Our daughter gave birth twelve minutes into last Monday, after a long, exhausting, and traumatic labor, which nearly ended in a caesarian. In earlier days of medicine, she would almost certainly have died.
We live in a very narrow zone: the thinness of the earth's crust, the thinness of the atmosphere, the small range of temperatures at which the earth can sustain the forms of life we are familiar with, and the short length of our lives. On a larger scale, let's not forget the short time that the human species has been present on the face of the earth.
Today I got a traffic ticket for not stopping for a pedestrian in a crosswalk. I was in the right lane of a four-lane road in downtown Jerusalem, and the pedestrian was hidden from view by the car in the left lane. I didn't dispute with the policeman who gave me the ticket. I even told him I was glad they were enforcing the crosswalk law. Compared to the disaster of injuring a pedestrian, the misfortune of getting a traffic ticket is rather minor.
Only a fraction of a second saved the pedestrian from being hit by my car. Sometimes we are on the wrong side of that fraction of a second, and we are run over, or we run someone over.
We live in the illusion of stability, that what was is what will be, but life is unstable, and we have no idea what will be.
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