Opinion When the ground shakes is it normal? | Israel today

I remember exactly at what point it happened.

In fact, I even remember the exact word where I had to stop my words on stage exactly a second before Punch because people in the audience looked up and started telling me: "Watch out, watch out, it's swinging! It could fall on you!"

And I did raise my eyes, and I saw a stage ceiling support, one that holds lanterns and curtain rolls on it, swinging violently and the lanterns almost hitting each other.

But I, who was in a stand-up mood, started improvising, and since the audience was made up of Tel Aviv municipality employees - I started talking about sinkholes and the wind outside and all kinds of other nonsense, and I didn't even realize what was happening above me, until the director of the department, who was sitting in the first row, said out loud : There is an earthquake.

It happened on two in the afternoon and you must have read about it in the newspaper.

An earthquake was recorded in central Tel Aviv and other places.

As mentioned, I was on a stage in the center of Tel Aviv, and in the minutes after the discovery, after it was made clear that we were not in danger, I was busy analyzing what I saw in front of me.

Of course I lost my focus and attention, and of course all eyes were lowered and stuck on the mobile devices.

And out of all of this, a realization dawned on me that for some reason filled me with great sadness.

Something that I suddenly understood, and I formulated it to myself in a somewhat strange, but true sentence, which goes like this:

You see it's not an attack.

For years, in my iniquities, I have been engaged in this pleasant profession: standing on a stage and trying to amuse those sitting in front of me.

From time to time something like this happens, of a collective distraction that leaves me alone on stage and talking to the walls.

Not long ago, more precisely on 7.4.22, something like this happened to me on a stage in Netanya, and I remember that realization hit me.

I immediately understood that it was an attack.

Something inside me, something in my 50-year-old Israeliness, something in being from this place, told me immediately, without words, that there had been an attack.

"There was an attack."

This couplet is so common, so naturalized, that it is already there among us.

You just have to press a button, and it starts flashing.

And from that exact engine I knew this week, on stage in Tel Aviv, that it was not an attack.

The texture of concern that came before me belonged to the curious genre, not the anxious type.

There was even room for humor.

It's us, it's the Turks and more.

And as soon as I understood: no.

This is not an attack.

I told the audience about the time I arrived at an event in a hotel in Tel Aviv very late, because I couldn't leave Jerusalem because of the damn tractor attack (August 2014).

It was a panel, and when I arrived and went on stage I apologized for being late because of the attack, then it turned out that no one in the hall, which had no cell phone reception, knew about the attack, and within a second the hall was emptied of the 1,500 female teachers who were there, and the conference exploded.

Then they came back to listen to me, and I successfully completed my performance and we all learned with relief that there was no disaster in Tel Aviv, thank God, and only I found myself saddened by the discovery that deadly terrorist attacks are such a part of the routine of life here, that I even have a series of stories about it, And there is even something to compare.

It's not normal.

It's not normal.

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