It’s no wonder that news of the bomb at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem last week hit us particularly hard.
Like many people, we believed Hebrew University was sacred ground. Surely the terrorists would not strike there.
Hebrew U. is an institution dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and higher learning. It’s a place that has encouraged controversial discourse by hiring some professors who are far from Zionists.
It’s one of the few venues in the country where Arab and Jewish students mingle, and where many victims were likely to be Arab or non-Israeli.
Moreover, in targeting the university, the terrorists must have known their victims were almost guaranteed to be in their 20s — at the very beginning of their adult lives.
Hebrew U. has long been the training ground for so many Jewish leaders. Rabbis, educators, and other communal leaders point to their experience at Hebrew U. as one of the most formative in their Jewish lives.
Marla Bennett, a graduate of U.C. Berkeley, was one of them. At 24, she had her whole life ahead of her, and we can only guess what she could have accomplished.
Bennett was a young woman who fed the homeless in high school, and collected clothing for poor Arabs and Jews while in Israel. She was always ready to help someone in need. She had an infectious joy about her and was an example for others. Had she been given the chance, she was going to transmit her own love of Judaism to countless Jewish children.
Some of the middle-schoolers at Oakland’s Temple Sinai were fortunate enough to have had Bennett as their religious-school teacher. She also was well-known at U.C. Berkeley Hillel.
Until now, the carnage in the Middle East, no matter how psychologically wrenching, hasn’t fully hit home for us.
But this time, with five of the seven victims Americans, it did.
At Bennett’s funeral, her boyfriend Michael Simon said, “This is just not the way it was supposed to be.”
No, it wasn’t.