The riddle of identity in wartime

Nothing stengthens your sense of identity like a barrage of ballistic missiles

Dear language-speaking friends,

I stole the headline for this post from this essay I wrote two years ago for the Boston Globe (the essay is mine but I didn’t come up with the headline.) That piece is about the war in Ukraine, its main idea being that nothing strengthens your sense of identity like conflict.

I could have written something like this about Israel now. I used to say that I like living in Israel because it’s the only place in the world where I don’t have to feel so Jewish all the time. That is, because here Jewish holidays are state holidays, and so many people share your background, you can relax your grip on your Jewish identity and focus on something else instead.

That has stopped being true in the past year. I feel both very Israeli and very Jewish, and it doesn’t seem possible to juxtapose the two anymore.

It feels especially true today because today of course is the first anniversary of October 7th, the deadliest attack on my people since the Holocaust.

And it felt true last Tuesday around 7 pm when I was lying face down on the ground in the open air under a barrage of ballistic missiles from Iran. It was a surreal experience, to put it mildly.

We were driving back home from IKEA: my sister, my mom, Maya, and I. I got a new mattress for Maya, and we got a sofa for Nellie, my mom’s new live-in carer who just arrived from Moldova.

In the car, on our way back, my phone started omitting a worried sound that turned out to be the Home Front Command app notifying us of a rocket and missile fire in our area. Maya screamed and spilled her coke onto the back seat.

We stopped and got out of the car. You’re supposed to lie face down on the ground far enough from the car in case it explodes. Maya and I climbed over the metal barrier and ran a few meters down the rocky slope. I crouched on my knees and elbows, covering her with my body and thinking, stupidly, this is very uncomfortable... and I have a mattress inside the car…

My mom has mobility issues so she couldn't lie down, climb over the barrier, or even crouch properly... so she and my sister just kinda stood there, dangerously close to the car.

We stayed like this for the required 10 minutes, after which we got back into the car, and got ready to go. Then another siren sounded.

This time I ran further down and we lay on the dry grass. A good idea because we would stay like this for the next 50 minutes…siren after siren after siren... loud booms and deadly fireworks right above our heads... The longest 50 minutes of my life.

Some cars kept zooming by, but many people stopped, like us, and were lying down or crouching on the ground, some pointing at the skies and screaming. A woman a few meters away from us was hugging a small child. A guy next to us got up and was talking on the phone and pointing at the sky - because it looked like freaking Star Wars there — and somebody yelled at him Lishkav!!! (“Down!”) and that was almost scarier than the booms and the flying fiery-tailed things in the sky and those were scary.

It's hard to explain what goes on in your system when you're lying outside under the biggest ballistic missile attack in history. For one, in addition to feeling helpless and terrified, you get weirdly, supernaturally calm. Probably because your brain is pumped with dopamine and adrenaline to help you make spur-of-the-moment life-saving decisions if needed.

But since you don’t have to make any decisions you’re also free to think slow thoughts like:

I wish I left my kid at home

I wish there were a way to teleport her home right now

I wonder how long we’re gonna stay like this… An hour? Two hours? The whole night?

If something falls on us, I hope it's instantaneous and we won't feel anything…

Now I will most certainly be late with that client project. And I'm not even worried about that.

If we survive this, I promise not to worry about things like having eaten too many cookies ever again.

I thought of the people at the Nova rave, a year ago, who were lying like this in the bushes, some 50 km south of where we were, siren after siren after siren, when terrorists jumped out from those bushes and started shooting them.

I also remembered an Israeli friend telling me how one time when she was little and they visited family in Argentina, there was an ambulance siren and her Israeli parents instinctively pushed her and her brother down onto the ground and lay on top of them.

I wondered if I’d develop (have already developed?) this sort of reflex.

Finally, after an eternity and a half, the sirens and the booms stopped and we got back into the car and started driving. That is, my sister was driving and I was hypnotizing Google Maps into please getting us home faster… 19 minutes to home… 13 minutes… 8 minutes…. 2 hours 17 minutes from home (GPS disruptions… we were somewhere in Jordan now…).

We got home eventually. We are all traumatized but we’re alright, physically, and that’s not a small thing these days.

A friend said recently that we’re living through something epic, and when things are happening on such a huge scale, individuals, sadly, don’t matter. I know that but it’s hard to wrap your mind around it. I want to matter.

That friend also just finished a special course that taught volunteers how to get people out of collapsed buildings.

A couple of worried friends abroad said, just like they did right after October 7th "I wish you came here and stayed with us.”

I love these people but I don't want to go anywhere. What’s the point? I could leave, but for how long? This is not gonna end any time soon, and home is here, not elsewhere.

Also, it seems I’ve come full circle and have the same feeling I had about a year ago, just before I started this newsletter. Right now I don’t see a point of getting out of my Jewish and Israeli shell and reaching out to the world, be it through language learning or anything else. You don’t have the luxury of wanting to reach out to the world when your main worry is whether the next missile is going to fall on you. And when you know that even if it does, you’d still be one of the lucky ones, because no matter what, nothing is worse than October 7th, 2023.

Somewhere in Tel Aviv

If you’re a writer on Substack, consider recommending Friends with Words to your readers (go to Dashboard>Settings>Publication details>Recommend other publications on Substack). I originally set out to learn 12 languages in 12 months, but now I’m not so sure anymore what I’m doing here. Let’s find out together.