A Rood Awakening!!!

A leisurely Sunday morning stroll down Jaffa Street toward the Hillel Coffee Shop took an unexpected turn as the window display of a street side shoe store caught my attention.  Veering four steps out of my path, I stepped to the inside of a concrete support pillar and paused to inspect something that I will never be able to recall. Whhaaaammmmm! The entire front of the store dissolved as a shock wave blew by me on both sides of the pillar.  A foul cloud of smoke with the acrid smell of burning flesh and hair filled my nostrils.  As the smoke cleared, I looked to my left and saw dismembered bodies scattered out into the street.  I held out my hands and arms and quickly checked my sandaled feet to make sure that my own body was intact.  "You are here to help," rang out in my ears. 

Stepping over a young woman's severed head,  I hurdled the 12 feet to get to a young IDF soldier who was slammed to his back with the stubble of his hair smoldering and his pants burned off up to his knees.  I knelt by him as he struggled to sit up.  He asked me to assess his condition as he searched for his arms and legs, "Am I hurt?"  He was understandably panicked as I searched his body for the source of the blood that covered his face and chest.  I told him, "You are OK - you have a cut over your eye, but you are fine - this is not your blood."  I placed his right hand over the cut and said, "Keep pressure on it."   Pointing to an M-16 with a severed shoulder strap about six feet away I asked, "Is that your rifle?"  "Yes," he responded.  I said, "I am going to get it for you."  To avoid the appearance of arming myself during the confusing aftermath of the explosion, I dragged it by the shredded nylon strap attached to the butt stock.  Once I got it to his side I flipped it over to check the magazine and safety - it was ready to go if the action was not over.  "You stay here and wait for an ambulance, you can't help anyone." I visually triaged the bodies in the immediate area.  Ten feet in front of me a man's body with an arm and both legs missing, was lying motionless in the street - the stump of his left arm on fire.  He's dead.  The screams died down as shock moved over the living casualties strewn around me.  To my right another IDF soldier was flat on his back with his hair smoldering and pants ripped from his bleeding legs.  Two men rushed to his aid and a third man in a white lab jacket knelt beside me to assess the soldier steadied on my right arm.  I said, "He's in shock - and has a cut over his eye."  I stood and handed his rifle, muzzle down, to a police officer.

About ten feet away, a woman was attempting to walk through a tangled net of wires.  She was confused, and as I grabbed her shoulders and looked into her eyes, I thought she was blinded by the concussion; her pupils were dilated to the point that there was no color.  "Can you see?"  "Are you hurt?"  She looked down at her legs. A large piece of glass was protruding from just above her left knee, and blood was soaking her shirt just below her rib cage.  "I must get to my husband," she cried to me in broken English.  "You must wait here; your husband will come to you." I forcibly restrained her.  "My husband is waiting for me on the other side - I must get to him!"  She was strong, but I wrapped my arms around her and said, "You must stay here until."  She let out a scream as she recognized the body in the street in front of us - "My husband!" My husband!" That is my husband!"  I put my hand on the back of her head and buried her face into my chest as she burst into sobs.  I prayed a one sentence prayer for her comfort, and a young Jewish woman approached.  I turned my head to her and said, "She has a couple wounds, but that is her husband." Her eyes followed mine to the smoldering body in front of us.  She put her arms around her Jewish sister and I stepped aside.

At my feet lay the severed head of a young woman.  I, like the several rescue workers scrambling around me, wanted to avoid the gruesome reality - but someone had to pick up her head and get it out of the middle of the sidewalk.  The small shreds of a blue plastic banner allowed me to wrap her smoldering head and carry it to a less trafficked area where I placed it at the side of the concrete support pillar.  I had no idea as to which body it belonged, but I did not want it to get accidentally kicked in the rescue efforts.  I looked at my blood and soot covered hands, and stopped to check myself more carefully for damage.  My hands were steady.  My hearing was muted and my ears ringing from the concussion, but I did not seem to have any symptoms of an adrenaline rush nor did I recognize any symptoms of shock.  As I looked around, I could see that emergency teams were now arriving in force.  The living were all being attended, so I looked for something to extinguish and cover the burning body of the gentleman in front of me.  I grabbed a policeman by the shoulder and shouted in his ear that I had wrapped a woman's head and laid it next to the pillar to which I was pointing.  He didn't understand my English, so I repeated myself, using the graphically grotesque gestures required to communicate the morbid reality.  He nodded and repeated back, "Woman's head,"   The look on his face let me know that he understood.  I did not want someone to accidentally discover it while clearing the blast debris. 

I turned my attention back to the street, as a soldier covered the body of this woman's husband with a larger piece of the blue banner.  I looked over the rubble and realized that there was nothing more that I could do.  I walked away, thanking the Almighty for allowing me to be there to help, and for allowing me to see the things that I saw. The two mile walk back to the apartment was filled with inexpressibly heavy emotion.  I know that I have been, and will be impacted by this event, but I do not understand the reason that I was involved.  If I had not stepped to the inside of that pillar, and paused at that very moment to look into the display window, my head would have been lying beside that young woman's head.  I often pray for more clarity, and to see more of the path before me.  But, I always end that prayer - "But I would rather continue to not know the path before me, than to miss being in your will." 

When I arrived at the apartment, I was met me at the door with a report that a member of the production crew was at the hospital with some minor glass cuts from a bomb."  I showed by bloody hands, "I know about the bomb, I was there."  I went into the bathroom to shower the smell of burnt flesh from my body.  I looked in the mirror.  Not a single hair of my beard was singed.  The other crew member returned to the apartment with a gauze bandage on his forehead, and like me, a bit sober from the experience.  Neither of us knew that the other was there, but we were both on within 20 feet of the bomber at the moment of ignition.  He was inside the shoe store that the bomber had just left, and I crossed her path just four steps before she detonated the bomb.  I took four steps to the left, and paused to look into the shoe store display window at the moment of the explosion.  -

Michael John Rood -Speaker in Prophecies in The Spring and Fall Feasts of the Lord four video set.