The Red Alert blares in the middle of the night. Like millions of other Israelis, I’m jolted out of a sound sleep and, adrenaline releasing quickly into my bloodstream, I jump into action.
The only difference is that when the alarm rings on my cell phone, unlike millions of other Israelis, I am physically 5,523 miles—make that 8,888 kilometers—away from that missile entering Israel airspace.
Because I am in bed at my daughter’s home in a leafy suburb in Massachusetts.
I was visiting my kids and grandkids, as I do at certain times throughout the year, when on June 13, Israel launched preemptive strikes against its military and nuclear sites in Iran, long the marker of terrorism and hegemonic threats in the Middle East. I am one of the 150,000 or so Israelis whose flights were grounded since Iran began lobbing missiles and drones at Israel’s cities and towns in response, something that residents of the Jewish state existentially feared for decades.
As the much-circulated cartoon of Moses declaring “Let My People Sleep” from the mountaintop, I figured that if all the other Israelis can’t get a full night’s sleep, well neither will I. So, when it’s midnight East Coast time and the crack of dawn in Israel, and the alarm goes off on my phone, then I’ve been all about solidarity in wakefulness.
I do this because, if I had been home in Israel these past 10 days, I would have been in and out of our apartment house’s basement shelter with my neighbors talking all at once in Hebrew, Russian, Amharic, and, of course, English. But here, once I’ve checked the missile map and calmed down, I can simply turn over and go back to sleep.
All the while, I am waiting for my turn for a seat on a “repatriation” flight rescuing Israelis stranded in foreign countries, with first priority given, in typical Israeli fashion, to those with humanitarian needs—be they medical, physical or families with small children waiting back home for a parent out of the country on business.
The entire episode of U.S. President Donald Trump ordering up those giant bat-like bombers to take down Iran’s nuclear facilities strikes me as somehow biblical. Not unlike Esther in ancient Persia, Trump had to risk alienating not a temperamental royal husband known to execute wives at the slightest provocation, but a rising tide of isolationists and an assortment of political enemies on both sides of the aisle.
“Who knows but that you were put in this position just for this moment,” Uncle Mordechai famously told his frightened niece. And who knows, too, if the same could be said for the president who charged ahead with a singular partnership with Israel’s prime minister to derail Iran’s race to the bomb.
Indeed, who knows if this was why this president was swept back into office by the American voters? You also can’t help but wonder what the opposition would have done—or more likely would not have done—had they been victorious last November.
The entire last few days have made me proud to belong to both these countries. At a time when we can see so many revealed miracles—the picture of a crib blown to matchsticks just moments after the small inhabitant had been taken into her parents’ bed, a friend’s Tel Aviv apartment destroyed just hours after he’d left to spend Shabbat with his kids—it is a severely crippled Iran, apparently agreeing to call a halt to its attacks on the Jewish state, that seems the biggest right now.
So I am going to sit back and let the Boss decide when to take me home to pray for Israel once again at close range. It is a time when the country must begin to slowly rebuild its damaged parts and regain its confidence in the future, a time when its citizens need to learn to sleep comfortably through the night once more.
For now, I’m also going to try to catch up on my sleep over here and eventually dream of a day when the lion of Judah will once again enjoy the peace won through equal parts strength, courage and gratitude.
I do this so that, in the years to come, my grandchildren and the other Israeli children, if they happen to hear that “Wanh, Wanh” sound of the Red Alert siren in the night, they’ll be able to just turn over and go back to sleep. Because they will know that there is nothing to fear. They’re being kept safe by friends—human and Divine alike—in high places.