“Boker tov, Boker tov! Are these fresh?” asked the handsome,
confident, breezy young man as he glided into the bakery and fingered the
Danish. The store had been closed the
day before because of Yom HaAtzmaut.
“No,” the attractive young woman behind the counter flippantly
responded, as she tapped her manicured fingernails against the glass. “What do
you think? They’re from two days ago.” Was she bored? Peeved? Interested? Was she
telling the truth?
This isn’t the first time these two have spoken.
That’s the kind of place where I sometimes go to get rolls
in the morning: very down-to-earth. This
morning was a little different from usual.
“Can I help you?” It
was the older woman behind the counter who had turned to address me. She obviously wanted to give the younger
woman and the other customer a bit of “private time” to work on their
relationship.
“Sure, I’ll take some rolls.” As she wrapped them up for me, she said,
“Isn’t it awful what happened in Boston?”
“Yes,” I said. She
knew I was American. But she didn’t know
I was from the Boston area. When I told
her, she immediately became compassionate.
“You’ve been hit hard,” she said. “9/11: it all started there, didn’t it? Those hijackers, they took off from Boston,
right?”
It’s odd to be getting sympathy from Israelis following an
attack like the one that took place the other day in Boston. It’s all over the
morning papers, of course, so everyone knows about it. “Terror on the Finish Line” went the headline
in Yisrael Hayom, the free daily
paper owned by Sheldon Adelson. A Hebrew
word that I couldn’t recognize at first but which is now familiar to me is “מרתון” – i.e.,
“marathon.”
I myself was going to call the twin bombings on Boylston Street a
“terrorist attack,” but I’m hesitating. In
the dictionary, “terrorism” is defined as political
violence. It isn’t yet clear yet who
carried out this attack and for what purpose, much less whether it was for
political purposes. So, as did President
Obama the other day, I’m not (yet) calling it a terrorist attack.
But Israelis are less restrained in this regard. They have no inhibition about calling this a
terrorist attack -- whoever may have perpetrated it. And sadly, they have lots of experience with
terrorist attacks.
“It was a pressure cooker, you know,” she said. “Like ones used in bombs in other places, such
as in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
The woman proceeded to offer me – and our government -- lots
of unsolicited advice on how to address terrorism in our country: what we could and should -- and shouldn’t -- be
doing.
But she also offered me compassion. And it was from the heart. I thanked her.
As I left the store, I noticed that the young man was
gone. But he’ll be back.
