A soft breeze stirred the trees as I stumbled to the bench and sat. I had just left my baby screaming. The daycare instructor told me that a week into September, I had to cut the transitional holding period, hand him over, and leave.
There were clouds in the sky, a soft light bouncing off the building, so different from the long summer’s pitiless glare. Elul in the air.
Ben adam, ma lecha nirdam. In our predominantly Mizrahi area of Jerusalem, Selichot prayers have been running full force for weeks. Notices announcing prayer times are hung everywhere, intermingled with posters of the hostages’ faces. Options for all hours – midnight, dawn, morning, afternoon. Son of man, why do you sleep? This time of year has always felt like a blessing to me – a brief caress before the intensity of the Days of Awe. This year it is crushing. I wish I could sleep.
As I walked the kids to preschool, I passed a crow, dead at the crosswalk. Its legs were curled inwards. Predatory eyes eaten away, leaving small holes.
What happened to it? my son asked.
Who knows? I said.
Crows are really strong. And fast, he said. Who caught it?
I rushed them pass another dead crow, curled up by the garbage.
When alone, I checked the news. “Israel at war: Day 338” read the banner. I had stopped counting once we reached 300. Yet nonetheless we are hurtling towards the first-year anniversary. All holidays leading inexorably to Simchat Torah.
I never could have imagined the names and faces of the missing would still be flickering at the bottom of the screen so many days later. Names and faces that have become achingly familiar. Bring Hersh Home signs still hang from many windows, though he’s already been brought to his ultimate home. Most bus stops display a row of hostage portraits. Over the year, they’ve been annotated in marker: “May G-d avenge his blood,” “He will not come home again,” “Still waiting for you,” and most recently: “Sorry.”
The sides of bus stops are plastered with stickers of smiling soldiers. Beneath their name, the day they were killed, and a clichéd quote (“A smile is our power” “I do it for our country”) – now given terrible gravitas.
When I see a picture of a beautiful young person, I assume they’re dead, my friend tells me.
Yesterday, we stopped by the big public piano in the city center. It was plastered with soldiers’ faces.
I took my kids to fix their bikes. In the corner of the shop was the picture of the young man who used to work there, killed in the beginning of the war.
Everywhere is a memorial.
The Shabbat after Simchat Torah, I lit a ner neshama for the still uncounted dead. How long will you keep lighting it? my husband asked after the shloshim passed. I shrugged. If I lit one candle for every person killed, every single day, it would take more than three years to light for them all. The candle is now a regular item on our weekly shopping list. Will I stop when we reach the yahrzeit?
There is no closure in sight.
Every week, I light two extra candles for the hostages. We’ll light them until they are all back, I told my husband. I never thought I would be lighting them a year later. I imagine Kfir and Ariel Bibas. Their mother’s face as she carried them. How she clutched them like if only she held hard enough, she could keep them safe. They were not released with the other children during that short-lived truce. Deep down, I can’t believe they are still alive. But every Friday, in the liminal moments before sunset, a spark of hope revives.
For us, the lucky ones, with no one called up, and no one in our first circle lost or dead or injured, war has become the new routine.
My now-turned second grader no longer flies into anxious rages. The constant meltdowns and nightmares have petered out. My almost-four-year-old is using the toilet. My children are mostly sleeping in their own beds. The evacuees who joined my daughter’s school “temporarily” just moved up a class. Supporting southern and northern agriculture now happens through a weekly online vegetable order, rather than running to the curb to buy whatever the truck brings. Check for evacuee- or reserves-owned businesses before making a purchase. Try to hire an evacuee for any repairs.
Some things refuse to become routine. Almost a year, and I still jump at every passing ambulance. So do my children. A siren is not an azaka, right Ima? my three-year-old seeks assurance. Once the protective ear-drum of obliviousness bursts, it does not grow back. Sometimes I fantasize about moving to the middle of nowhere, just for silence. At least I no longer grab my kids and run for shelter.
The air is haunted by the distant rumble of warplanes. My husband tells me, These are our planes. It’s good. It means they are doing something. But to me it’s the shriek of unquiet ghosts. My friend says, I listen for the choppers, bringing in the injured. So I listen for both, and smile and chat and pretend that the hairs on my arms aren’t standing on edge. We lucky ones have learned to live a split reality, smiling for our children, trying not to flinch every time we pass a picture of Hersh, trying not to calculate, living? dead? when we pass a hostage poster. Not looking at the news till we are alone. Learning to talk past tears, to talk even when our throats are clogged.
We are the lucky ones, with children who can still be protected. With children who don’t fully understand.
I wish I was a girl, my five-year-old tells me. I’m scared to fight in the army. If I was a girl, I could do something else.
I tell him there are many things he can do in the army. I tell him he can be a doctor like his uncle (don’t mention that the 669 search-and-rescue unit is dangerous; don’t mention the chopper crash). Tell him he can be an engineer. I think of my friends whose sons are in Gaza and flinch.
I never thought I would be grateful that my husband is asthmatic, or that I only had children late in life.
Scared he may be, but my son loves war songs. Bedtime begins with Golani sheli, celebrating the Golani unit where so many people in our neighborhood served. Remembering the Uncle Moishe and Country Yossi of my childhood, I feel alienated and sad. What is this world that my children inhabit?
On our way to kindergarten, my son asks me to play Eyal Golan’s Am Yisrael chai, the unofficial anthem of this war. His high clear voice sings along loudly, “Soon the sun will rise / we will know better days … they will all return home / we will be waiting for them upstairs.” He garbles the words, skipping what he can’t remember. Like the hostage posters, the song has become tattered and annotated in the course of this terrible year. They will not all return; sometimes those who did return found no one waiting for them. I think of Almog Jan’s father, whose heart gave out a few hours before his son’s rescue. My son, at five years of age, can still sing the refrain wholeheartedly: “The nation of Israel lives / if only we don’t forget to always be united.”
But we have forgotten.
In this daily grind of war, my feelings and reactions are always in delay, like an old movie whose sound track is off kilter. While I’m still numb with grief, protesters are spilling to the street, promising to “Burn the country down.” As I watch the protests, someone sends a death threat to the mother of one of the hostages.
Anger is so much easier than grief.
I am out of time, watching the Romans approaching the Temple, while the people of Jerusalem burn the food stores.
Is there any way to escape alive in a coffin? To save what can be saved?
I check the news late at night or after drop off. In between the world changes and changes again. Stick close to a shelter, my husband texts me. Things are heating up in the north. If we lose contact (code for: Hezbollah or Iran shoots precision missiles and knocks out the electricity), we’ll meet up in the house.
I wonder if this time lag is what splits us. Achshav! yell the protesters, Now! Now! Now! Those who react in real time need to do something, anything, so as not to sleep. And those of us who need to process hang back, trying desperately to catch up with our own experience. The world swirls around us, hanging over nothingness.
Today, my baby runs into daycare. He grabs a truck and sits down without crying. I walk out to the cool air, washed clean by the first rain. Sit on the bench. Scatter the sandwich my baby squashed into my hand. Pigeons and blackbirds swoop down to fight over the remnants. Light flickers over blue-black feathers, dances on the path – fleeting, fugitive, heartbreakingly beautiful. G-d, I pray, please. Please let me know what I have, before it is gone.
