Yom Yerushalayim in the Rain

Yesterday a close family friend visited. His last real experience in Jtown was in the 1950's, so I spent some quality time with him recounting what was and wasn't in my neighborhood half a century ago. Late into dinner he verbalized what I had been thinking for hours. "Do you think that tomorrow [today] will be dangerous here in Jtown? It is Yom Yerushalayim, after all."

In fact, I'd been considering that situation for weeks. There are posters and flags everywhere commemorating 40 years of Jtown's "reunification". It would be the perfect time for the Palestinians to protest the occupation in some sort of unified manner, possibly with violence. I was a sitting duck.

This morning I woke and remarked that the weather was sort of weird. There was high pressure and low, grey clouds. And then it started to rain. Strange. Minutes later it downpoured with heavy and windy rain. The rain managed to sneak into my apartment via the porch and flood the living room.

I was annoyed. I had to walk across town for a meeting and my rainjacket was recently stolen (in the Likud headquarters in TA, long story.) I arrived wet. The rain also meant that the honking outside my apartment was amplified. No one understood what was going on. It is May, for God's sake. We stopped praying for rain on Pesach.

One of my friends remarked that we [humanity] may have broken the weather. We will tell our children that in the summer it used to be summery and in the winter it was wintery and they won't have ANY idea what we are talking about. Oy!

And while I'm sure that we actually have "broken" the weather, there was something else at play. Last week we experienced that crazy hot, over 100 degree weather. That kind of heat makes people agitated and incites them to do crazy, radical, stupid things. It was as if God looked down on Jtown today and said, "Oh yea, time to cool things off." Ceremonies are good places for potential violence; the main government ceremony was canceled today due to the weather. And furthermore, it shouldn't be such a celebration anyway. Something should literally come from the sky to mute the energy.

Sometimes the Divine hand is more obvious than other times. And sometimes chance makes things happen the way they should.