Fear Itself

"They got what they wanted." The March 11 Madrid commuter train bombings influenced Spain's election. (Pablo Torres Guerrero - El Pais via Reuters)

"With a siren," Ricki interjects, "we all say to ourselves, 'It's just a woman in labor, it's just a woman in labor . . .' "

"If you hear one," says Jessica, "you brace yourself, because you don't want to hear two or more. One siren, just one, delivers a sense of relief."

How you respond depends often on what you have seen. Ariel rides city buses, as many as four a day, except in the few harrowing days after a terror attack, when, at her parents' insistence and with their money, she grudgingly takes taxis. Jessica won't ride city buses at all. In 1996, she was in a bus directly behind one of the No. 18s that blew up on Jaffa Road. She remembers it as a dull thud -- "it's not like an explosion in the movies."

"I hear about it from the dreams," Ricki says. She is talking about her clients who have been through a bombing, and the memories that plague their sleep. "There's a silence after a bomb, a deathly stillness. The birds have flown away, the air is sucked out of everything. Everyone is frozen. They can't speak.

"Then," she says, "it starts."

"It" is what happens afterward. Each person tends to carry away a specific image, a memory that haunts him. With Jessica, it is the cinders that floated down like sinister black rain. Levi Levine, Ariel's husband, was at the scene moments after Sbarro was bombed, in 2001, trying to help the victims. Many were beyond help.

"My mother takes care of babies," Levi says. "One day, afterward, I was with her, and one of the babies was asleep, and I had to ask her to move the baby's hand, because the baby's palm was in the same position as a baby's palm I saw in Sbarro." Shai was among the first at the scene at a Friday morning bombing of a supermarket in which three people died, including the teenage female bomber and a security guard who was trying to stop her. That afternoon, at home, Shai became nauseated when Ricki was cooking chicken.

"Olfactory triggers," Ricki says measuredly, "are very common."

It's all visceral. Some of it stays visceral, and needs help escaping. Disguising details to protect the privacy of the person involved, Ricki tells a story about a client of hers: The patient was a young man experiencing emotional problems, for no apparent reason. Ricki first interviewed the patient's mother, and asked for a routine mental health history. Were there any particular traumas in the boy's life? The mother ticked off the usual list: hospitalizations, divorces in the family, death of pets, that sort of thing. Nope, nothing special.

Meanwhile, the patient was delayed in arriving. The mother apologized, saying that he couldn't take the bus. "I almost didn't ask why," Ricki says. It turned out he wouldn't ride a bus because he had been personally affected not by one bus bombing but by four -- hearing one happen, losing a relative in another, and so forth.

"You raise your kids to think people are good, because the alternative is too terrible to bear," she says. "You don't want to live in a world like that, where there is evil lurking behind every smile. You don't want to believe in that. And then your children find out on their own."

One ordinary Israeli family. Seven people. Levi, Jessica and Shai have each been at the scene of a bombing. Ricki counsels victims. And Bernie? "Two students of mine were killed at the bombing of the cafeteria at the Hebrew University in 2002. A third one was sitting between them, and bent down to get something from a knapsack, and because of that, though she was wounded, she lived." Only Tani, the quiet, handsome boy with the soft eyes, seems not to have a story to tell.

I ask Bernie and Ricki: Why do you still live in this place?

"There has to be a Jewish homeland," Ricki says. "This is not a guaranteed thing. Someone has to do it, and we didn't want to be people who just send money to plant trees."

And so they live, partly in defiance, but mostly, they do what they must to keep their own tree flowering. Bernie, one of the gentlest men I've ever known, owns a pistol. He carries it when he is traveling with his students somewhere. The Israeli Ministry of Education requires armed escorts on class trips.

In the intractability of the current situation, the history teacher hears echoes of the past.

"The history of war," Bernie says, "shows us that there is always a demonization of the enemy. You don't know what to believe. In World War I, we were told that the Kaiser was murdering children. That was not true. In World War II, when the Allies said the Germans were killing civilians, it also sounded like propaganda. Now the Palestinians are being told outrageous things. They are being told by their leaders that the Jews are poisoning their wells. They don't know what to believe. They are deprived of a decent life, and they are whipped into a frenzy. I don't think most Palestinians are evil."

