Every Thursday evening my fifth-grader goes back to his school for a few extra hours of Torah learning. The program is voluntary, but well attended; it makes the boys feel grown-up and independent to learn in chevruta in the beit midrash and then be addressed by a rabbi from the outside.

“The man playing the terrorist grabbed me as a hostage and held me in front of his body,” my son enthuses.



Last Thursday night, the boys poured out of the school with extra boisterousness, and my son and his friends tumbled into my car gushing about the night’s surprise. The men from the neighborhood watch team had performed a drill simulating a terrorist attack on the school during their study period.


“The man playing the terrorist grabbed me as a hostage and held me in front of his body,” my son enthuses.


I shake off a tiny, involuntary clutch of horror that freezes my insides and play along, “How did you get away?” I ask.


From the discussion of the drill, the boys segue into what they want to do in the army. While their talk about the merits of the different units seems objective, their preference is usually based upon where an older brother or beloved teacher has served. All their teachers are veterans who are periodically absent on reserve duty, and part of the knowledge they impart to the boys is the wisdom and war stories of soldiers.


We arrive home and move into our family’s nighttime drill, which preserves the routines of childhood. I sit by my son’s side as he gets into bed and hear about the highs and lows of the day, his musings and concerns, his questions and opinions. He’s the kind of kid that can go on forever, so I end it by asking to hear his kriyat Shema (nighttime prayer). I kiss him and walk out of his room wishing, like usual, that time will slow down so drastically that it will take 50 years for him to grow up.


This is when the real terrorist attacks.


We hear about it the next morning on the radio, but the names haven’t yet been released. As he leaves for school, my son doesn’t yet know that one of the murdered boys lives in our community and a second one lives in the neighboring town. Both boys went to his school before graduating and they have younger brothers still attending.


He comes home from school on Friday and collapses, sobbing, arms covering his head, on the kitchen table. Avraham David Moses was his friend, he tells me. When he was in third grade and Avi was in the graduating eighth grade class, he was having a hard time with friends. One day, he was sitting alone and dejected when Avi came up to him and asked him what was wrong. They started talking, and from then on Avi was his friend, exchanging a few words with him every day and affording him the protection and patronage of an older boy.


There’s more. All kinds of ghastly narratives. A fourth grader in my son’s school was in the library during the attack, learning with one of the murdered boys. He described to the kids in school how he saw a boy get machine-gunned and saw his body, from the force of the blasts, fly out the window. Someone yelled for them to get out, and he saw Segev Avichayil, the 16-year-old boy from our community, run and throw himself on the terrorist, who threw him off and gunned him down.


I don’t know what to make of these eyewitness accounts from the mouths of babes, passed along by other children. I don’t know if they’re true or how true they are, but I know the kind of images that are going round and round in my son and his classmates’ heads.


“I don’t know what Segev’s brother is going to do,” my son says. “He loved Segev so much - you should see the

I know the kind of images that are going round and round in my son and his classmates’ heads.

way he smiled whenever Segev was with him, even when someone said his name.”


He had sat next to Segev’s fourth-grade brother on the bus home from school the day before the attack and they had talked about what they would dress up as for Purim. Segev’s brother was going to be a security guard for a company that was a pun on his name.


We’re all depressed on Friday, with a heavy sadness you feel in your bones. My son keeps on saying in intervals throughout the day, “It’s so weird, I keep on hearing Avi’s laugh, he had the most wonderful laugh.”


The next day is Shabbat. We hear more. Quite a few boys from our community went to the Mercaz HaRav high school and were present during the massacre.
Everyone acknowledges the impossible situation: the government does everything to encourage terrorism and is incapable of fighting our enemies. Its strategic goal is to empower the enemy by arming it, supporting it economically, and giving it the legitimacy and power of a sovereign state whose only goal is our destruction. With such a mindset, any tactical moves against the enemy are bound to be mostly for show: to set the terrorists back a little while flexing the military’s muscles for the benefit of the frightened and faithless Israeli public.


Our Shabbat hosts’ family has one boy in the paratroopers and another about to be drafted. So many of our friends have boys entering the army. It’s insensitive but I can’t keep my mouth shut: “I would do everything in my power to keep my son out of an army whose government supplies the terrorists with weapons, sends them on suicide missions to avoid pseudo-civilian casualties, and then releases the terrorists that they risked their lives to capture,” I say. “If the army goes into Gaza under the present government, many boys will die, and then they’ll turn Gaza right back over to the rival terrorist gangs.”


My opinion is very much a minority one. Army service here is viewed as sacred and serving is felt to be the only way to defend Jewish lives. But no one, including myself, has the heart to argue and the subject is changed.


My hostess had earlier been telling me about the amazing change in her son since he entered the army, his jumping up to take out the garbage and perform any other chores while on leave as if taking on heavy

My opinion is very much a minority one. Army service here is viewed as sacred.

responsibilities had made him aware and appreciative of the responsibilities assumed by others.


She now presses my arm gently and says softly, “You know... you won’t be able to stop him from going in.”


I look at her. I’m taken by surprise, but of course she’s right.


My boy will still let me hold him when he’s upset, he still spills out his secrets to me at night before sleep, and so I feel like I have power over his destiny. But that will change; it already has.


I have no hope for peace, I have little hope for the election of a sane, clear-eyed and strong government in the near future, so I’m left with the vain hope that time will slow down so drastically that it will take 50 years for my son to grow up.