During a recent trip to Israel, Lisa Schor Babin found herself seeking safety in a bomb shelter. The experience gave her a rapid and powerful lesson in radical empathy, and put the work done by compliance and ethics officers in a new context.
A family trip to Israel to honor the memory of my father-in-law turned into a war story. News of people displaced from their homes, followed by protests and riots, police blockades, and then missiles fired towards Jerusalem came on the day of the gravesite service. We woke the next morning to warnings of unprecedented civil unrest in neighboring towns. We were able to go on with our day, but on the drive back to our home base, we passed police cars blocking off-ramps and mushrooms of smoke on the horizon. That night, with sirens blaring around us, we spent the night in and out of the bomb shelter.
The next morning, we packed our bags, headed north, and checked into a hotel just south of the Lebanese border. There we felt surprisingly safe, out of the range of missiles, and spent the next few days enjoying nature hikes, blue skies and good food. Then, missiles were fired from Lebanon, so we headed back down to stay with a friend in a central town close to the West Bank. We spent three quiet nights with no middle-of-the-night sprints to the…
