What it feels like to be Israeli

Nearly two hours ago Alissa called to ask if I had heard that a shooting had happened somewhere. I checked the news- nothing. I heard sirens in the distance, but I live around several main streets. There are always sirens. She called back about twenty minutes later to tell me that there had been a pigua, a terrorist attack on a yeshiva near town. I looked again on jpost.com and still nothing. Two minutes later I checked again and there it was. Three gunmen had entered the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva in Kiryat Moshe and opened fire. Six people have been confirmed dead and many more were wounded.

Since I arrived on aliyah, Sderot has been the hot topic of conversation. We spend hours discussing the danger civilians there face and what we can do to support them emotionally and financially. Jerusalem has been somewhat of a safehaven. The safety precautions that were enforced upon me five years ago are a distant memory. When I was here five years ago there were multiple suicide bombers on buses and shootings in the Gush. A week before I left a former NCSY advisor of mine was injured in a pigua on the 14 bus. I remember walking by the site a few days later and seeing a beat-up piece of cardboard with a pasuk from Eichah etched on it: The enemy has once again entered the gates of Jerusalem.

Tonight is Rosh Chodesh Adar. We are supposed to be "marbim b'simcha" and I feel numb. Mercaz HaRav is two minutes away from where I stayed for each of my past five visits to Israel, but now it feels more like my neighborhood than it ever did before, even if it is an hour walk from where I live now. The victims of this attack will have rushed funerals Erev Shabbat. I don't think any of their families will manage to be "marbim b'simcha" on Rosh Chodesh Adar ever again.

This news still isn't even an hour old. If I heard this in America I think by now I would be back to whatever it was I was doing. Here I have ten minutes more of a TV show episode and I'm not sure if and when I will watch it. I know that Jerusalem will feel like a different place when I go out tomorrow. Everyone will be feeling what happened tonight.

Every Israeli feels it, which now includes me.