Winds howl.

Clocks tick.

Four cars pass. Or just two.

They are far away far from the bedroom cocoon from the falling in and out of short sleeps.

It could be 1810. It could be or 975 BCE.

The winds ancient sounding carry history sweeping past with the moans of millenniums.

Korach’s in there his ferocious battle against the calm.

I hear the cries of men being swallowed by the earth.

Nowhere to run nowhere to hide when you go against G-d.

Clocks still ticking.

Winds still howling.

Darkness unassumingly creeps in.

Did these same winds blow past Sarah’s tent while she worried about Yitzchak? While she waited for the promises to come true?

The wandering winds don’t die down only the interest in them does.

Dinner calls. Bedtime routines.

Some kind of nonstop alarm like a prison siren sounds.

Makes you wonder how Yidden lived through wars and pogroms.

Winds of contention. Are they the same ones that blew on David’s harp? And accompanied us in our exile to Babylon?

 ***

When we first moved to Israel 20 years ago we lived on a basically uninhabited mountaintop with about 25 families. The houses were made of thick cement each wall about 5-feet thick for protection.

The houses had absolutely no heat and it was a freezing winter. The winds blew harder on the open mountaintop and we huddled together freezing through the nights.

We had actually brought a huge air conditioner-heater with us on our lift but it had to be installed in the wall. Considering the thickness of the cement we tried to make do without it until we saw it was a serious necessity.

We hired a man to come and drill a square in the concrete wall big enough to hold the unit.

He drilled for a week straight with some huge drill freezing us even more as the ever-widening hole let in ever increasing wind and cold. But then our air conditioner-heating unit was installed.

We made a semi-festival as we were about to switch on the heat button.

We pressed the button. We waited. And waited. And … cold air came out.

The heating mechanism was broken.

  ***

 Last Shabbos I was told a few personal firsthand stories of the past. About the Jews living in the Old City of Jerusalem. This particular family lived under the Churva shul.

Each time winds of a pogrom stirred their Arab neighbors would knock on their metal shutters to warn them to go up to the top of the shul. One day the Jordanians took over the city. The Jewish family was told to pack their things.

Her mother never believed could never imagine said the woman telling me the story that they’d be gone any longer than a day or two. That it could ever be that they’d be taken away from the Wall they davened at three times a day. The Wall that was their mother their father their life source and more. Her mother this woman told me folded and put out all their clothes in a high place so they wouldn’t get moldy while they were gone. They left with only the clothes on their backs assuming they would soon be back.

It was 20 years before they returned.

When the Kosel was released her family rushed to cry on its stones. From that day on though her mother was already 70 years old the entire family would walk on unpaved stone roads every single Shabbos — clear rain or winds — to daven at the Kosel.

Generations strong and bold grew out from there.

Winter nights in Jerusalem.