Last night I missed a very close friend’s first son’s wedding.

We’d spent hours waiting for planning talking and sharing about “the” day.

As the hours pass I imagine the chuppah the simchah the kallah. How in the world am I going to explain this to my friend?

Maybe I’ll start with the truthful saying that “every person who’s meant to be at the chuppah will be there and every person who’s not won’t be” This time I was on the “won’t be” list.

I decide as a future defense that from now on I’ll just tell every person whose simchah is out of Jerusalem that I won’t be able to make it. Then I realize how many simchahs I’d missed in Jerusalem as well. So maybe I’ll just send out a sort of bas kol that I won’t make it to weddings until my youngest is old enough to stay home alone.

I had had it all planned out.

The babysitter was to come at 5:30 so we could leave early and come back early.

Well HaKadosh Baruch Hu had other plans …

Our babysitter called at about six to let us know she had been close to the explosion next to the bus station earlier that day. And that baruch Hashem she didn’t get hurt but she’s definitely shaken up.

The way she says it the shaken up part reminds echoes..

I open my book to the first story I ever wrote for the Mishpacha magazine called Concentric Circles. I read a few paragraphs. The words were so simple innocent and clean like the old clear blue skies of Eretz Yisrael.

Even washing machines in Eretz Yisrael keep Shabbos. My washing machine had lasted up to the last load of whites on Erev Shabbos but like it’s Owner collapsed at 5 p.m. Friday with Shabbos half an hour away.…

My mother in law G-d bless her always used to say as she was finishing up the dishes at two in the morning “Finish your work today mammele because tomorrow’s a new day.”

No phrase jungles in my mind more routinely since we’ve moved to Eretz Yisrael. Because … there’s one guarantee here: Who knows what tomorrow may bring? Or won’t.…

Well as I said earlier in Israel no one knows what tomorrow will bring. The news broadcase: a huge blast Rechavia bus 19.

My washing machine repariman was close to the scene. Nothing happened to him; he was “just” shaken up. He couldn’t come that day. It’s an unusual phenomenon here how the brain and the heart can receive such trauma and still continue to walk the person through daily life keeping the wheels turning.

In Klal Yisrael there is no such thing as an event not affecting every single Jew. Like a stone thrown into calm waters its concentric circles ripple through the entire body of [the Jewish People].

There they are — the same words again: “just shaken up.” The repairman’s words echo in the babysitter’s. The same bombs. The same enemies. The same Jewish People being hurt.

For some odd reason I check the date of the story — it’s the same exact week seven years ago. What does this mean?

Every season — every day — has its intrinsic energy. Pesach comes around every year with its own powers to help us to break through whatever chains enslave us. It’s said that from now until Shavuos there is a special energy in the world that helps us to break through. We just have to make an opening the size of a pinhole.

It’s hard to break a cycle. Maybe we’re not supposed to break a cycle that Hashem put into the world like the cycles of the holidays of love and hate of hurt and forgiveness. But that we can grow bigger and deeper within the cycles each time they come around. And that is what forms.