When will this chain of bereavement notices, funeral notices or memorials end?
Another beautiful face. Another photo. Another legend of a hero, soldier and civilian alike, who battled so bravely.
Another story to fill this strange and somber space — of waiting.
I know a thing or two about waiting.
Waiting to meet the right one.
Waiting for motherhood.
Waiting for your future to begin, even as the years and time pass, it only retreats farther and farther away.
The thing is, it’s a kind of waiting for good to come to pass.
It’s kind of waiting for your dreams to materialize.
And it’s a kind of waiting that’s between you and your own heart, your own soul, your own hopes and dreams.
This time, for ten days, I’ve been waiting again.
Only this time, not alone.
Only this time, not for something good.
Together with Am Yisrael, I sit here, waiting for war.
We are waiting for war.
What a strange space to be in, waiting for war.
What terrible words!
How somber a time it is. How eerie. How tense.
What has Israel been up to as we sit here waiting for war?
The border of Gaza holds over 300,000, possibly 400,000 troops by now, who have been called up.
As they gather, we know they haven’t been called up for a picnic.
The roads are filled with convoys of armored trucks, heading south.
Surprisingly yet unsurprisingly, the events that dominate many of the army bases have been life affirming events, such as weddings.
Quick, getting married in a dash before going off to battle.
The videos abound.
The emotions choke you as you watch.
The singing on these bases abound, be it singing for nuptials, be it random songs that strengthen the Jewish spirit.
Of course, the soldiers aren’t just singing at the bases. They are preparing for the chaos and terror of a battlefield. They know they may die.
Are they busy saying “just in case” farewells to loves ones? Closing loose ends with people they couldn’t forgive, but now this may be their last chance? Are they intensifying their training in preparation for battle? Refining their marksmanship? Practicing tying tourniquets?
They are busy sending out videos of themselves singing, boosting our morale as we await war, busy baking for the soldiers and drawing loving cards to boosts their morale.
The emotions choke as you watch these, too.
Now the soldiers are singing. But what will be in a few weeks time?
These young boys, they’ll be altered forever.
Who of them will return and who G-d forbid won’t.
Young Jewish brides are making public statements of optimism, by taking a step toward their future as their grooms are on the brink of war. Or choosing to take the risk of G-d forbid becoming young widows, choosing to forever be linked with their loves, and confront a death cult of atrocities with a counterpoint response that screams “life!” and “living!”
Better to have loved and lost, as the saying goes.
Love is in the air here. Love of Am Yisrael for one another — remarkably so, after an unprecedented period of deep contentiousness. Love of country. Love of bride and groom.
“We know some of us won’t return,” I heard a soldier say. “But we are here to protect our country our people, and we will do it as faithfully as we can, even at the cost of our lives. Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish People Will Live!”
He looks to be but a child to me. Yet, he and the legions of soldiers have surpassed us all in their bravery, depth of understanding, valor.
This strange and somber space of waiting for war has been a space that Am Yisrael has filled with endless inspiration, like only we a nation, as battered as we have been, know — how to rise from the ashes.
Gutted, but we rise.
It’s a haunting place, this waiting for war.
As we go from shattering shiva to shattering shiva, it seems the nation is only gaining more strength, more resolve about what we are fighting for.
The singing on the army bases has only grown deeper, more determined, single-minded, more resolute than ever.
Of course, the soldiers aren’t just singing at the bases.
Those convoys of trucks on the roads, carrying with them the awful, yet also paradoxically potentially lifesaving, instruments of war.
Cannons, weapons, guns.
People will die. Innocents, too. War. The hell of war. It’s a profound kind of sadness that blankets Israel, as we sit and wait for war.
No one knows when it will start. But we know it’s coming.
We know, as scarred as we are now, we will be even more scarred when active defensive war comes.
The streets of Jerusalem have been quite quiet. Other than bare necessities like work or groceries, no one is out and about.
And yet, somehow, everyone is. No one is quite sitting and waiting.
The waiting for war here has been a time saturated with funerals and of strangers coming to pay last respects to the bravely fallen. The waiting for war here has been filled with unimaginable, supremely organized chesed, acts of kindness and generosity, in support of our troops and of each other.
It’s nothing short of a war of survival, and we all feel it in our bones.
This unprovoked pogrom of Oct. 7 has left us all changed. Not only Israel herself, which feels forever altered. But all of us. Individually, too.
The wrath and judgement and superficial categorization of people’s politics and positions, all that has fallen by the wayside, replaced by an instantaneous amalgamation, a stunning unification.
It’s not just that it’s an act of profound good will and solidarity.
Without anyone formally processing it as such, the brutal and devastatingly deadly slam we received has been so profound and drastic a collision that it’s like all we have previously been has shattered to smithereens, reorganizing the world as we know it.
Right, Left, Religious, Secular. The scenes are too numerous to mention, but so many scenes have shocked me and been the photo negative of what I would have expected only a couple of weeks ago.
The world feels malignantly upside-down, overturned. Actual confusion about good versus evil. Because while most things in life are grey and nuanced, some drastic things are, in fact, black and white.
The elegies and requiems of Tisha b’Av’s Kinnot and of the Scroll of Eicha have come to life here, in unspeakable ways we never in our wildest nightmares imagined.
When we read those Kinnot and that Scroll, we thought it was for the far past.
Now we are living these graphic atrocities in our present.
The stories of the freshly buried and not yet buried, the stories of young soldiers who fought like lions and lionesses, alongside ordinary-extraordinary civilians, the stories of those who, uncalled, came to fight of their own volition — sacrificing their lives, the endless stories of these Jewish heroes who are, like Masada and like the Warsaw Ghetto or any other landmark of this scale, now forever part of the annals of Jewish history, whose valor we will speak of for generations to come.
Whose legendary stories have already begun to take flight.
As we wait for war.
Together.
Copyright © 2023 by the Intermountain Jewish News
