I wrote earlier today about the young man from our city who was killed in action. I was wrong about his funeral, though: it wasn't last night, it was tonight. When I got to work (I assist a beautiful local older couple when I'm not a visiting nurse at a large yeshiva in Jerusalem [where I'm now doing telemedicine rather than going in-person]), I saw a message asking that everyone on streets X, Y and Z come out as the family left for Har Herzl. Military funerals are always very big (hundreds if not thousands of people) but given the current situation, outside events including funerals are extremely limited in attendance. The couple I work with lives half a block from the soldier who died. He was only 22 and leaves a young wife....
At the appointed time "my lovely lady" (MLL) and I joined her son-in-law and went outside (her husband was teaching a Torah class on Zoom). Her daughter? She was at another military funeral on Har Herzl....There are no words for the emotional resilience of the Israeli people.
The street was lined with people with Israeli flags.....Somber.....Quiet.....Someone with a beautiful voice at the end of the street was singing tehilim (psalms) and people joined in.....
NOTE: Everything scary/stressful that I write after this was not proven in the long run. De-stress alert!!!
And then a military officer walked down the street and announced repeatedly that there had been incursions into the north and if we heard an incoming rocket siren, we all needed to lie flat on the ground with hands over our heads.....I asked MLL if we should go in or stay out, and if she could lie on the ground if necessary, and this amazing Holocaust survivor told me she wanted to stay out (in thinking about it, we still would have 90 seconds to get inside and she could walk that fast, so we were really okay. They were just saying to lie on the ground because of the big crowds there). I didn't see a single person on the street move. This country is amazing. (Although I guess I'm still pretty darn American because my mind was going a mile a minute with "should we go in? Maybe we should just go into the bomb shelter now and hang out there for a couple of days just in case something happens?!").
The minibus with the family drove by and there honestly was not a sound. I whispered the words of consolation we say at a funeral when the mourners pass through two lines of people after the burial. I have no idea what the protocol is, but it felt right, and then MLL and I walked two houses down the street to "accompany" the family. Hundreds of people filled the street, holding Israeli flags, accompanying the family. It was incredibly moving and absolutely heart-breaking.
I was so thankful that my 7 minute drive home was siren-less and it was wonderful to arrive home and find a beautiful dinner my kids had made (not that I was super hungry).
And then during dinner, the Homefront Command issued an alert--without a siren--that everyone was to "enter a protected room and stay there until further notice". This was a country-wide alert.....
On the plus side, I was very impressed at my family's togetherness (aside from about 20 seconds of squabbling about "do they really mean it?" and "I'm hungry! I didn't get to eat yet" ["Grab a snack and let's go!"]. I pressed the button to close the metal tris (shutter) to our sliding glass door, grabbed Percy (I'm seeing a trend here....) and his doggie friend Theo (neither of whom made a peep or squirmed even a bit) and went upstairs. Penina triple-locked our front door. Everyone else shut every other tris we had and we got upstairs in about 45 seconds. We had a really "fun" ten minutes in there with some saying tehilim, some cracking jokes and, after a few minutes, some trying to figure out if this was real or not because the WhatsApp messages were FLYING and "some" people were saying it was a mistaken message.
Turns out, thankfully, in this case "some" people were correct and Home Front Command sent a message saying "You can leave the protected room in your area. Following a situation analysis, you can now leave the protected room".
HASHEM YISHMOR
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