Despite All of The Differences, Israelis Stick Together

One of the things I miss about Israel (and hope to experience one day soon) is the closeness that everyone feels with each other. Its known to be a small country and news travels from one end to the other quickly. I think that is why Israelis are always fighting - its like how siblings fight. And I find this closeness to be across all divisions, irrespective of the different groups with their different political and religious views. I truly felt on an Egged bus, with the chilonim on one side, and the Charedim on the other side, that everyone was in "it" together.

Anyways, I read a story on Aliyah Blog today that I though demonstrates this idea well:

Picking up the Groceries

I was walking up Rechov Yaffo near the shuk yesterday. Baruch Hashem, it was raining very heavily – not so much fun though for those of us who had to be outside. There was a man in front of me carrying in one hand 3 full grocery bags and in the other hand a cardboard carton with 6 bottles of soda.

The carton broke apart and all of the bottles spilled onto the sidewalk.

I knealt down to prevent all of the bottles from rolling down the hill back to Kikkar Davidka. As we tried to fit the bottles into the remains of the carton, the carton totally broke apart. So the man took two of the bottles over to the door of his apartment 15 feet away, while I heald the bottles on the sidewalk (still pouring rain).

Here comes the good part (for those of you that have bothered reading this far):

Within ten seconds, two different store keepers were already out on the street, holding open plastic bags to put in the remaining soda bottles. Before the man could return, we had the bottles in bags, ready to be shlepped once again.

The two shopkeepers that came out to help did so without being asked. I was the only person their wearing a kippah – they were just Jews whose natural inclination was to do chessed for someone on the street that they did not know.

This entry was posted on January 6th, 2005 at 11:54 by Yaakov and is filed under Only in EY. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.