We are a nation in mourning, a nation united by what we’ve lost

I was heading toward the bus stop when I saw a small cluster of people that had formed around a little girl, about six or seven years old. She was clearly not from my very chareidi neighborhood — oversized, short-sleeved T-shirt tucked into mini shorts perched atop knobby, fawnlike legs that wound down into sandals; a mass of untamed black curls framed her narrow face and tearstained cheeks.

“What happened, bubah?” asked an avreich, forty-ish, with a long black beard and his Gemara clutched at his side as he bent down to listen to her.

“Are you lost?” inquired a Sephardi savta, her face wrinkled with concern.

Between the tears, they managed to eke out her story. “You wanted the day camp on Louis Lipsky?” asked the prim and proper woman whom I’d pegged as a high school mechaneches or maybe principal. “That’s not over here, that’s Ramot Alef.”

A tall, broad, thuggish man, wearing the vest of an Egged inspector, bare arms tattooed up to his shoulders, swaggered over. “What’s going on here?” His eyes softened when he saw the girl. “What happened?”

One of the adults offered a hasty explanation, and he pulled out his phone. “Here, metukah, you know your ima’s number? Call her.”

Metukah called her mother and sobbed. The mechaneches/principal then took the phone and clarified the little girl’s destination. “Don’t worry,” she assured the mother. “One of us will take her there and make sure she gets there. I’ll call you.”

Once she’d hung up, they broke into a small squabble about who would escort her.

“I’m going in that direction anyway,” said the avreich.

“I have the time,” offered the savta, wrapping her arm around the hiccupping girl.

“I’m an Egged employee,” insisted the inspector, who no longer looked quite so thuggish. “It’s my job.”

My own bus arrived and I climbed on. As the bus pulled away, I turned my head back to catch one last glimpse of the scene. We’re a nation torn by My Type and Not My Type, riven by ideology and affiliation, yet for a few small moments, here we were, with one focus, united around a little girl.

And I wondered: Is it always going to take tears?