My job is to forgive them all, to understand them all

I’m newly widowed, and anyone who’s been through this knows that once you climb the massive mountain of details and paperwork and finally get to the other side, you’re still facing a wall of grief, uncertainty, and loneliness. It’s a sad journey to the top, and no matter all the wonderful and well-meaning friends, and the most incredible children and grandchildren, at the end of each day, you’re still doing it all alone.

So today I thought I’d take it easy on myself. Leave the computer and the paper mountain for another day, another time, and go get the car fixed! I’m not kidding, but it was a good distraction, and then there were also the errands that needed to be done in preparation for Shabbos.

I live in Israel.

Although most people where I live don’t feel the heaviness of the war on a daily basis, the tension is palpable. You can tell by how everyone walks and interacts — from the men who almost knocked me down by brushing past me in the grocery store, to the father-and-son team who pushed their grocery cart behind me and knocked me into a check-out conveyor belt, to the woman to whom I was apparently invisible as she cut in front of me so closely we would have had a collision had I not stopped short, to the many electric scooters whizzing by me so fast that one misstep would result in disaster.

Everyone is hurried, absorbed in their own worried thoughts.  Clearly, they had no malice aforethought, although evidently, they had no forethought at all.  But it was Erev Shabbos, parking was at a premium wherever it was to be found, and it was hot — oh, so hot — that if the looming Iran/Hezbollah threat wasn’t enough to make people edgy and impatient, the heat was a guaranteed boiler-maker.

My job is to forgive them all, to understand them all.

And if I can forget my standards for polite social interaction, I know I’ll succeed in doing this.

We’re all buying supplies for our bomb shelters. Buying supplies for a bomb shelter isn’t normal. And, it’s hard, and heavy, and expensive, and maybe not enough, and there’s certainly never enough room in these tiny spaces, which are not built to contain a family of eight or more. But in Israel, where it isn’t always possible to make it to the bomb shelter in the 90 seconds or less you have, the luxury of space and a well-stocked miklat isn’t much of a consideration.

But as this assault to mind and body was happening in the grocery store, I wasn’t so forgiving. In fact, I was downright annoyed and angry, and I’m sure that my body language and the expression on my dour face gave my mood away to anyone who cared to look in my direction.

I was pretty well-spent and longed to be home.

Then, one last speeding electric scooter made its way directly toward me. I clutched the wall and pushed my body as hard as I could into it, so hopefully I’d minimize the damage about to be done to me. The teenage boy maneuvering it, realizing my terror, slowed down, and looked at me with the sweetest and warmest smile, which entered straight into my heart and instantly connected us.

I responded in kind.

My appreciation for the goodness of humanity having been restored, I returned home, upbeat and positive, still feeling the warmth of this sweet young boy’s smile, ready to go mountain climbing once again.  B’ezras Hashem, I’ll break a world record in making it to the other side.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 908)