A Yom HaZikaron Vignette

Bar-Ilan intersection; 11:00 am.

The mournful sirens started wailing maybe fifteen seconds ago.

Traffic is slowly coming to a stop. An old mini-bus, too narrow to take corners at any speed slowly turns right at the intersection, the driver obviously looking for a safe place to stop.

At length, like a frail old man going up the steps, the bus stops and settles back on its haunches. The door opens. Maybe a minute has gone by. From the cab descend two short legs. Standing on the ground behind the door is the driver. He is so short that his head does not reach the window.

From the side I can see that he is, in fact, a frail old man. He finally finds his footing besides the bus he drives for a living. And then a metamorphosis. The frail old man draws himself up, back ramrod straight, arms at his sides, chest up, eyes forward. At that particular moment, I swear he was 3m tall; guardian of his country.

The sirens die down. A frail old man laboriously gets back into his bus and drives away.

About the Author

Benjamin Levy is the CEO of IsItYou, Ltd; an Israeli start-up specializing in mobile face recognition; He was born forty-six years ago in Mexico City and lived for a long time in California. Today he is married to an Israeli and the proud father of three. To date, he’s managed to fit in getting three degrees, launch a democratic school, hold eight proper jobs, completed over eighty consulting assignments, and worked in 61 countries, and fourteen of the world’s time zones at last count; His favorite line of poetry comes from Rainier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: “to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.”