Last year, I was driving one minute, sitting in a destroyed car the next. I never saw the man who passed the red light and smashed into my new car, sending it flying across three lanes of traffic only to crash into a thick traffic light pole. That’s what life can be like, is like, for so many. Perhaps for everyone.
Sometimes in the middle of the night, I imagine the worst…a policeman coming to my door. It happened once early in the morning when everyone in the house was asleep. I opened it and my brain began thinking. Lazer is in bed. I was just there and then I went through my children thinking who isn’t home. Frantic in those split seconds before it registered that the policeman was asking if I was a member of the family who lived here five years ago.
The alarm on their car was blasting away and neighbors were complaining. The only address the police had was this one…the people never updated the Ministry of the Interior’s database. Breathe. All is fine.
Rosh Hashana and now as Yom Kippur approaches, that’s what life is about…uncertainty, that moment of stark terror…and the calm as your life returns and you accept that Yom Kippur is not so much about sealing your fate as promising your future.
Whatever the future holds, it is what God intends for us. We can’t always understand or like the path He takes us on. But there is a reason for all actions. It is at moments like this that I think of two families – both victims of terror attacks; both lost young children to barbaric murderers seeking to glorify Allah.
Both transformed their sorrow into something amazing. Both families began working to help others – one runs a fund that cares for children with developmental problems and is a constant and loud advocate for fighting terror; the second created and runs an organization dedicated to helping other families learn how to cope, to live, with the devastation of losing loved ones to terror attacks.
On the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur before their children were murdered, they never would have imagined the paths their lives would take. Knowing this, comes the fear and the hope and the faith.
As Yom Kippur draws near, in a few short hours, we will close the computers, the phones. The buses will all stop; the stores will all close. Israel’s airport will shut down – no planes in or out. The umbrella of silence we pull down each Shabbat is nothing to the one we place over ourselves on Yom Kippur.
In a city up north, residents received a reminder that they are asked not to drive on Yom Kippur and if, for some reason they have to, they should call the police for an escort. Other than security or medical reasons, Israel is about to close off the world for 25 hours. Much of the world will never notice; but it is an inspiring thing to see, here under the umbrella.
We will fast; we will pray; we will contemplate how we can try next year to be a bit better, a bit kinder, a bit slower to anger. We will forgive our friends, our neighbors, our families, ourselves, in the hope that in doing so, God will forgive our imperfections.
And we will find, in the hours and minutes before the Gates of Heaven close again, the hope, the wonder, and even the fear and take it with us into this new year with the knowledge that God knows all. God sees all. God protects Israel.