Israel Under Fire: Ima Shel Shabbat
by David Wiseman
After a long and trying week there is nothing better than heading into a Shabbat. It is the buffer that separates the weeks from each other. You may enter it weary and tired, but you emerge on the other side rested and inspired.
As far as weeks go, this one was a doozy. Unrelenting shelling of Israel left it with no other response but to fire back. It was on. And then it got real. The media, who were sleeping while rockets were raining down on Israel, suddenly woke up once we decided to take the cue out of the rack.
We tried to avoid using the W word and just go on with life as normal. Our youngest daughter was Ima Shel Shabbat at Gan and that was the perfect antidote to get us into the Shabbat mood. One by one all of the phones, computers, tablets and other devices were turned off. The table was set and it was time to put the stress and anxiety on the back-burner for 25 hours.
Then the siren started. There are multiple ways to react to the siren blaring and none of them are good. Panic…Fear…Terror….Distress. As we were sitting around our Shabbat table and hearing the siren it sadly united us with Jews of every other generation - from those who were petrified that the pogrom was about attack them to those who lived in fear for hearing a knock on the door from the Gestapo. The difference this time was that we could fight back.
Across the country, people were excusing themselves from the Shabbat table due to them being called up. Normally the only decisions one has to make on Friday day is what game to play or what to read. Now we had to make a plan what to do if the siren rang again.
In this day and age it’s not easy to see miracles, but if you look hard enough you can see them. As we made Havdalah, we felt far more fortified and energized than we had 24 hours previously. We may have been frightened and scared, but we were still here.
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