Rabbi’s Message From Israel

Thursday afternoon seems to mark the point at which everyone begins to wish
the other Shabbat Shalom.

Yet a very uneasy shalom hangs over Jerusalem as we begin to prepare for
Shabbat. Traffic on Jaffa Road is back to normal and it is as if yesterday’s
incomprehensible attack simply wasn’t. Today, though, a Palestinian East
Jerusalem cab driver said: “Yesterday we couldn’t look at each other.” The
bulldozer attack was not, to most estimations, an organized terror action.
The perpetrator lived with a Jewish woman in the East Jerusalem village of
Suhr Baher, a community where Palestinians hold Israeli ID cards and from
which many of the trusted workers come. He had a criminal record and was
employed as a construction worker on the Jerusalem light rail transportation
project. Stories have surface that moments before he drove the front-loader
off the site into traffic he was taunted and pelted with stones by Charedi
children. And then he snapped.

Whatever the motivation, we grieve for the loss of more lives and the
suffering inflicted upon dozens. The press repeats the story of the parents
who handed their infant out of the car window to a passer-by moments before
their car was crushed.

For some reason unknown to me, I call to mind the Talmudic assessment that
Jerusalem was destroyed because of “sinat chinam”– gratuitous hatred. Far
too few of us are able to look each other in the eye these days. We pray for
guidance this coming Shabbat for our God to help us put an end to that
hatred even as we pray for renewed strength and resolve for our defense.

Shabbat Shalom m’Yerushalayim

Rabbi Ned Soltz