Three portraits of galus, three experiences that will evaporate when we emerge into the dawn of redemption

Someday we will all be together,
Someday we’ll be sheltered and warm
Never will we have to express any fear,
Our scars and our wounds
will disappear

(Mordechai Ben David, “Someday We Will All Be Together,” JEP 4, 1979)

When the Geulah comes, all we endured throughout our long years of exile will feel as though

It Were but a Dream

Here, three portraits of galus
Three experiences that will evaporate when we emerge
into the dawn of redemption.

Birth Pangs

Esther Mandel

In the bomb shelter’s stifling heat, amid blood and fear, I saw an inverted reality

N

othing prepared me for giving birth during war.

When I went into labor during the Israel-Iran War, my husband and I packed up, arranged care for our other kids, and drove to Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital. The hospital is a 40-minute drive from Beit Shemesh, through the most breathtakingly beautiful wooded mountains of Nes Harim. In war parlance, it’s a “shetach patuach,” land that hasn’t been built up, which means that if a missile was heading into the hills, the army wouldn’t try to intercept it.

We drove in silence along the winding dark mountain roads, switching from radio station to radio station to avoid any news updates, while I labored in the car, and we tried to stay calm.

We arrived safely, and initially everything proceeded as usual. Soon I was ready for delivery, prepped in a hospital gown, and installed in a delivery room.

Then the first hatra’ah, the incoming-missile warning from the Home Front Command, sounded from our phones and throughout the hospital loudspeakers.

Two orderlies burst into the room, and supported from both sides by nurses and doctors, I was brought out into the protected hallway.

The hallway was crammed with laboring women in hospital beds and their spouses. There was no privacy, nowhere to look, nowhere to put ourselves. Two midwives urgently tried to maneuver a bed through the crowded hallway into an operating room, an almost impossible task.

Eventually, we returned to the delivery room, but this rushing in and out to the hallway happened a few more times.

Then my labor stopped progressing, the baby’s heart rate dropped, and I was prepped for emergency surgery. (Later, I’d meet two other women who needed surgical intervention for the same reason. Iran, we don’t forgive you!)

It felt as though I was upside down at the bottom of a goldfish bowl, reality stretching itself into a concavity, so that when I looked it in the eye, all I saw was distorted glass staring back at me. I heard all the activity around me — the booms, the phones chirping their warnings from the Home Front Command, the doctors and midwives shouting instructions — through a morass of flickering fluorescent lights. The only real things were the things so small no one except me noticed them.