Today was a quiet day in Jerusalem. No sirens. But many sirens in the South and all over Israel. Many rockets falling all over Israel. Many have stopped watching the news. It doesn’t help us. We are slowly pulling ourselves together. I have decided I have to pull myself together.
I am a writer. More than that, I am a mother of four boys. My oldest son is on active duty. I cried as he left, driven by my husband to base on the Saturday morning of sirens, of call-ups, of the news that the South was under attack. Our Shabbat observance broken. So much broken. We had no idea that broken was not the right word, but rather smashed, shattered, devastated, massacred.
As a mother, I have to bring our spirit back, however that may look. Ideas come. I send out a WhatsApp message encouraging parents to make colorful signs with their kids of support for the soldiers, of belief in the people of Israel, that we will get through this. Colorful, bright signs are already hanging from the windows of houses, on gates and at local traffic circles.
I openly invite, with my art therapist friend, parents and children to bring old sheets and paints to create more signs of hope and strength in my garden. Many come. The children take their job seriously. They have something important to say. We are full of the light of children’s smiles, the sound of their chatter, the sight of their colorful pictures, brave dabs in the darkness that is hovering around us.
There is a saying now on the streets in Israel, “Once we lived in a world that was a world, and not Gehinnom.”
One woman with four small boys had a brother-in-law murdered in the South, unspeakably. She wept over her son’s small head as she helped him paint a blue Star of David. Her mother-in-law had a nervous breakdown. There is no shortage of tragic stories. I make her tea. I feed her children grapes, hand them pomegranates from our tree. There is so little I can do.
No one is making plans. Everything is hour by hour, day by day. Just like I counseled my son on how to get through his very difficult army training. Now his training is halted. He is ready to fight, fully trained or not. He is not complaining even though his fantasy is to live in England and watch Manchester United. I didn’t realize that in training my son as a soldier I was training myself.
I tell the parents in my garden that we will get through this war hour by hour, day by day. We will do it for our children. We will support those who have lost everything. The parents breathe fresh air, feel community, feel normal, like maybe we can forget for a moment what has happened, what is happening. We are very good at deluding ourselves as Jews. I can’t help thinking – what happens if the Iron Dome malfunctions? The Iron Dome that has minimized the hell-bent horrific intentions of 6,000 rockets launched from Gaza in the last week.
Yesterday I was told we are privileged living in Jerusalem as opposed to the South. I don’t like the word “privilege.” Like we don’t deserve to live, breathe, sit in a garden with our children making signs to raise the spirit of our nation fighting for our lives. That the fate of Jews is to be massacred, and any life or living above that is a privilege. The person who said this was not Jewish. I tried to explain to her the danger of her statement. How my friend, a mother of five, told me she had a dream a month ago about terrorists attacking her house, and her huddling with her small son in a cupboard. My friend woke up and comforted herself by saying, “It could never happen.”
It has happened.
In every generation
there will be those who rise up
to do harm to the people of Israel
were it not for the protecting presence of G-d.
My Iraqi Jewish grandfather used to sing these words from the Haggadah in Judeo-Arabic every Passover. All our Jewish memories are rising up from the graves of the Holocaust, from the graves of the Farhud pogrom of 1941. Our grandparents’ memories live in us.
Even though my grandparents were expelled from Iraq in 1951, along with 120,000 Iraqi Jews, they maintained their optimism. Even though they were discriminated against in Israel as Arabic Jews, they maintained their Zionism. I draw on my grandparents’ strength to understand what is happening. To get through today. I know it is my duty to pass on this strength to my children whose lives have been dramatically disrupted.
War is a new education.
My fifteen-year-old son before October 7 was not going to return to school after Sukkot. He has ADHD and learning challenges. He was going late to school and cutting classes. He was always on his phone. Now everything has changed. He’s still always on his phone. He has become our main source of Hebrew information and news. Now he is waking up early and volunteering to take supplies to the South, getting jobs helping to clear security shelters, and he has also adopted a young boy with special needs. All in a week.
Over Shabbat he said to us, “You know, it doesn’t matter how you look. It doesn’t matter if you’re fat or thin, or how your hair is. What matters is what you do.” I asked him, “What makes you say that?” He replied, “When you read about the dead from the South it doesn’t say how they looked but what they did in this world, if they were married, how many kids they had.”
Our children have faced their first pogrom. They are growing Jewish memory. They speak Jewish wisdom.
Mourning trucks drive through the streets of Jerusalem piled with white chairs and folding tables for shiva houses. Forty percent of IDF casualties are from Jerusalem and the wider Jerusalem areas. Our cemeteries are filling up and our children are watching whilst their teachers have gone to the frontlines, and they learn the news of camp counselors and youth group leaders who have fallen. They see us mothers busy preparing meals for houses who have had wives, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, sons, daughters, babies kidnapped, missing, murdered.
They are scared. They are dealing with emotions adults struggle to deal with. “Breathe,” I say to my youngest son. “Breathe and know we have each other.” I keep my boys as busy as I am, collecting supplies for survivors of the South, for soldiers; opening our garden to children and parents; making meals for mourning houses. No one in Israel is still. I cannot respond fast enough for the WhatsApp group volunteer opportunities – they are all taken. Our children are watching us come together. Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Left, Right, Charedim, Arab Christian and Muslim, Bedouins, Druze, immigrants – all the people in Israel who do not want Hamas terrorism to win. Who do not want massacres in their homes and communities. And our children see – we are stronger together.
