The horrific attacks that befall us, the Jews in the Holy Land, evoke a sense of chaos, anarchy, God's wrath, and complete helplessness.
There is no security, no peace, our lives hang in the balance, and every Arab who roams freely is a potential terrorist who may, at the whim of a moment, pull out a knife and stab a Jew for his own pleasure.
But in reality, this concept is completely wrong.
There is really no real danger walking around the street, the 'big' wave of attacks is actually very small compared to previous periods, and most - or perhaps almost all - Arabs don't really want to murder us.
Our attitude towards Arab violence, and the horror of it, are a function of what is known in social psychology as 'perceptual salience.' Terrorist events receive significant prominence in the media, and the harsh images accompanied by harsh texts push aside all other data.
So maybe it's time to update the data a little: deaths resulting from violence are today infinitely lower than other factors like, listen carefully, your blood fats, and speaking of the holidays.
If in the past, back in biblical times, a country could be 'erased' by its neighbor at any given moment, starting in 1945, as historian Prof. Yuval Harari points out, it has not happened even once that an internationally recognized country was conquered or annihilated by its neighbor.
It didn't happen. It also - apparently in the view of a reasonable person - won't happen.
The twentieth century, the bloodiest and most insane century in human history, claimed the lives of a total of only 5 percent of the human population on Earth.
These few percent include World Wars I and II, the Holocaust of European Jews, the Vietnam War, the inter-Arab wars, and Stalin's work in the Soviet Union.
Today, in the 21st century, a total of 1.5 percent die each year as a result of criminal and political violence. In Israel, the number is even lower, at 0.75.
The level of security of a resident of the State of Israel is so high, Harari explains in his lecture, that most people in history could only imagine it. We go to sleep without fearing that in the middle of the night the residents of the neighboring village, or the nearby group of Cossacks, will surround our village and slaughter us. We travel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem or from Ashdod to Haifa without fear that a gang of robbers will capture us, murder us or sell us into slavery, and we send our children to school without fear that one of the hot-tempered teachers will slap him and cause him injury.
And here is another statistic that illustrates our mistaken attitude: The total number of suicides in the country is 1 percent, meaning 0.25 more than deaths from violence.
In other words, the likelihood that any of you will die from a violent event, including the criminal gang wars in Israel, is significantly lower than the chance that you will kill yourself.
So true, every death is shocking, a family has been destroyed and will never be restored, children have lost their father and mother and will grow up in a different, cold, and cruel world. Our hearts ache and weep with you.
We have, after all, a collective Jewish heart.
Along with this, we must remember, and also acknowledge: we live in the safest, most peaceful, and calmest time in thousands of years.
Dismantling the Sukkah
How is it that the feelings of happiness, joy, and creativity in building the sukkah on the eve of the holiday are replaced by a feeling of fatigue, weariness, not to mention disgust when dismantling it?
The holiday season is coming to an end, and the wife starts nagging: When are you dismantling the sukkah? When are you returning the sides to storage? When will you roll the thatch of the Keynes into the packaging (with the original symbol) that protects it from the elements and bacteria?
The homeowner looks at the sukkah, which was so beautiful to him just a week ago, and keeps thinking about the dusty sides, the unaesthetic thatch, the nails protruding from the "slats" that support the thatch, and feels like a construction worker.
He sullenly tries to 'push' the work onto one of his sons, the ones who were so happy to help him with the construction, but they are suddenly busy. They rush to the meeting between times.
The sukkah now seems to him like an ugly shack, a temporary apartment, and his greatest desire is to "get it over with." To move the ugly, peeling walls, which he boasted about to his guests just three days ago, to the warehouse with the filthy packaging of the thatch, and to return the porch to its normal, clean, and tidy state.
In the meantime, he will injure a peeling medic, curse his sons who joined the trip organized by the yeshiva between times, and wait for next year.
Then he will, with the joy of a mitzvah, remove the sides and thatch, and forget his disgusting behavior, on the eve of the holiday.
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