During these troubled times here in Israel, when each day brings more tragedy, murders, kidnappings, and bombings, I work on my daughter's 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle to soothe my nerves.

The puzzle is a print of a 19th century painting of two young women in flowing gowns arranging sunflowers by an open, sun-bathed window. I hold a tiny piece in my hand and examine it: two brush strokes of shades of beige beside another color so indistinct there is no name for it. What could this piece possibly be? Part of a gown? The background wall? Maybe the skin of her arm? I haven't a clue.

Then I notice that at the very tip there is a dark brown line. Perhaps it is the windowsill. I move the piece along the windowsill, trying every notch, and suddenly it fits! A sense of satisfaction wells up in me, a joy at things finding their proper place, a mini-mystery solved.

Seeing the piece as part of the rest of the picture, I realize that the beige brushstrokes are her nose. I never could have guessed.

WEIGHING INVITATIONS

The phone rings. It's my friend Hanna's husband, inviting us to a surprise party for Hanna's 50th birthday. Of course, we'd love to come, but they live in Efrat, a 25-minute drive from Jerusalem. An hour ago, the Internet reported "heavy machine gun fire" on the road to Efrat. Do I have to choose between my family's lives and my friend's 50th birthday party?

Hanna's husband senses my fear. "We'll understand if you don't come."

An hour later the army relieves me of the decision by closing the embattled road. I send Hanna an e-mail birthday card and breathe a sigh of relief.

It's not so easy when the children are involved. My 12-year-old daughter asks me if she can attend a classmate's Bat Mitzvah.

"Where is it?" I ask, unsuspectingly.

"Where they live, in Beit El."

"Beit El?" I recoil in horror. "To get to Beit El, you have to go through the Ayosh junction. Arab snipers shoot at the Ayosh junction every day. How can I let you go there?"

Her classmates call my daughter a "scaredy cat," because I won't let her go. But they are of a different breed. One classmate and her family spent Yom Kippur in the Gaza settlement of Nitzarim, which was literally under siege. They traveled there and back in an army helicopter.

These Fridays, at the behest of the police, my daughter's school lets out a half-hour early so the children can get home safely before the Muslims finish their prayers on the Temple Mount, where the sermons exhort them to "slaughter the Jews."

PLUMBER OR TERRORIST?

Last Thursday, with police warning of an imminent terror attack (which actually happened four hours later downtown), I returned home to find an Arab youth digging in the lane at the entrance to our house. He was fumbling with plumbing pipes, although I was unaware of any plumbing problems on our street.

"Who are you?" I demanded in Hebrew. "I'm with the municipality," he answered, without stopping.

"The municipality?" I was suspicious. He was not wearing the municipal blue uniform, and looked too young for an official job.

"Where are your municipal identification papers?"

"I left them in the truck."

Vehicles cannot enter the narrow lanes of the Old City. The truck must have been parked five minutes away, a convenient excuse for not producing his papers.

In a panic, I ran into my apartment, yelled to my husband to watch the suspicious Arab at our entrance, and phoned the police, talking so fast and so breathlessly that I had to repeat myself three times before the police dispatcher understood what I was saying.

Five minutes later, Yitzhi, the chief of our local police station arrived.

By now another, older Arab man was working alongside the youth. Yitzhi spoke to them in Arabic, examined their identity cards, and told me they were bonafide subcontractors working for the municipality. I let out a long sigh.

"Don't hesitate to call us anytime you see something suspicious," Yitzhi said to me. "And don't be afraid."

"Of course, I'm afraid," I shot back at him. "We're all afraid. How can we not be afraid?"

"Are you religious?" Yitzhi asked. I was about to answer flippantly, for my dress identified me as religious, but I sensed he was asking the question on a deeper level.

"Yes," I answered simply, sincerely, more to myself than to him.

He pointed heavenward in a silent gesture, the final, authoritative statement of the Israeli police department on how to deal with the terrorist threat.

CHILDREN'S FEAR

Last Saturday night, my husband and I were on our way to Moshav Meor Modiin, a 40-minute drive from Jerusalem, to pay a condolence call to the family of 25-year-old Aish Kodesh Gilmore, who was gunned down while on guard duty at a social service office. We had left our daughter, usually mature and confident, to baby sit. Almost at our destination, the cellphone rang. It was our daughter.

