The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

I’ve been staring at the computer screen for the last ten minutes, trying to find the words to describe the day today, listening to “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” on repeat, unable to both stop listening to Mason Jennings’ cover of the Dylan song as well as type anything coherent. The song is so beautiful. It's haunting and soothing, and so melodic. It's sad and depressing song about class and racial divides, but there's something about the song, and Jennings' version especially that is also very comforting. And today is a day where we all need some comforting.

If you saw the news, you probably saw that there was another tractor attack in Jerusalem today (Tuesday). I have no idea how this is being covered in America (when I called my parents a few hours after they’d been awake, they hadn’t heard anything) but I hope it is. The basic gist of what happened is some guy got ahold of a tractor, and copied the attack of a few weeks ago, but with much less destruction – as far as I’m aware, about 15/16 injuries, some serious, and no fatalities. Except the guy, who was shot by a civilian that climbed into the cab of the tractor.

Our cell phones have a system where the head of student affairs can text the entire student and SO body instantly, alerting us to security concerns, or in the case of a piguah (Hebrew for “attack”), ask for immediate notification that we’re either “okay” or need to “be called.” It’s a good system. Today it worked well.

Ulpan got out at 1:30, and I was in the library checking e-mail, when a little before 2 o’clock, I got the piguah text. I had just heart lots of sirens, but I assumed they were for the Barack Obama motorcade – he arrived in J’lem today and is staying at the King David Hotel, literally next door to HUC. But then I got the text, immediately responded, packed up my stuff and walked to the admin office to see what had happened.

In some ways, this was an incident low on the gravity meter. There were no Israeli fatalities, the attacker was stopped very quickly, and everyone was able to go back to normal relatively quick. What’s upsetting about this incident is the proximity. It occurred on King David street, right at the intersection of Jabotinsky and Keren HaYesod, basically at Montefiore’s windmill and Yemin Moshe. For those that aren’t familiar with Jerusalem geography, that’s about a 3 minute walk from campus. It was incredibly close.

A classmate, who was walking home, saw the whole thing unfold before her. An Egged bus was mangled by the tractor in front of a classmate’s apartment building, and he was in his apartment and heard the commotion and the gunshots. Other classmates were walking towards the site and were told, “Don’t go there, there’s gunfire there.” When I heard what happened, and where it was, I got a little more upset. I had a relatively mundane afternoon/evening planned – go home to drop of bag, help classmates write a song parody for our upcoming student talent show, go to a park to play frisbee, go see apartment, eat dinner, go to meeting for HUC hiking club, then go home and do Ulpan homework – and wasn’t upset enough to not complete my tasks.

I also felt like this still wasn’t happening to me. I didn’t get it. I didn’t feel it. So I left campus and walked the 3 minutes to the accident site. If I didn’t know better, I would have guess there was a bad car accident. There was a lot of broken glass, over turned cars, ambulances, gawking pedestrians, a sense of uncertainty. But then there was the police! And soldiers! They were in the process of setting up a perimeter, and I didn’t want to get too close, but I wanted to see. It was the perverse voyeur in me, I suppose. The human in me who needs to look at a car accident or a train wreck. It was simply bizarre. I have no other words.

The mood the rest of the day has been equally weird. Everyone is talking to each other a little differently. No one really knows how to react. Some people went home and let it all marinate. Some people went to a movie. I played frisbee and then signed a lease for an apartment (It was a day truly filled with ups and downs). Life goes on here. This is what happens. But now I think Israel is starting to make a lot more sense to me. We’ve lived through a pigua, we see what it does to Israelis and what it does to us. We have the ability to start to understand the entirety of the culture. In some weird way, this was our christening. We’re now Jerusalemites.