Terrorist Stabbings in My Hometown

Ra’anana, Tuesday, 9 a.m., stabbing on Ahuza Street, the city’s Main Street.

Where?  Near my middle son’s junior high school.

10:30 am: Stabbing in our neighborhood, between the ice-cream parlor and the bookstore where my fourth-grader goes.

My children have lived their whole lives in Ra’anana, but they don’t have the sense that the danger is getting closer to home. They grew up with the ethos that all Israel is their hometown.

My eldest son was born in Jerusalem, on a height near where Abraham walked with Isaac. He then lived in Ra’anana for 18 years until he went into the army and was sworn into the paratroopers at the Western Wall to protect David’s City and all of Zion.

Bruce Springsteen wrote a great song called “My Hometown. “ It’s a ballad fondly telling about his hometown and the different hometown his children had.  In every town a Jew has ever lived, he also had a song about his hometown. It’s called “Hatikvah .” “The Hope.”

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Ra’anana is a comfortable suburb northeast of Tel Aviv, settled by New Yorkers in the 1920s.  Twenty years ago, I departed from Great Neck, New York, the fabled home of the Great Gatsby, where there were more millionaires than people, and, like those early New Yorkers, I settled in Ra’anana.