"What's wrong, honey?" I asked.

"I'm petrified," was her terse answer.

"What are you afraid of?"

"I'm scared of Arabs attacking our house."

What could I say? That her fears were unfounded? That our house was not attacked by Arabs in the riots of 1929, when 17 Jews in the Old City were hacked to death?

I knew what should be my line, "Don't worry. Everything will be fine." But I couldn't say it. I will not make promises I couldn't keep, and I am powerless to guarantee her safety.

For years I had had a grand plan that, if the Arabs, who constitute 80 percent of the Old City population, ever start to riot, I would send my children for safety to my friend Naomi's home. Naomi lives on a peaceful, rural moshav in the middle of the Jezreel Valley, far from the Green Line.

But this past Rosh Hashana, when the Arabs threw stones on elderly Jews praying below at Western Wall, Israeli Arabs in Nazareth, ten minutes up the road from Naomi's moshav, also broke out in violent riots, as did Arabs near Haifa and Tel Aviv. My fantasy of a safe haven for my children had been dashed.

"The front door is double-locked," I said in a reassuring tone. "If you like, you can lock the courtyard gate, too."

"But they could come over the roofs, to the inner courtyard, where the doors don't lock."

She was quoting me. How could I have been so careless as to express my worst nightmare in front of her? Sitting there in the dark car holding my cellphone, I felt a shadow of a memory of Jewish mothers throughout the ages -- during the Holocaust, the pogroms, the Crusades -- powerless to protect their children from those who yell, "Death to the Jews."

"Then say some psalms." I instructed her. "G-d is the only One who can really protect us."

I had to end the conversation. We had arrived at the home of the 25-year-old widow and her baby daughter.

DIVINE JIGSAW PUZZLE

As I sit puzzling over another unrecognizable piece in our 1,000 piece jigsaw, it occurs to me that our situation is part of G-d's multi-billion piece jigsaw puzzle called "Human History."

I look at each particular piece, the deaths and sufferings resulting from terrorist attacks. It is all so terribly puzzling. I cannot possibly understand what I'm looking at, or how it fits into the larger picture. But I know that history is not haphazard. I know that G-d is in charge. Despite what all the politicians may think, it is He who runs the land of Israel, and the whole world.

I am absolutely awed by the central role that the issue of the Temple Mount has taken in the middle of it all, and how this has attracted the attention of the whole world.

G-d's finished picture will not have paint splashed willy-nilly over the canvas . G-d's finished picture of human history will be perfect, precise, and beautiful.

G-d's puzzle is a picture of exile and redemption. And every baffling piece will eventually fit into the puzzle ... perfectly.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

How do we manage to put together a 1,000 piece puzzle? We look at the finished picture on the lid of the box, of course. Without it, the task would be virtually impossible. Human history comes with no such lid, but we do have a general picture of the finished product: the ultimate redemption of all mankind.

The Prophet Isaiah (11:9) describes the Messianic era: "The earth will be full of the knowledge of G-d as the waters cover the seas." The Sages differ on particulars of that time (such as whether the world will continue to function by the laws of nature), but all agree that the Age of Redemption will be characterized by universal G-d-consciousness.

Everyone will realize that G-d, not chance, not economic factors (as Marx claimed), not the political powers-that-be (the false god most of us worship), not military superiority, but G-D is the ultimate causal factor behind everything.

The puzzle pieces now begin to reveal parts of the larger picture. People in Israel keep expecting to be saved by our powerful army, or by the government. But the government is in disarray, and the army is so restrained that it is a de-clawed, de-fanged tiger, left only with its roar. Deep in my soul I begin to understand that perhaps the army's enforced impotence will make us realize that our salvation lies not in the army, but in G-d.

The puzzle piece fits.

© Aish

Sara Levinsky Rigler graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University. For fifteen years she practiced and taught Vedanta philosophy and meditation. She wrote A Bridge of Dreams, and resides in the Old City of Jerusalem with her husband and two children.