It is at this point that Tani speaks out. It turns out he does have a story to tell, after all.

"When I was in eighth grade I had a friend who lived in a settlement. He and another friend skipped school and took a hike down the valley near their home. A Palestinian shepherd killed them with bricks and stones, and dipped his hands in their blood, and wrote things in blood on the wall of a cave. They were beaten so badly they couldn't be identified by dental records. They needed DNA."

An ordinary Israeli family, preparing for Sabbath dinner.

MY TRIP HOME WAS UNEVENTFUL. It turns out there was nothing at all to worry about with the fated, fearful Flight 223. Security was surprisingly light, and we were checked aboard by a Sikh in a turban and Muslim woman with a head scarf.

There are no more bad rumors about Flight 223, no more delays or cancellations. There used to be a problem, but British Airways has taken care of it.

Flight 223 no longer exists. The same plane still flies along the same route at the same time, but it is now called Flight 293.

International air corridors are not Jerusalem. Things are simple, still.

On the way to my house, I asked the cabdriver, as I always do, if anything interesting had happened while I was gone.

Plenty, he said. The government had issued an alert to be on the lookout for seven people suspected of belonging to al Qaeda, possibly planning something bad, though it wasn't clear what, or when, or if they were in this country at all. The government was urging people to go on with their holiday plans, though. The driver said he felt things were getting pretty scary, here.

Then he asked me why I was laughing.

NO ONE KNOWS WHAT TERRORISM, FUELED BY NEW TECHNOLOGIES, WILL UNLEASH on our country in the coming months, or years. In fact, as I write this I can't be sure that a catastrophic terror attack will not have occurred between the deadline for this story and the day you read it.

In our climate of strategically restrained anxiety, it is considered almost a crime to make predictions. When, shortly after 9/11, the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking dared to speculate once again that advances in genetic manipulation of biological toxins will make it almost inevitable that mankind will extinguish itself on this planet in the not too distant future, scientific colleagues rose one by one to distance themselves from these terrible, irresponsible thoughts. You probably don't even remember this episode. Good, good.

Will America of the next decade resemble more closely the Jerusalem of today than it will the America of today? Maybe. How scary is that? Plenty. But I'm a little less scared of it than I was before I met my old friend Bernie, and his family, surviving with love and dignity and a sense of purpose.

In Israel, I think, the constant grind of terrorism has not only penetrated people's sense of denial, it has sanded it almost completely away. But what it has exposed is not the blind, paralyzing fear that Ernest Becker envisioned in The Denial of Death. It is something else altogether. The Israelis live defiantly, indomitably, with a heightened intensity, as though each day might be their last. After a bomb killed two dozen young people at a Tel Aviv disco a few years ago, Israeli youth refused to be cowed. They resumed a robust nightlife. Today, outside the scene of the bombing, beneath a stone memorial listing the names of the dead, is a single inscription: "Lo Nafseek Lirkod." It means, "We won't stop dancing."

I think Becker got it only partly right. Yes, death is a certainty, and we get by through denial. But would immortality, in a world such as ours, really be better? Becker, in his own bleak way, was too insistent on defining the human as just another animal dumbly fulfilling his Darwinian destiny. With the right frame of mind, denial can be a magnificent ignorance; the possibilities within it are limitless. In the end, those possibilities -- not self-delusion -- are what make us human and keep us sane.

Just before I left on this trip, my friend Laura gave me a $5 bill. Laura is a journalist, an expert in affairs of the Middle East, and the daughter of a rabbi. The bill, she told me, was "mitzvah money." When someone is heading off on a possibly dangerous journey, it is a Jewish custom to give him money to give to a beggar at his destination. That turns the journey into a good deed. With luck, God will protect you.

The bill is still in my wallet; I'd completely forgotten about it. At first, I felt ashamed. But sometimes, when you focus too intently on your own situation, you miss the big picture. I'm going outside, right now, to give the five bucks to the first homeless person I see. It's all the same world, you know.

Gene Weingarten is a Magazine staff writer and columnist. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article at 1 p.m. Monday on washingtonpost.com/liveonline.