Two words.
An answer to a question I asked that I can’t even remember.
Something like: How are you?
It wasn’t the two-word answer, it was who it was coming from.
My grandson. Not because he’s my grandson, but because he’s eight years old.
When I was eight I was worried about whether I could have my own bicycle, and maybe a couple of pet ducks. It’s true, we lived near Lowry Air Force base, but I had no idea what an air force was for. I only knew that some really cool planes flew overhead from time to time. This was when Lowry was still an active base, and, in fact, was still the Air Force Academy.
I also knew that a lot of my classmates at Montclair Elementary School came and went — stayed for a year or two and then were gone — because their parents were in the army. For reasons I still do not understand, the United States felt it necessary to retain hundreds of thousands of soldiers on active duty long after WW II was over. Their parents were “in the army.” I didn’t know what that meant.
It is also true that in school the teachers made us practice ducking under our desks in case there was a nuclear attack. I had no idea what a nuclear attack was, nor did it register even on the teachers, let alone on the second- and third-graders, how absurd it was to think that ducking under the desk could provide protection against a nuclear attack.
Here I am, many decades later, and my grandchildren in Israel are, if not ducking under their desks at school, taking action against attacks — and they, unlike me in my youth, know what an attack is and know why they must take shelter and know what best method for taking shelter is. They know about missiles and bombs and sirens and friends who no longer have a father.
Which brings me back to the two words.
“The milchamah.”
“The war.”
Maybe the question I asked was, “Why are you not in school?”
“The milchamah.”
I recoiled.
Here it is, an eight-year old has to know that there is such a thing as “the milchamah.”
His words meant: there is no school now.
School’s out.
Indefinitely.
I later learn, though I should have been able to figure it out myself, that school is out throughout the whole country of Israel. Too dangerous. An Iranian missile could break through the missile cover anywhere.
Yes, the kids can go batty trying to figure out things to do when there is no school day after day, and the parents can go batty coping with the kids who are going batty, but right there on the surface, not beneath the surface, is the awareness that this whole unnatural scenario is because of those two words: the milchamah.
Try explaining it to an eight-year old. “You see, there are these people who want to end our lives . . .” “You see, a milchamah is something that you sometimes need to do because some people don’t want our country to exist.” If the eight-year child doesn’t get it, you’ve failed, and if the eight-year-old child does get it, you’ve also failed. This is what parents want to teach their kids?
Who are these eight-year-old Israeli kids? It may sound obvious to say that they go to school and learn the ABC’s and play with their friends and like ice cream and want to stay up past bedtime. Obvious, no? Not so obvious, for there are other sets of eight-year-old kids who have a very different life. They learn about “martyrdom” — i.e., premeditated murder — and about parents or uncles or aunts who are saluted for having been “martyrs” – i.e., cold-blooded murderers — and they learn about “evil Zionists” and “evil Americans.” As they grow older they learn that the Holocaust was a hoax and “Israelis” (a curse word) kill Arab babies and must all die.
“The milchamah” has a radically different meaning to different sets of eight-year-old kids.
Yes, I recoiled when I heard his two-world answer. My eight-year-old grandson had to answer, “the milchamah.” He had to have that consciousness, and I was so very, very sad for this; but yes, also, I was proud. He didn’t want “the milchamah.” He didn’t want to know about missiles aimed deliberately to kill eight-year-old kids and other unarmed people. He just wanted to be back in school, studying the ABC’s, relishing the Torah he is studying, having fun.
Innocent fun.
Like I had with my bicycle and pet ducks, once I finally got them.
Not the kind of fun taught in textbooks of hate that too many of the other kids in Israel’s “neighborhood” are taught from — textbooks as absurd, on the scale of truth, as those anti-nuclear bomb ducking drills I went through when I was eight-years old.
© IJN 2026
