Life in the in-between Reflections, post-Sarona shooting

It’s no wonder that “flow” has become the quintessential feature of our experience here. Be here now, don’t think about the future and forget about the past.

By DANYA KAUFMANN
In the aftermath of the deadly shooting, a heavy security presence guards the entrance to Tel Aviv’s Sarona Market last week (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
In the aftermath of the deadly shooting, a heavy security presence guards the entrance to Tel Aviv’s Sarona Market last week
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
For the first time in months, I opened the news app on my phone.
I had pretty much stopped reading the news, assuming that if anything important happened, I’d hear about it. My assumption proved to be true, when on June 8, as I was about to enter a concert venue in Jerusalem, I heard a man ask the guard if he knew how many had been injured in the terror attack.
What happened, I asked, although I knew perfectly well. I opened the app to see the horror for myself – unprepared to see a deadly shooting in Sarona Market.
Jerusalem has been my home for the last four years, but when it hits Tel Aviv, it still hits me right in the gut. That’s where I go to run away from the Holy City, to be carefree and naïve, to drink coffee in quaint little markets.
These news-free months, I now realize, coincided suspiciously with the months of relative quiet since the last wave of terror.
There’d been no official ending of course, no conscious sigh of relief – but at some point I was no longer refreshing the news app to see how many people were killed; I was no longer imagining a man walking behind me with a knife everywhere I went, breathing quietly and intently; and I wasn’t calculating anymore – calculating my chances of being killed if I took a bus versus a car, calculating whether a terror attack would be more likely to occur in Mamilla or the Malha Mall, calculating how much worse it would be to be stabbed than to be shot.
There had been (thank God and don’t tempt fate) very few attacks recently, and we were back in the in-between. Like a boxer between rounds, or a Sherpa between climbs, we can afford no unnecessary strain during these times. It’s when we recalibrate, relax our minds and give our emotions a rest. We each have our own ways of shutting down, blocking off some part of ourselves. So I stopped reading the news.
There’s a window of opportunity in between every two tragedies; the trick is to get into it as soon as you can. The game begins as soon as you’ve skimmed the news, made sure no one you know was involved, and calculated how close you were this time. The winner is the one who presses play first, who picks up the pieces the quickest. It’s about how many minutes it takes you to find a new topic to talk about with your date, about how many days after the shooting you go back to that bar, how long before you’re back at the beach.
We live in these breaks, in the space between one person’s last gulp of air and another’s decision to kill. Life is concentrated in the hiatus, condensed into the break. As soon as it’s over and before it starts again, we run for our lives – to the beach, to the mountains, to New York. We drink, smoke, love, party. The only rule of the game is that you don’t talk about it, not until it happens again. And if you absolutely have to, make it cynical. It’s no wonder that “flow” has become the quintessential feature of our experience here. Be here now, don’t think about the future and forget about the past. Let go, hold nothing too dear – but at the same time grab it all as tightly as you can.
Because sooner or later it’ll all fall apart, and you’ll have to pick up the pieces of this precarious existence once more, try to put it all back in place. Is it any surprise that in these magical moments interspersed among the blows, these breaks into which we squeeze it all, we’d rather go to the beach? Not read the news? That we’d rather bask in the sunlight and enjoy today’s quiet than contemplate a long-lasting solution – or anything long-lasting at all?