If you search this blog for posts that use the phrase “dodging a bullet,” you’ll find quite a few.
It’s a useful term, handy for describing a situations where one escapes relatively free of harm while others do not. Generally, it is the result of, for lack of a better term, good luck. Being in the right place at the right time...or, more appropriately, not being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Aunt Marge and Uncle Phil know what it’s like to dodge a bullet. In July of 1996, they flew from Athens to New York on their way home from Israel. They changed planes to catch a flight to Miami, while the aircraft they had been on took off for Paris. It was TWA Flight 800...and as everyone knows, that flight never made it to Paris.
Israeli blogger David Bogner, who writes at Treppenwitz when he’s not guest-posting here, knows that feeling too. For he was just in Mumbai, returning home only five days before the recent terror attacks began.
He had stayed at the Oberoi Hotel, one of the hotels that would come under siege. And he had had dinner with Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who, only days later, would be murdered in cold blood by the terrorists - targeted as Jews, a microscopically small fraction of India’s population.
A few days - or minutes - can be the difference between life and death. Ask anyone who was in New York or Washington on September 11, 2001.
I am grateful that my friend dodged that particular bullet and is home safe in the arms of his family...while at the same time my heart breaks for the victims of this latest terrorist atrocity. May their souls be bound up in the bond of life and may they rest in peace, while we do what we can to eradicate those whose twisted beliefs have made a god of death.
It’s a useful term, handy for describing a situations where one escapes relatively free of harm while others do not. Generally, it is the result of, for lack of a better term, good luck. Being in the right place at the right time...or, more appropriately, not being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Aunt Marge and Uncle Phil know what it’s like to dodge a bullet. In July of 1996, they flew from Athens to New York on their way home from Israel. They changed planes to catch a flight to Miami, while the aircraft they had been on took off for Paris. It was TWA Flight 800...and as everyone knows, that flight never made it to Paris.
Israeli blogger David Bogner, who writes at Treppenwitz when he’s not guest-posting here, knows that feeling too. For he was just in Mumbai, returning home only five days before the recent terror attacks began.
He had stayed at the Oberoi Hotel, one of the hotels that would come under siege. And he had had dinner with Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, who, only days later, would be murdered in cold blood by the terrorists - targeted as Jews, a microscopically small fraction of India’s population.
A few days - or minutes - can be the difference between life and death. Ask anyone who was in New York or Washington on September 11, 2001.
I am grateful that my friend dodged that particular bullet and is home safe in the arms of his family...while at the same time my heart breaks for the victims of this latest terrorist atrocity. May their souls be bound up in the bond of life and may they rest in peace, while we do what we can to eradicate those whose twisted beliefs have made a god of death.
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