This week, when I went for a run on a winter night, I found myself grabbing the house key while it was between my fingers.
This is how we, the girls, were taught over the years: that when the plastic is hidden inside the fist, and the metal sticks out from between the fingers, you have a means of protection to use in any case.
Meager means of protection, and only God knows how much he would have helped in the event that Tapu Tapu, and peace and blessings be upon him.
This is not the first time I run late.
In the park next to the house, surrounded by a fence and gates, in a half-sleepy town in Sharon, there is really no reason to feel fear.
That's why the key matter caught me by surprise as well.
"Why did you run alone?" quite a few friends wrote to me when I uploaded a photo on Instagram.
Because we all know this caution that girls should take in the public space.
But the fear did not come from there at all.
The previous Saturday evening, seven people were murdered by the shooting of a teenager, a threat, a murderer, a terrorist.
During Shabbat, a shooting attempt was thwarted in which more people were injured, and a few hours later an attempted intrusion into a community in Samaria where a friend lived was recorded.
Who knows what else might happen by the time these lines are published.
And I, who is considered a very, very calm and soothing person, walked around the sleepy city of Sharon with controlled anxiety.
The next day I sat down to write in a busy cafe in the city center.
People around me talk about work, life, trips, and I see in my mind's eye how in a moment, when the evil one comes in here, I'll be crouching under the table and looking for a way to neutralize the shooting, and how the white sweater will probably go to waste after I use it to stop the blood of one of the wounded.
Who cares about a white sweater when your people are bleeding under the table.
This is exactly how I planned what could happen to us at any given moment.
The media, which I belong to, breaks into the broadcast during the attack and stays there for hours, showing us white marking tapes and destruction and objects full of blood.
need to break through.
should be reported.
But maybe we'll wait a moment and come up with more details later?
I am sure that we will all be a part of the events even without the reporters chasing the events on the screen.
Fortunately, I was never at the scene when an attack took place.
I have never walked down the street and "suddenly heard a boom", I have never ducked under tables other than as part of an exercise, I have never heard, really, truly, a shout of "Allah is great" followed by an explosion.
Tap-tap and thank God, I wasn't, and I also hope never to be in such a situation.
Neither me nor anyone else.
So why am I imagining her?
Because we are an integral part of this terrorism.
In the 90s we were children.
We canceled a high school Purim party when a girl, whose first name was the same as mine, was murdered with her two friends and ten other people in an explosion at the Dizengoff Center.
We preferred to walk than take the buses, which would then explode.
We listened to the news and saw the images, which were not filtered at the time, of a baby girl covered in blood being carried by a police officer, of life stories that were cut short in an instant.
Later I was already on the side of the survey, I sat with the families who experienced full-on trauma.
Those who try every day to forget the sights of the burnt bus, the deafening sounds of gunfire, the smells - oh the smells - that they carry with them to this day.
And as a bystander, I'm probably also trying to forget along with them.
I am not considered anxious.
My husband and children travel in Israel and the world - and are simply aware.
But at a time like this, fear bubbles up, and the incessant chatter in the news and on the web does no good.
We are a post-trauma nation that, even if it wasn't there itself, still feels that it is there.
And it doesn't matter if you live in Jerusalem, Sharon, Paris or London.
When suddenly the boom is heard, you are there.
And it is important to know, and important to report, and important to tell.
But I can't avoid the thought that we must limit, not to say stop, the transmission of this anxiety from place to place.
The messages "Amal'a, who knows why there are ambulances in the mall?"
In the neighborhood WhatsApp group, the posts about "suspected terrorist attack" when in total an explosion from a gas cylinder is heard, the posts of "Caution, a suspicious person with a really big coat at the intersection", when it is pouring rain outside.
Vigilance is required.
Anxiety - less.
Because on days when we have enough things to be careful of, don't invent more reasons for us to stress.
And we'll cross our fingers that reality doesn't do that for us.
were we wrong
We will fix it!
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