Thursday evening I got home at maybe a quarter to ten. I put my stuff down in my room and proceeded to fold my dry laundry and hang up my wet laundry. I talked to my flatmate for a bit. I came back to my room and saw that I had a text message on my phone. I checked it and saw that it was from Harris, my chevruta from last semester who is now working in the dairy on a kibbutz. The text of the message read “Are you ok?”

Harris doesn’t usually check up on me like that unless there’s a reason. So I called him. He told me that 8 Yeshiva students had been gunned down in their beit midrash in Jerusalem, and that they thought that there was a gunman still loose. Now Harris knew that the Yeshiva hit was Mercaz HaRav and not our Yeshiva, and he knew that it was in a different part of the city. But still he worried.

I don’t have internet or television at home. I didn’t hear more about what happened until the next morning at Minyan, not at the Yeshiva but at the Conservative shul next door. The morning’s darshanit (they have a rotation of congregants who give divrei Torah every morning) was visibly shaken by the events. After services and the Rosh Chodesh breakfast, I went down to our beit midrash to set up for Yachad Minyan with my friend Benjamin. He used the Yeshiva Computer to check his email while I cleared off the tables for dinner. He turns to me and says “You’re going to want to check your email… people will be worried. Also Rabbi Diamond wants us to confirm that we received and read the security updates email.” So I checked my email and indeed I had a few asking if I was dead.

Grandma Bev heard from someone in her community that there was a shooting at “The Yeshiva” in Jerusalem. Since this person is active in the movement she assumed at first that she had meant my Yeshiva.

The news says things like Yeshiva in Jerusalem, Jerusalem Yeshiva, things that make people back home think of me and where I am, where I am studying. When I first heard the news, I didn’t make the connection as quickly. I am accustomed to the idea of the Yeshiva where I am studying is not generally accepted as the same kind of Yeshiva as where eight were killed and forty wounded Thursday night. I would not be allowed to study there, I would not be considered a serious Torah student there, I would likely not even be considered a Jew there. The first thing I thought about the kids who were killed (and they were just kids) in relation to me was not how we are similar but how we are different.

Where did this poison come from?

It was the email from one of the directors of our program, Rabbi Goldfarb, that started to bring it home.

These boys were learning Torah and celebrating Rosh Hodesh in the beit midrash, activity we know and appreciate.

I sit here in my own beit midrash, in my makom kavuah, my gemara still sitting on my shtender open to the sugya we were learning this morning. At Mercaz HaRav, they might not recognize me as one of them, they might not see the similarity between this Yeshiva and theirs. That doesn’t matter. Why is it that it takes so long for me to recognize them as like me, their Yeshiva as like ours? What is this wall that is between us?

The shooter was a resident of Jerusalem… an Israeli citizen. Someone from a neighborhood not far from where I live. I don’t know what to do with that.

I find myself noticing that my makom kavuah is next to the door of the beit midrash. I find myself looking to see who it is whenever I see movement outside. Mercaz HaRav was hit most likely because it is the flagship institution of the Religious Zionist movement and of the settlement movement. These factors don’t apply to my Yeshiva. There is not much reason why an institution like this one would be a target of Palestinian terrorism… honestly, around here we are more worried when we see Haredi types poking around. They have been known to try to steal (liberate, I guess) sifrei Torah from liberal Jewish institutions. My sense has always been that we here at The Conservative Yeshiva have more to fear from the right wing of our own people than from the sorts who perpetrated last week’s massacre.

Talking to my friend Alex over lunch yesterday, we were talking about egalitarianism and the movement. He told me that he cares a lot less about the Movement than I do, or our friend Adam does. Alex is going to be enrolled in JTS’s rabbinical school in the fall. He says that he hopes to be a Rabbi for all Jews, not just for Conservative Jews. I agreed that Klal Yisrael is more important to me than Conservative Judaism… but that since Conservative Judaism is the only place where I have a home, I am necessarily forced into a particularistic way of thinking about my Judaism.

But this is much deeper than that. Deeper and sicker.