WHAT IS THE SENSE? INDEED, WHAT IS THE SENSE?

You may not have seen the story last week, and if you didn’t, I certainly don’t blame you. It got short shrift, no more than a passing mention if at all, in the national and local media. This, despite the extraordinary tragedy, the bloody death of an American citizen and his daughter, on the eve of her wedding.

I got the news via a blurb in the New York Times, confirmed it via a lengthier story in the Jerusalem Post, and have spent my days under a shroud of helplessness and depression ever since. I requested from the local news editor and a reporter that they tell the heart-rending story, perhaps even through my eyes as a grieving friend, but I got neither yes nor no, just silence on the other end. Something, I had hoped, to put a human face on far-away terror, a story with which any loving parents and decent being could identify.

David Applebaum was a classmate from yeshiva days. We were not the closest of friends, but we did pal around a bit, share an occasional lighthearted moment, maybe because I was the only one nearby who had a car. Transportation from Skokie to Rogers Park was a highly valued commodity.

But, I knew David Applebaum. He was the only kid in seminary at that time that still wore old-world payes, the traditional unshorn forelocks. He prayed with particular fervor. He observed the commandments meticulously. He excelled in his studies.

We have come to expect that young people of such deportment almost invariably suffer from terminal religiosity and seriousness. David, from all appearances, transcended the stereotype. A dead-on sense of humor. A healthy dose of sarcasm. An ingratiating streak of goofiness. A demeanor that bespoke his reluctance to take himself and the yeshiva milieu, which he loved, too seriously.

We all knew that David would achieve. And he did. After his rabbinic ordination, he went off to med school, where again he excelled, and for reasons yet looming serendipitously on the horizon, he specialized, then lectured prolifically, in emergency medicine. Then he resettled in Israel and started a family.

I cannot tell you why, but even early on, I sensed that David had an entrepreneurial inclination. At best, this seemed an oxymoron when played off against his altruism. One could only assume that his destiny was to an altruistic deployment of his sense of promotion. (Who else but David, I thought, would imagine treating a group of visitors to the Jerusalem emergency center he founded with a Texas-style barbecue?)

And, so it was. He was the invariable first-on-scene responder to every attack and bombing, even performing battlefield surgery under fire. He directed emergency services at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital. He founded a network of not-for-profit emergency clinics. To visit the clinics’ website, www.terem.com, is to see the amalgam of entrepreneurial spirit and idealism made manifest.

Then, on the eve of his daughter’s wedding, he and his daughter became the victims. A late-night stroll, a snack in a trendy Jerusalem café, chit-chat about the wedding . . . a suicide bombing. And, no time for a surrogate David Applebaum to save the lives of David and Nava Applebaum. Funerals instead of a wedding.

No, I had not kept in touch with David. In some odd way, that made watching his accomplishments from afar seem even sweeter, and his brutal death even more traumatic. Oddly, too, my impulse is not the desire to kill ten Palestinians to avenge David’s death. It is not to debate the philosophical or political implications of “moral equivalency,” or the absence thereof. It is to grieve the lost of a decent, giving, dare I say saintly, man, the loss of a life-giver, not a life-taker, and his innocent daughter-bride, whose dedicated work was to treat children suffering from cancer. It is to cry bitter tears over the senselessness of violent, hateful death, any violent, hateful death whatsoever.

It is to scream a helpless, yet-to-be-hearkened-to scream at anyone, everyone, who yet believes that violence paves the way to humanity’s highest destiny, not to the depths of hell. It is to scream, “Can you not see – whomever you are – that you are killing doctors and brides and babies along with your combatants and terrorists?”

Indeed, can we not see? Indeed, what is the sense? What is the sense?