by David Gerstman in
Where, What and When October, 2001

All of us make decisions every day. Most of these decisions are remarkably mundane, having no immediate effect on our lives. Even when we choose to eat ice cream instead of no-fat frozen yogurt, it won't harm us (although it might, if we make that choice repeatedly over many years).

Occasionally, though, these everyday decisions have significant unforeseen effects on our lives. When they do, there are two ways to react. One is to attribute the results of these decisions to random chance. In a recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, Hillel Halkin wrote that if he were killed by a terrorist bomb his fate would have been determined "...by a flip of the dice."

Not everyone views the hand of fate in such a random manner. Some see Hashem guiding the hand. Two days after Tisha B'av this year, Baltimoreans Yaakov Cohen and Tsiona Taragin got engaged. Since Tsiona's father lives in Israel, and hadn't gotten to know his future son-in-law, the couple traveled to Eretz Yisrael for a visit of week and a half. They arrived Tuesday, August 7 (the 18th of Av in the Hebrew calendar), and it took them a couple of days to recover from the jet lag. Thursday was to be their first day of touring and reacquainting themselves with Eretz Yisrael for the first time since they had learned in seminary and yeshiva.

Yaakov spent Thursday morning learning in a nearby yeshiva. Tsiona met a friend on Ben Yehuda Street, at the Bell Center, for a late breakfast. During breakfast, Tsiona told her friend, "You know, everyone here says it's a war zone, but I don't feel it at all."

According to their earlier arrangement, the couple met at the corner of Yafo and King George at 1:30 p.m. to spend the rest of their day together, including a trip to the Kotel. Though Yaakov had expressed an interest in eating felafel, since they were in front Sbarro's, a pizza restaurant, he changed his mind at that moment-he says he doesn't know why-and decided to have pizza for lunch. Tsiona wasn't hungry since she had just eaten.

The downstairs of Sbarro's was crowded, so Yaakov and Tsiona went to the second level. The couple talked while Yaakov ate his two slices and drank his Sprite. Tsiona returned to the first level two times, once for change and once for a straw. The second time she went downstairs was about 1:50. Shortly after Tsiona returned the second time, a deaf mute circulated around the upper floor of the restaurant requesting donations. Tsiona gave him some money from the shaliach mitzva money she had been given for her trip.

At 2 o'clock they heard a loud explosion followed by two lesser blasts. Despite the wall between the second floor's eating area and the counter on the main floor the couple felt some of the force of the blast.

Though neither was injured, they and everyone else upstairs ducked under their tables. The only noticeable sign of the blast upstairs were the lights that had been dislodged from their fixtures. Tsiona thought that the lesser blasts might have been a gun firing and was scared that the mayhem wasn't yet finished. Yaakov and Tsiona, with no prior agreement, both started reciting the 121st perek (chapter) of Tehilim (Psalms.) it At this time of great fear and foreboding, they asked and answered with the words of King David that their rescue would come from Hashem.

Shortly, a young man, who they later learned was named Rabbi Binny Friedman, got up on his chair and started reassuring the people upstairs that everything would be okay. Tsiona twice shouted at Yaakov, "Are you okay?" and he shouted back, "Yes." They had trouble hearing, since the noise of the explosion had clogged their ears.

They wanted to get out in case more bombs had been in the area. (This wasn't an idle fear. In the past, terrorists have set up two bombs in close proximity of one another in order to maximize casualties.) Despite the fear pervading the restaurant, the diners on the upper level calmly lined up single file and quickly exited the restaurant. (Though it hadn't occurred to Yaakov and Tsiona at the time, Rabbi Friedman later wrote in the Jewish Press that there was reason to fear that the structure could have been damaged to the point of collapse.)

The way out of the restaurant was more harrowing than either Yaakov or Tsiona anticipated. Though there wasn't much damage upstairs; the ground floor was a far different story. Floorboards and debris were all over the first floor. A duct had been knocked off the ceiling and lay on the ground. They weren't certain of what they were walking over. Was it food or body parts?

The horror of what happened became real when Yaakov and Tsiona stepped over the bodies of two women on the way out. Yaakov said that they were both pale and bloodied. He hadn't realized right away that they were dead.

Once outside, the couple had a little scare when they couldn't find each other; they had turned different ways. But after the momentary confusion they saw each other and hurried away together. They wanted to make sure they were out of danger.

They walked up Rechov Strauss toward Bikur Cholim hospital. A chareidi man saw them and offered them water when they told him where they'd been, but they declined. They caught a cab to Tsiona's father's home, which was normally a 10-minute drive. Because the police had closed off the streets in the center of Yerushalayim, the trip took 40 minutes.

During the ride, using a cell phone, Tsiona told her father where they'd been. At first the significance of that news didn't made an impression on Tsiona's father. But on a second call he was shocked to realize that they had been in the restaurant at the time of the explosion. Both Yaakov and Tsiona realized at that point that it wouldn't do to inform their parents in America that they had been in Sbarro's and escaped unscathed. They would wait until their return to the States, when everyone could see they were okay to inform their parents that they had been inside the pizza store at the time of explosion.

The rest of the day, the couple watched news reports, stunned at what they had just lived through. There were still two matters that they had to tend to. Because their hearing was still affected from the explosion, a doctor checked them to make sure that they didn't have ruptured eardrums. (They didn't.) Their hearing returned to normal in a few days. They also were unsure what was on their shoes. Was it human flesh or inanimate debris? Because of the doubt, they scraped their shoes and buried the residue.

Nowadays, many people surviving such an event would simply consider themselves lucky. Yaakov and Tsiona, however, considered themselves rescued. They were led to a dangerous situation but Hashem protected them. Maybe the tzedaka they gave shortly before the explosion combined with other merits to save them. Maybe other merits served to protect them. Whichever was the case, Yaakov and Tsiona looked to acknowledge Hashem's protection. They asked rabbanim what to do. The consensus was to add one small thing to their daily routines, such as learning an extra mishna.

A few weeks later Arutz 7, reported another choice that may have contributed to the escape of Yaakov and Tsiona. Following the late May collapse of the Versailles wedding hall in Yerushalayim, which killed more than 20 people and injured over 300, building inspectors were sent out to survey the city's public buildings. Even though Sbarro's met the standards of the government's safety regulations, the inspectors recommended strengthening the structure. The restaurant's owners repaired it at a cost of $100,000 even though they had no legal obligation to do so. Engineers surveying the damage of the bomb blast in Sbarro's estimated that these changes saved about 50 lives.

Understanding that everything comes from Hashem should serve the young couple well when they start their lives together after their marriage in November.

To read more about the blast, here are some sources:

Jack Kelley of USA Today was 30 yards away from Sbarro's and witnessed the devastation. This account is very graphic and not for everyone.