The man in the middle of the street

I was standing on the street between the King David Hotel and the YMCA – two Jerusalem icons heavy with history.

The King David, once the target of a deadly bombing, still carries the scars of our tangled past.

The YMCA, with its bell tower and arches, holds something different: a quiet hope. Inside, there’s a preschool where Jewish, Muslim, and Christian children learn together—Hebrew and Arabic, holidays and songs, side by side. “The good news is they celebrate all the holidays,” one mother says. “The bad news is the kids are NEVER in school bc they’re celebrating all the holidays.”

And that’s where I stood when the siren rang.

A few people on the sidewalk stopped in their tracks, heads bowed. The staff from the King David stood in front of the storied hotel. A taxi pulled over; the driver got out. I couldn’t tell if he was Muslim, Christian, or Jewish—and in that moment, it didn’t matter.

But still, some cars kept moving. Another taxi sped by. A few motorcycles wove around the frozen pockets of people. And then, a man stepped into the middle of the street – into the very center of the street. I don’t know who he was. But he planted himself there like an exclamation point – forcing the cars to stop. Forcing us all to notice.

It was a small act of defiance.

Of insistence.

“SEE US,” he said with his whole body. “SEE HOW WE ARE HURTING.”

Every single Jewish person I know in our broken Holy city knows someone – or knows the mother or father of someone – who was murdered on October 7, or who has fallen in battle since, in Gaza or in Lebanon. And those of us with children in the army – or about to go in – are living in a constant, perpetual state of low-grade anguish.

There’s a saying that Yom HaZikaron reminds us of the price we pay to have a country.
And Yom HaShoah reminds us of the price we paid when we didn’t.

And now, as antisemitism rises in ways many of us never imagined we’d witness again in our lifetimes, the imperative of this country—the necessity of a sovereign Jewish home – is no longer just a matter of memory. It is a matter of survival.

Here in Jerusalem, we’re still trying – sometimes clumsily, sometimes beautifully—to live side by side. To make space for one another. And I wonder about the people who didn’t stop for the siren. I wonder what they felt— or didn’t feel. I wonder what they’ve lost, or what they’re holding on to.

And I think about the parents on the other side. The ones who may hate us, or who may fear us, and still see the faces of their own children in the corpses of the children in Gaza, wrapped in burial cloth. It is gut-wrenching. It is unbearable. It should be.

And I keep thinking about the man in the street. About how maybe the most sacred thing we can do right now is to simply notice. To bear witness. To let ourselves be interrupted by the rift in our universe.

I hope one day the memorial siren won’t be political.

I hope one day we’ll all be able to mourn together – not as distant cousins living in parallel universes in the same hurting city, but as brothers and sisters with shared sorrow, and maybe, one day, shared and nurtured peace.

And I hope those children – those little ones in the preschool with backpacks too big for their bodies and hands sticky with snack time – grow up in a Jerusalem where sirens only signal recess, not remembrance or rockets.

Where standing still isn’t an act of differentiation between Us and Them, but a moment of shared understanding for all we’ve endured, separate and together.

Where the past no longer bleeds into the present.

And where hope finally drowns out the sound of grief.