Same House, Different Headlines

The war brought out my kids’ personalities in black-on-white
I
t’s interesting to observe how children raised with the same parents, in the same home, can turn out to be so different. These differences were brought to the fore most starkly during last week’s war. (And I’m not talking about the war between the kid who stepped on his brother’s shoe by mistake, and his brother’s retaliatory stretching out of his leg to make him trip davka.)
On Friday night, Day Two of the war with Iran, the flashes of missiles and interceptors streaking across the night sky brought out my children’s personalities in dazzling detail. And I, looking for something to distract me from my anxiety, did something entirely illegal under normal circumstances: I labeled them.
Like this:
The Panicker. “Quick, get away from the window!” he shouts, as we watch the flashes in the sky in wonder. “It’s dangerous! Resisim (shrapnel) can fall! Move away, move away.” In a frenzy, he slams the windows closed and shoves us in the direction of the reinforced room.
The Chiller. “You don’t need to go to the mamad unless there’s a siren. And that loud, grinding sound on the phone is not a siren. It means there’s stuff in the sky heading toward Israel, but they don’t know where, and if it rains down on Yerushalayim, we’ll hear a siren, and only then do we need to go into the mamad.” A few minutes later, when the siren sounds, and the panicker is yelling from the mamad that we all come join him, the chiller is heading toward the kitchen to fill up a plate with cholent, later complaining that the Home Front Command instructed the mamad to be stocked with food and water, and there’s not a speck of food to be found in his inhospitable sisters’ bedroom. I’m actually quite touched when I see how the panicker is almost hyperventilating at the thought of his brother risking his life for some cholent, considering that just the day before he’d threatened him with unmentionable acts of violence over the leg-tripping incident.
The Imaginer. The imaginer gets very triggered by the panicker. Gifted with an overactive imagination, this nine-year-old imagines the booms of intercepted missiles we hear in the distance being Arabs banging at our front door. “I’m scared!” she wails. “Arabs are coming!”
“Oh, no they’re not,” her sister, The Reassurer, assures her, putting her head in her lap and stroking her cheek. “The people sending the rockets are thousands of miles away.”
“But maybe some of them came on the rockets,” wails the imaginer. “Maybe they’re jumping off now and running up the steps and banging on our door and....”
The Composer. The composer combats the imaginer’s imagination by making up songs. The songs always have the magical effect of calming the imaginer. This time, he comes up with the following: Hoshe’a es amecha, u’vareich es nachlasecha, Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran zol shoin mer nisht zein, ur’eim venas’eim ad ha’olam. Everybody sings along with gusto, including the imaginer, while I idly wonder if the UK administration would freeze all my assets — like the wedding gifts still sitting in my mother’s attic — and not allow us into the country if they got wind of this shocking, blanket call for genocide. The composer is also good at filling in the missing words to the songs everyone thinks they know, but don’t really, with his own version, such as, “A Yid never breaks and a Yid never bends, a Yid never gets up in the night, emunah keeps him up for the fight.”
The News Reporter. The news reporter is out of work on Shabbos, but as soon as it’s Motzaei, he dials the news hotline to get a detailed update on everything that’s happened in the past 25 hours. He listens to every interview, every political analysis, every statement of every minister, and then hangs up to give us a comprehensive update, with an impeccable impersonation of Bibi’s deep voice and Trump’s hoarse one. He then calls the hotline again to find out what happened in the past 90 seconds in order to give us a fresh update. He’s not afraid to put boots on the ground, either — if he hears rumors that resisim have fallen in the neighborhood, he’ll walk over to check it out, and come back to assure us that someone had dismantled his oven in an attempt to fix it, given up the effort, and disposed of the parts on the sidewalk next to the garbage cans, igniting the rumors.
The Expert. The expert knows everything, without even having to listen to the news, including how to best get rid of nuclear facilities without the risk of radioactive waste, what isotopes are (as opposed to isotypes), how to build an atom bomb, why Iraq invaded Kuwait during the Gulf War, and what Golda Meir said in her premier Knesset session. The news reporter and the expert can almost come to blows over their difference of opinions (and the word almost can sometimes be dropped from the sentence), which is when the music player comes in.
The Music Player or MP3 Carrier has a playlist for every single occasion. A playlist for every Yom Tov, for a wedding, a bris, a birthday party, and even for war. When things get a little heated, the music player calms things down by playing just the right songs. And as we listen to, and sing, the words of Tehillim, words of chizuk, words of emunah, and “Yachad kulanu yachad,” we know that despite all our many different labels, we’re really one family, one nation, who truly love each other at the core, and that together we will prevail.
(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 950)
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