Our Creator, just like His chosen people, is still here. That will never change

IT is June, 1967, and family and I are living in Israel during a sabbatical year. We are today in the anxious first moments of what will be the Six Day War, and we hear conflicting reports about how it is going.

In between air-raid alarms, I am sitting in our kitchen with our seven-year-old daughter. She asks me: “Abba, what is a bomb?”

“A bomb is something that can hurt you.”

“I know I know. But what is it?”

“A bomb is something that falls from an airplane and it makes a big noise when it hits the ground, and you better not be around hen one falls. That’s what the shelter is for.”

“Is a bomb like a bullet?”

“Yes, like a bullet, only bigger.”

“Will the Arabs drop a bomb on Israel?”

“I hope not.”

“But Israel is a holy country. You said so. Will G-d let the Arabs hurt a holy country?”

I am caught. Why do the righteous suffer? Theodicy. Iyov. R Akiva. Tzaddik v’ra lo. “I don’t know. I don’t know what G-d will do. But I don’t think G-d will let us get hurt, so don’t you worry.”

“Well, if G-d won’t let us get hurt, why do we need to go into the shelter?”

Checkmate, by a seven-year-old. I mumble something about eating lunch.

*

It is June, 2025, exactly 58 years later to the day. I am in Jerusalem, and so is that former little girl, now a young grandmother. We are talking on the phone, but it is interrupted by the incessant wailing of a missile alarm, apparently from the Houthis who regularly send missiles our way.

My mind races: Fifty-eight years, and everything has changed. Fifty-eight years ago there were no smartphones, no computers, no email, no drones, no guided missiles, no Jerusalem skyscrapers or light rail, no traffic tunnels and bridges and fast thruways, no network of thriving suburbs surrounding Jerusalem, no vibrant economy, powerful armed forces and unmatched air force, no vast network of yeshivos and kollelim, no serious Torah Judaism in Israel. The list is endless.

 Fifty-eight years, and everything has changed.

 Fifty-eight years, and nothing has changed. They still send sophisticated bombs at us, we still hear regular air raid sirens; and hatred of the Jew not only still exists, but is intensified. No longer a hidden phenomenon, now it is blatant and unabashed throughout the world, even on elite university campuses like Oxford and Harvard and Columbia.

Despite the alarms, we continue our phone conversation. The sirens wail, and we should be dashing into the shelter, bur first I ask her a question: Israel is a holy land. Would G-d let the Arabs hurt a holy country? So why do we have to scurry down into the shelter?

She remembers, she chuckles, but does not answer. Because though everything has changed, she also knows that nothing has changed.

And fortunate are we that one truth has not changed. For although Israel has paid a heavy price in blood and tears during these 58 years of wars and missiles and intifadas and terrorism — not very different from the previous four thousand years — we know that even though we cannot enter the Mind of G-d and find answers to our troubling questions, one unalterable truth we do know: Unlike our historic enemies, we — and not they — are still here. Because einei Hashem…“always are the eyes of the Lord upon His land, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year” (Devarim 11:12).

So when her father asks that former little girl the eternal question, and she, like her father, has a mortal mind and can offer no ready answer, they both realize that although much has changed, one truth remains constant, permanent and eternal: Our Creator, just like His chosen people, is still here. That will never change.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1066)