Let my people sleep

It’s as if God is forcing us together to support each other through the fear, uncertainty and anxiety.

What’s it like living in Israel under Iranian missile fire? It’s exhausting.

Lately, when I’m jolted awake in the middle of the night by the jarring alert from my “Home Front Command” app, I know a siren may follow within minutes. If it does, the blaring wail soon fills the air outside, echoing the same discordant sound from my phone. As I jump out of bed, my first instinct is to make sure everyone in my family gets to the safe room as quickly as possible. We gather on the two beds in our safe room with pillows and blankets, and try to cuddle amid the loud booms of rockets being intercepted and blown up.

Those who don’t have a safe room inside their house must head to the closest bomb shelter in their building or neighborhood. My son’s best friend doesn’t have a safe room in his house, so each time the siren sounds, he and his family must run to the local bomb shelter, a Sephardic synagogue. The benches are arranged there so families can sleep if they are too tired to go back and forth between sirens.

Can you imagine multi-generational sleepy strangers huddling together, in a concrete walled room, scrolling on their phones, schmoozing with neighbors, dealing with over-tired kids, and trying to keep their sanity? It’s the togetherness with family and neighbors that allows us to get through this experience.

The sirens not only sound at night; they can occur any time of day as well. Recently my husband and I were grocery shopping when a siren blared. We left our cart unattended and walked 10 seconds to the nearby preschool bomb shelter. We watched the grocery store manager recite verses of Psalms before he updated us on the missiles all over the country. In that tiny room, I noticed the familiar drill of strangers — random shoppers and grocery store staff — enduring the disruption together.

Can we come out yet? People inside wanted to know. About 10 minutes later we got the all-clear from the app and walked back to our shopping cart as if nothing unusual had happened.

That’s what we do here: We go on living. We must be resilient to maintain our sanity. It’s as if God is forcing us together to support each other through the fear, uncertainty and anxiety.

We understand the current Iranian war is not just about backing our government’s military campaign. It’s also about recognizing that we are like a country of exhausted parents of a newborn baby, knowing that a full night’s sleep probably won’t happen for months, but we nonetheless manage to adapt and (mostly) function.

Sirens now sound every two to four hours, like a wailing baby pulling us from sleep. But unlike a real baby, this cry sends us running to shelters, where we hear missiles intercepted overhead. In a way, it feels like these alarms mark a rebirth — our nation rising again after generations of hardship, from the Exodus to pogroms, the Holocaust, and decades of war and terror.

But what started as a run for cover with each falling rocket has turned into family bonding. We band together like the nuclear family that gathers at every seder to tell our national birth story in dramatic detail.

When we tell the story of Passover, we tell of the sheep’s blood on the doorpost of the Israelite homes so that God would know there were Jews there, and He would “pass over” those houses and not afflict them with the plague of the firstborn. But why couldn’t God already know which houses were Jewish? God is omniscient! The answer is that the Israelites did not paint their doorposts with blood to inform God, but to remind themselves of who they were. In fact, according to the Biblical commentator Rashi, the Israelites painted the inside of their doorposts with blood, not the outside, since it was actually for them alone.

In ancient Egypt, we marked our doorframes with blood to remind us of our Jewish identity. Now, we close the thick door of a bomb shelter, sealing ourselves inside a protective “womb.” As missiles fall, we wait, hoping to be passed over once again.

Unfortunately, we are not always secure; sometimes people don’t make it to the bomb shelter. There have been serious casualties in this war. But by and large, the Iron Dome defense shield has intercepted about 90% of the rockets launched by Iran.

Just as parents of newborns know they eventually will regain their sleep, so too Israelis know that eventually they will reclaim their slumber. But in the meantime, they will gather together in the womb-like bomb shelter to wait out the end of the Plague of Missiles with a yawn and an eventual sigh of relief of Biblical proportion.
And we will finally be able to say: Mazel tov! It’s an ancient nation reborn! PJC

Dena (Stein) Udren lives in Beit El, Israel. She grew up in Point Breeze.