To master our unfamiliar lines in the script that’s unfolding

All you wanted was some predictability and order in your life. Nothing too extreme or regimented: Morning would come, the kids would wake up (or be woken — at first gently, then with exaggerated chirpiness, then with improvised songs featuring crude rhymes such as “get out of bed / like your mother said”) and they’d get dressed, get ready, and go off to school. Because school would be open, the buses would be running on schedule, and all healthy children would spend their day with teachers and friends. Obviously.

Was that really too much to ask?

All you wanted was to be able to make plans in a clearheaded and organized way. For all that you admire flexibility and spontaneity, you’re really not so great with last-minute changes. You prefer to make your plans in advance. Plans for the summer, for example. Or plans for a quick trip abroad to join a family simchah. It’s such a reasonable, normal thing to do: look at a calendar, circle a date, and then book airline tickets or pencil in three days of bein hazmanim for a big family outing.

Is that really too much to ask?

All you wanted were some headlines discussing a different conflict in a different country. Honestly, there are so many countries in the world, and so many nations that don’t get along. Couldn’t those commentators and analysts and politicians find some other state to dissect? Couldn’t the perpetual naysayers find some other government to criticize, some other nation to demonize? You wish that for one entire week your little country, a country that tries so hard to be ethical and moral while not being suicidal — an increasingly dizzying balancing act — would merit, if not some grace and understanding, then at least some ignoring.

That really isn’t too much to ask, is it?

All you wanted was a peaceful Shabbos, the type of Shabbos where no one anxiously scans the sky for trails of smoke before washing for challah. Where squadrons of fighter jets don’t emit a strange buzzing harmony to the zemiros. Where the davening proceeds calmly, without the baal tefillah having to compete with a siren, where v’yasem lecha shalom evokes poetic images of Jews with different types of yarmulkes dancing in a circle, not pleas for murderous mullahs to be thwarted before they can slaughter more innocent Jews.

Is that really too much to ask?

All you wanted was to schmooze with your family back in America about the weather and the kids and the Shabbos meals and the Purim menu without having to screen every sentence, every comment, through the various “will this make them too worried/will I sound too nervous/will they ever relate” filters. You don’t want to feel an invisible wall between you. Because really, you come from the same place, you grew up experiencing the same things, you know each other in a way no one else can. Even after yet another round of another couple hundred missiles, family should still be family.

That really isn’t such a big ask.

All you wanted was to sleep a whole night without your phone squawking urgently about an upcoming attack. An entire night without that keening siren rudely extracting you from the sweet depths of slumber. And really, a night of blissfully unbroken sleep is definitely a minor thing to ask. Right?

All you wanted was the reassurance that you weren’t doing anything foolhardy by raising your children in the place your ancestors had yearned to visit, the destination your great-great-great-grandmother had trekked to as she neared the end of her life, just to be buried in its soil. Those ancestors hadn’t dare dream of actually living in the promised land: disease and drought, poverty and persecution, antagonistic sovereigns with rigid quotas, had forced them to reserve the yearning for their siddurim. But you live in a different reality, a reality where the country of boundless spiritual potential is no longer girded by the material barriers of the past. Or so you thought… until the barrage of raised eyebrows and the comments and the questions: are you sure it’s safe, are you sure your kids will be okay, are you sure this is a stable place to bring up a family. It’s come to the point that you’ve begun asking yourself those questions, too, wondering if this makes sense. You want to tell yourself, with full confidence, that you’re giving your children something they can’t get anywhere else. You want them to feel with certainty — a certainty that stems from your own conviction — that they might be more vulnerable here in some ways, but they also have more protection.

Is that really too much to ask?

You want predictability. But maybe all those layers of routine have swathed the daily miracles with such opaque mundanity that you scarcely see them anymore.

You want to make plans, to control your calendar and your lists and your schedule. But maybe you need a reminder that we’re not in control, we never were — there’s a Scriptwriter positioning us in preordained roles at preordained times, moving figures across a cosmic stage according to His own plans and pace, to reach His desired finale.

You want the headlines to focus on some other conflict in some other country. But maybe you don’t want to face the truth: that the land you live in will always garner more scrutiny and demand more sacrifice than any other. That the nation you belong to will always be held to a different standard, fated to stand alone and apart.

You want a quiet, peaceful Shabbos without rumbling jets or plumes of smoke. But maybe you forgot that Shabbos — if you really tap into it — can provide its own bubble wrap, an impermeable layer encasing you against the tension and trauma of everything happening outside.

You want to connect to your family without those barriers blocking the phone lines. You want to just talk, just share, without filtering every sentence. But maybe it’s your own sense of otherness that you’re projecting into every conversation. Because they have their dilemmas you can’t fathom just as you have these missiles they can’t imagine — until real sharing and real listening break through the barriers.

You want an unbroken night of sleep. Don’t we all. But just as you’ve rubbed the slumber from your eyes when your newborns called for you, maybe your Father Up There is waiting for your calls, too.

You want to know that you aren’t being irresponsible by raising your children in a war zone. That even if they face more threats in this very contested, troubled land, they also merit a protection more direct, more overt, than they’d experience anywhere else. And that’s a hard one, a very hard one — especially when the windows rattle and the impact of an intercepted missile just yards away literally shakes your bones and widens your children’s eyes in shock. Because children are very perceptive; they read their mothers more avidly than they read those piles of books on the couch. It’s only natural that your children sense your doubts and insecurities long before you articulate them. But how can you radiate stability when everything — even the windowpane — is shaking?

You think through the past few cycles of missiles, of muddled plans and unplanned moments and mandatory lessons you never signed up to learn. And you start to realize that despite all those things you want, He wants something else.

So you do your best to let go of that desire for routine, for stability, for normalcy, and instead to master your unfamiliar lines in the script that’s unfolding. You try to focus on the miracles He keeps enacting, to lean into the embrace He’s extending. Hopefully, if you can lean into that embrace, your children will sense it, too. They’ll feel the security of His protection and direction.

Because really, that’s what you aspire to these days. That’s what you ask for, during the rare quiet moments in this no-school-no-schedule-no-plans-random-siren-at-any-moment existence.

And because you’re asking Him, it’s not too much to ask.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1102)