From Shabbat Dinner to the Shelter
What it means to welcome the stranger
This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.
One moment you’re enjoying Shabbat dinner; moments later, you’re making your way into a bomb shelter. You close the door tight and you’re in another world.
It was Friday, June 13. My husband and I had flown into Ben Gurion the previous day—which also happened to be the last day the airport was open. We then traveled to Herzliya, where we had been invited to Shabbat dinner at the home of our friends Orna and Baruch.
We had just finished dessert when our phones started wailing. We had all downloaded the Home Front Command app, which issues warnings and sirens, indicating that folks have 30 to 90 seconds to find a bomb shelter. Luckily for us, Baruch and Orna have a shelter in their laundry room, complete with thick cement walls and pipes to protect against poison gas attacks.
Baruch and Orna’s other Shabbat guests that evening were a young German couple. We squeezed six plastic chairs into the laundry room, and the two young men were pale as sheets. The vibrations from the booms (the Iron Dome intercepting Iranian missiles) sounded like they could have been in Baruch and Orna’s backyard.
It wasn’t my first time in a bomb shelter. During the three months we spent in Tel Aviv in 2012, we had huddled in a mamad as missiles were launched from Gaza. But the missiles weren’t as powerful back then. The ones coming down now can shatter a hospital and fracture an apartment building.
There are many things you can’t do in a bomb shelter, but one thing you can do is can talk. In Baruch and Orna’s shelter, we had time to talk about our lives. One of the German men, who wasn’t Jewish, told us that he was pursuing a PhD in Jewish history. He had fallen in love with Israel years earlier when he volunteered with German-speaking Holocaust survivors in Haifa. He came to know our Israeli hosts in the course of researching Orna’s late mother, who had been saved by the Kindertransport.
Baruch, an 86-year-old retired biologist who grew up in Detroit, first visited Israel in 1961, as an emerging scientist.
“Israeli culture has changed since then,” he lamented.
“How?” I asked.
He replied by telling us a story: One day, he got on a bus, and told the bus driver he was looking for a modest hotel for the night.
“Who needs a hotel?” asked the driver. “You can sleep at my mother’s house.” The driver took this young American home to his mother, who fed him dinner and insisted on giving up her bed for him, while she slept on a cot.
“Things are different now,” Baruch said.
And yet, I witnessed this kind of hospitality again and again during our short trip. When we landed and could not access the parking garage, a stranger approached our car and leaned over the gate to release a latch. When another stranger noticed that we were lost in the maze of hallways, she led us to where our apartment was tucked away. Shoppers at the grocery store helped translate when my rudimentary Hebrew faltered.
Throughout our visit, our Israeli family and friends checked in with us over WhatsApp. My cousin, who lives in Jerusalem, gave us tips: Go out for air whenever possible. When you go grocery shopping, ask the staff to point out the location of the closest shelter. If you see that the lines are crazy, abandon the mission and head back home. Buy some bread or crackers and peanut butter for the mamad. Also, the ingredients for gin and tonic.
Our friend Rifka, who lived nearby, kept us apprised of any new guidelines. Running shoes were now recommended instead of sandals, the better to protect feet from explosions. Rifka checked in on us nightly.
“OK?” she would write at 3 am on WhatsApp.
“OK!” we would respond.
We were lucky: our bedroom was the bomb shelter. Israelis without a mamad have to race out of their homes in the darkness of night to find a public shelter, often holding crying children and barking dogs.
In Toronto, where I live for most of the year, we teach kids not to connect with strangers. But here, the injunction from the Torah “Be kind to the stranger” applies everywhere. Baruch told me about a park called Green Kfar Saba. All of the children know that if they hear an alert, they must race into the neighboring apartments. People leave their doors open for them.
A friend in Beit Shemesh told me that her husband saw people getting off a local bus when a siren went off. They didn’t know where to go, so he invited them all into his home. Eight strangers—a Haredi couple, a woman in shorts, and others—huddled together in their mamad for ten minutes. Then they left to continue on with their day.
These are acts of pikuach nefesh—saving lives. This is what it means to welcome the stranger.
Dr. Lesley Simpson is the founder of L’chaim: The Jewish Letters Project, an online newsletter where Jews throughout time share what makes life meaningful in Jewish wisdom letters, also known as ethical wills.
In addition to searching for more letters, Lesley designs writing workshops for people drafting wisdom letters. A former journalist and published children’s book author, Lesley lives and writes in Toronto, Canada. She completed a PhD in Jewish studies specializing in this extraordinary tradition.
This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.
 | A guest post by
|
You not only capture pikuach nefesh, you deftly bring us inside this intimate space with you, connecting us all at a time when we need it most.
A vivid description. Stay safe. Hugs from Toronto, Frieda