1.5 Minutes

 Think of what you can accomplish in 1.5 minutes. You can make your bed. Or check your email. Wash a few dishes. Respond to that text you've been meaning to. And, if you live where we live, you can use that time to get into your nearest safe room or bomb shelter when an "incoming-rocket" siren goes off. I have to say that I find 1.5 minutes a pretty comforting thing; in Sderot (which we visited on a tour on Independence Day just a few weeks ago), you have 10 seconds, which is why their town is peppered with bomb shelters and I'm hard-pressed to say where (if?!) there are any in our city. Then again, our city is pretty new (around 20 years old) and since the 1990's it's been a law that all newly-constructed homes and apartments have a mamad safe room in them. 

Ilana's room is in our mamad. And half of our family was in there on Monday a few seconds after a siren went off. I was driving to pick up Ilana, who volunteers weekly at a thrift store. I was driving up a main street in our town when I heard the first "gearing up" tone of the siren and I could see people on the sidewalk just stopping and I could almost see them thinking exactly what I was thinking: "A siren?! In little sleepy suburb? No way!". I'm pretty sure I went through all of Kubler-Ross's stages of grieving in about 2 seconds, because after the "denial" of the my first thought, I pretty quickly went through anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance; it was a whirlwind, I tell you. I gunned the car to get to the community center where she was (having spent three years in ulpan there, I also knew where the safe rooms are AND knew I could get there in less than a minute and a half. And a big thank you to my ulpan teachers who taught me two things I used on Monday: 1) a siren (azaka) that goes up-and-down in tone is the one that tells you to get inside quickly (tzefira, a sound that stays steady, is used for the country-halting, stand-at-attention minutes on Memorial Day) and 2) that we, indeed, have 1.5 minutes to get to a safe place, a fact that popped into my head effortlessly when the siren went off.

I've been working remotely since Monday, although it wasn't a fear of rockets or violence that kept me from seeing patients in-person on Monday, it was the fear of sitting in multi-hour traffic with the tons of people going into Jerusalem to celebrate Yom Yerushalayim (noting the day of the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967). Sadly, that day ended with sirens around the country and there have been over 1000 rockets fired at Israel since then.

Everyone has a story: Cousin Jillian spent the middle of her birthday night in the bomb shelter in her dorm.....Shira and her friend were sitting outside in downtown Jerusalem when the first siren went off. Shira told of an older Israeli woman waving her arms and yelling to them about "hommus" (so they thought). They couldn't understand WHY the lady was getting so worked up about hommus until another brief moment passed and they realized she was yelling "HAMAS" and urging them to get inside. 

The Iron Dome (fun fact: in Hebrew, it's called kipat barzel--the "Iron Kippah", which hopefully gives you a chuckle, as it did for me) works pretty darn well, with a high interception rate but it comes at quite the price: about $80,000 a pop. Given the beating the economy has taken from Covid (and let's not mention the four elections we've had in the past two years that blew through $4 billion [and that's dollars, not shekels]), the frequent boom-boom we've been hearing is disturbing on many fronts.

Schools were on remote-learning nationwide today (sort of the Israeli version of a snow day, I guess), but tomorrow those in safe areas (like us, b''eH) will be back to normal. 

I've been very touched by the number of friends and family contacting us to ask if we're safe (best "blast from the past" was when my babysitter reached out. Not like the babysitter I paid to watch my kids, seriously the one who watched me a gazillion years ago! [We ran in many of the same circles in Boston and catch up every few years, so it's not like we hadn't spoken since I was a kid! PS: Big shout-out to Janet Z!). 

As of now, all is well and please Gd will stay that way. Please daven for peace.