem. That one was in the Shomron. I don’t go to such dangerous places. The streets of Tel Aviv? Busy bus depots? All right, just avoid public areas and you’re safe. It’s a basic human instinct to want to feel that what happened to others can’t possibly happen to you.
Recently, that myth was shattered.
In the neighborhood right next to mine, just over on the next hill, where my family used to go hiking before the start of the vast construction project that created Ramat Beit Shemesh Gimmel – and brought in hundreds of legal and illegal Arab workers – two terrorists stabbed a 19-year-old boy on his way out of shul.
Thank God it wasn’t worse; it certainly could have been. The two men were standing by a busy bus stop at the time of morning when bus stops are crowded with children on their way to school. They tried to push themselves onto one of those buses, but the children screamed and the driver quickly closed the doors. The terrorists, for some reason, let several other crowded buses pass them before walking toward a shul, searching out the right target. After an hour of hanging out, they finally attacked – just as the police car that had been called by concerned residents finally made it onto the street.
It was clearly a miracle, and for that we thank Hashem, just as we do for all the countless other miracles that take place daily in our land. But I won’t deny that it was also a wake-up call for me:
You thought it couldn’t happen here? It can. Right here.
It can happen anywhere.
No place in the world is safe anymore, and the sooner we all realize that a terrorist attack in Chevron is a terrorist attack in Beit Shemesh is a terrorist attack in Paris, London, or New York, the sooner we’ll appreciate that we’re all in this together, and that, in the words of our sages, we have no one to rely on other than our Father in Heaven.
I still think my neighborhood is a marvelous place to bring up children, and I’m grateful every day for having the privilege to live in our land.
But on that Thursday morning I learned that this privilege is not something to be taken for granted.
