In Israel, we are masters of uncertainty Every generation has faced obliteration

I’ve treated scores of terror victims, traumatised soldiers and bereaved families, since I moved to Jerusalem as a psychologist in 1986. I thought I’d seen it all. Nine friends and neighbours murdered by suicide bombers, drive-by shootings, and stabbings; and a child, the son of a dear friend, bludgeoned to death. But this year has been the most painful in memory.

I don’t say this lightly: Israelis, in their seventies like me, have been through the food rations and the Sinai battles of the Fifties; the Six Day War in the Sixties; the near fatal Yom Kippur War of the Seventies; the Lebanon War and the First Intifada of the Eighties; the bus bombings and the Rabin assassination of the Nineties; the Millennium decade of suicide bombings and the second Lebanon War; and the second decade’s rise of Hamas and Hezbollah with their terrifying rocket barrages. It was more of the same in the third decade until the same morphed into the unimaginable on October 7.

A pogrom on our land, the lone sanctuary for an ancient people. And thus the painful cycle of Jewish history returned and our illusion of security was shattered. But Israel will survive. Not merely because we have a powerful military, a system that rewards innovation and creativity, a highly adaptable citizenry, or a deeply interconnected populace that can act like a dysfunctional family at nine in the morning and a band of brothers by noon. We have something else in addition.

Necessity has taught us to be the masters of uncertainty. Our Jewish faith has inscribed not knowing into our collective unconscious. We’ve made a religion out of it.

Today and tomorrow we’ll recite these well-known, solemn verses from the Rosh Hashanah liturgy:

Who shall live and who shall die,
Who by water and who by fire,
Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued…
And who will maintain the mundane when you don’t know what will be next?  

Yes, who maintains the mundane when you don’t know what will be next? My son and three sons-in-law are in the army, so their wives defend the home front. In a time of insanity, they are the sacred guardians of The Routine. The kids make it to school on time in clean clothes. At the end of the day, the toys and games return to their bins and boxes. Meals materialise at the appropriate times and the homes appear remarkably suburban. When the sirens screech, they hurry the children into the bomb shelters. Bags of treats greet them in their protected rooms.

So we maintain the mundane, but vulnerability is still inevitable. You can compartmentalise fear, just not hermetically. It leaks out when you least expect it. I learned that lesson at a family gathering two weeks ago.

It was a pre-bar mitzvah ceremony for one of our grandsons, a picnic on a grassy knoll facing the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. An hour into a meal filled with joyfulness and love, my stoic daughter-in-law, Tal, reads a speech. She raises her eyes to glance at the 50 or so family members and friends. The children laugh and shout as they run through rows of sprinklers. She refers to the war and the hostages. Her voice remains steady until she speaks about Aaron — her husband, my son, the father of the bar mitzvah boy, the soldier about to return to his unit — and then she bursts into tears.

Tal is the master of self-control — the antithesis of gloom and despair. But it’s moments like this when we all cry, including her husband, the warrior, the man who four months ago spoke before a group of Americans and said, “I hate war but it’s what we must do.” 

It’s what we must do. When you face an enemy who wants to obliterate you, you have a simple choice: either act like prey, frozen in terror, or become a warrior on the battlefield, in the bomb shelter, or in the living room. This is the mentality of a people under siege. For much of the West, war is merely an abstraction. Afghanistan doesn’t border on the United Kingdom. You don’t hear the booming of rockets fired from Gaza or Lebanon or Yemen or Iran. You don’t run to your bomb shelters. You don’t have to live with the certainty of not knowing what’s next.

Each of us is a heartache away from trauma and grief, but life goes on — even when you know someone who’s been murdered, taken hostage, wounded, and fallen in battle; even when you’re terrified that the next knock on the door might be from an IDF officer informing you that your son was killed in battle.

Black humour helps. I recently saw a video clip about a workshop for war widows. Two widows of tank commanders are seen chatting together. One says to the other: “It’s amazing how considerate and kind the unit is to us wives.” The second widow responds: “Hey, if your husband’s going to die in battle, then there’s no better unit in the IDF than the tank corps.”

