It’s Another Day and It’s Not OK

By Aryeh Levin

After davening in shul, a man asked,
“Did something happen today?”
Another answered quietly,
“Yes… a terror attack in Jerusalem. Jews were killed.”

Jews were killed.
We thought those words belonged to our ancient past,
echoes of exile,
pages in history books.
Instead, they haunt our mornings,
nearly every day,
staining the headlines of a living Jerusalem.

Seven neshamos torn from us:
Levi Yitzhak Pash, the kind-hearted yeshiva caretaker,
Yaakov Pinto, a young groom who dreamed of building a home,
Yisrael Matsner, only twenty-eight,
Yosef David, clutching his seforim on the way to learn,
Dr. Mordechai Steintzag, “Dr. Mark,” who baked bread for neighbors,
Sarah Mendelson, mother and friend,
and one more whose name Heaven holds.

On a bus, at a junction,
bullets rained, glass shattered, lives ended.
It’s another day—
but it’s not OK.

I don’t know the solution.
But I know this:
we cannot go on pretending.
We cannot sip coffee, scroll screens,
and act as if the world is unchanged.
It must matter.
It must break our hearts.
It must move our hands.

Perhaps it’s another mitzvah,
a promise taken on before Rosh Hashana,
a candle lit, a coin given, a word of Torah spoken.
Small acts—but acts that resist forgetting.
Because if we keep walking as if nothing happened,
then something inside us dies too.

It’s another day.
But it’s not OK.