In August of 1977, at the beginning of my junior year in college, I flew to Israel to begin a year of study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It was an extremely valuable experience, strengthening my connection to Israel and enriching my Jewish life in ways too numerous to count.

Just over twenty-five years later, my eighteen-year-old son Noah will fly to Israel shortly to begin a year of study at Yeshivat Or David in Jerusalem, for what I am sure will also be an extremely valuable experience. He is going to a different kind of program than I went to, and at a different stage of his post-high school career. Far more important, though, he is going to a different Israel.

If I still harbored any illusions that there was a significant similarity between the Israel I experienced twenty-five years ago and the Israel Noah will experienced this year, that illusion was shattered -- along with many lives and limbs -- when a bomb went off last week in a cafeteria on the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus.

After nearly two years of relentless Palestinian terrorism, most of us have become numb. Painful as each new incident may be, they no longer affect us the way they once did. For the most part, Palestinian butchery has lost is power to shock.

But for me at least, the Hebrew University bomb was different. Maybe it's because five of the seven fatalities were American citizens, a couple of them students who but for a few years age difference could easily have been my son. Maybe it's because, as Noah's flight gets closer, the incessant brutality of Palestinian terrorism and the inability of the Israel Defense Forces to bring it under control begin to take on a more personal coloration. Or maybe it's because, for most of the 1977-78 academic year, the Mount Scopus campus whose peace was so cruelly shattered last week was my home.

Back then, the campus on Mount Scopus, which before 1967 had been under Israeli control but in an area surrounded entirely by Jordanian-controlled territory, was still being built. The main campus of the university was in Givat Ram, in the heart of West Jerusalem. The one-year program students stayed on Givat Ram for our summer ulpan, then moved up to Mount Scopus, where the School for Overseas Students was located, for the rest of the year. A few other elements of the university had moved up to Mount Scopus, but most were still on Givat Ram, though many were slated to move up when their new facilities were finished.

A couple of new Jewish neighborhoods had been built in East Jerusalem adjoining Mount Scopus, but most of the area between the campus and the western part of the city consisted of Arab neighborhoods. There were times that we traversed some of those neighborhoods, and it never occurred to us to be afraid. Terrorism was not unknown, of course -- I once heard and felt a bomb go off on the Givat Ram campus while I was studying at the National Library there -- but it was a fairly rare, unpleasant punctuation to our otherwise serene lives.

The Israel where my son will spend this year is a very different place. It's not just the increased frequency of terrorism, nor its enhanced brutality, though both are clearly of a different order of magnitude than they were in 1977. It's also the unabashed pleasure that so many Palestinian Arabs take in the deaths of Jews. The giddy celebration of the Mount Scopus bombing that took place in Gaza last week was astounding even to those of us who thought we were so cynical that nothing could still shock us. The celebrants were not rejoicing in a victory that helped their cause, nor in an act of revenge against an individual who had harmed them. They were, plain and simply, rejoicing in the fact that more Jews had been killed and wounded.

I know some Jews who believe that all Arabs should be expelled from the Land of Israel. I know many Jews who believe that Israel needs to be less scrupulous in avoiding civilian casualties if it is ever to stop the current Arab reign of terror. But I don't know a single Jew who would rejoice in the murder of innocent Arabs. I cannot conceive of a group of Jews who would spontaneously celebrate the spilling of Arab blood. The Western media may equivocate, but morally discerning human beings cannot help but recognize the simple truth: there is no moral equivalence between Arab terrorism and Israeli response, between those for whom killing may be a painful necessity and those for whom it is a cause for celebration.

It is one thing, though, to be certain of the rightness of a cause and another to risk that which is most precious to you in the furtherance of that cause. As Noah's departure gets closer and the prospects of an end to the violence seem ever more distant, I cannot help but feel some ambivalence at the risk that he is taking by spending the year in Jerusalem during these troubled times. Yes, the risk is fairly small, since he will not be on a major campus with lots of Israeli students but in a small yeshiva that serves only foreigners. Yes, his risk is only a small fraction of that faced by Israelis his age, who as soldiers are on the front lines of the battle against Arab terror. And yes, as we learned painfully on September 11, complete safety is a mirage no matter where you live.

But still there is no getting around the fact that he will be at somewhat greater risk in Jerusalem next year than he would be on an American campus. There is no denying the fact that I will live next year, as one friend whose son is also going put it, with a hole in my stomach. There is no avoiding the reality that my heart will stop every time an incident occurs, until I know that my son is safe.

So why am I letting him go? Because I can't say no. Because Israel is no less his homeland than it is that of the Israeli eighteen-year-olds who will be at far greater risk than he will be next year. Because Israelis need to know that Diaspora Jews will not abandon them in their battle against those who dance in the streets to celebrate the spilling of Jewish blood -- and whose celebration, it's worth noting, does not seem to have been diminished by the fact that some of the Jewish blood spilled did not belong to Israeli citizens.

And, last but not least, I am letting him go because he wants to spend the year learning in a yeshiva in Israel, and because I have every reason to believe that, if God keeps him safe, this year will enrich his Jewish life as much as my year at Hebrew University enriched mine.

This column also appeared in The Jewish Week.