It reminded me of a Holocaust joke about a prisoner who dies in Auschwitz and goes to heaven and tells God an “Auschwitz joke”. God says to him: “That’s not funny.” The prisoner responds: “Well, I guess you had to be there to understand.” That’s the thing. You’ve got to be there to understand how healing it is to laugh with tears in your eyes.

That’s why you don’t often see long faces, whispered tones, or solemn voices. Three weeks ago, on my son’s day off from the Army, we were in a lively restaurant. The beautiful kids carrying trays of food scurried around with smiles on their faces. Our curly-haired waiter took our order with a grin and a question.

“Where are you?” he asks my son, whose M-16 leans against the wall:

“Jenin,” he answers.

His wife, Tal, instinctively lowers her eyes. It’s a Hamas hotspot like Gaza. She keeps her fear and tears to herself.

“You’re busy?” asks the waiter who a moment earlier had told us he served in Gaza for four months. It’s a question without a question mark. No one has any illusions about what busy means.

“Yes,” my son answers. “A drop in the ocean.”

When you belong to the same club, you speak in shorthand. The web of words that separate us disintegrate when we’re fighting for our survival. We share the same pain.  It’s the pain of knowing you’re one click away from bad news but you click, nevertheless. You promised yourself you wouldn’t, but how can you stick your head in the sand when the bad news, which is yours and everyone else’s, is all around you?

So, you click, and you see a picture of six dead hostages shot multiple times by the same Hamas butchers the students at my Alma Mater, NYU, praise like they’re the Second Coming of Che Guevara. And then, because we Israelis have this deep need for self-flagellation, we turn toward one another with fiery dragon fingers and accuse. The Right curses the Left. The Left rages against the Right. And everyone blames Bibi. After all, we have a prime minister who’s like a beacon running on a 25-watt bulb, but let’s not forget who pulled the trigger.

And we’re left bereft, orphans in need of our Churchill, not a man who serves power and politics above integrity and responsibility. Actually — no, not Churchill. Our greatest leader spoke with a lisp, broke tablets and burned gold. He was a reluctant leader. Principles not power guided him. He faced God and argued on our behalf when God threatened to destroy the Israelites.

Yet here we are, 4,000 years later, acting like ungovernable kids straight out of The Lord of the Flies. The absence of leadership creates desperation and fear. Desperation and fear lead to polarisation and amnesia. Amnesia creates confusion.

One year later, we act like adolescents fighting over an either-or solution. Some of us say: “We can’t let the hostages stop us from destroying Hamas. The road to victory ends at the Philadelphi Corridor with Yahya Sinwar’s head hanging by a noose.” Very few Israelis will celebrate victory knowing that the hostages were murdered. Others fight back: “No, we must do everything possible to get the hostages back even if it means Hamas remains in power.” 

I know that story well. In 1992, my son-in-law’s brother, Elchonon, was stabbed to death close to his home by a Palestinian terrorist. The Israeli government traded Elchonon’s murderer — along with a thousand other Palestinian prisoners, including Sinwar — in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. That kind of deal most Israelis pray will never be repeated.

So, in the meantime, what can we do?

Well, we can send a message to their pagers and walkie talkies. We can watch when they brush their teeth. We can once again stand tall and pray that our government has found its sense of purpose.

But there’s something else we can do. We can make babies. Yes, Israelis, whether secular or religious, continue to make children.

You might ask: “What does that have to do with anything? You’re living in a state of existential dread. 100,000 Hezbollah rockets are like stallions at the starting gate ready for the gun to go off and Iran’s a few grams of uranium from a nuclear weapon.”

Well, it has to do with everything. Because babies mean we believe in a future. And if we believe in a future, we have hope, even when despair and helplessness appear to dominate. Because making babies means we’ll safeguard them like bears protect their cubs. Because it means we will survive and thrive. We have been here for thousands of years facing obliteration in every generation.

Yet here we are, agents of living history creating another iteration of the Jewish story.

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