Homefront

Since we may not be here by Tuesday, this week's post is going out early. Good luck to us all | Non-Fiction | Scary Soup

Hanzo staring at the Persian rug with suspicion

Last Thursday, at 10 a.m., I found out that I would receive a lifetime achievement award from “ACUM” (The Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers in Israel). “Lifetime achievement award? You’re not even sixty yet!” said my wife, “doesn’t that sound weird to you?” “A little,” I replied, “but maybe we’d better not talk about it too much. They might take the prize away.”

Seventeen hours later, when I woke up to learn that Israel had bombed Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz and Iranian missiles would be launched at Tel Aviv any minute now, the idea of a lifetime achievement award at a young age sounded a little less absurd. And there we were again, Shira and I, sitting in the stairwell outside our apartment (which is considered the safest place in old buildings with no bomb shelters), listening to the explosions and trying to remember better days. Days when, instead of passively awaiting the next blast, we took our own initiative and came up with creative things to bicker about: the correct way to load the dishwasher, how to educate our son, and what temperature to set the A/C to.

At five a.m., I’m sitting on the floor in the stairwell again. This time, the explosion sounds really loud. I’m supposed to send out a new Substack post in a few days. I’ve already written something about the first time Lev used a public bathroom, at the mall, and the philosophical insight that came to him when he flushed the toilet. But now that kind of nostalgia for an innocent and slightly stinky past strikes me as completely irrelevant. One of the missiles lands exactly where Shira and I always stand at the weekly protest against the Gaza war.

These Iranian missiles only serve to remind me that, unlike the unnecessary and brutal war that Netanyahu insists on dragging out in Gaza with no purpose, there are also other wars, against real and powerful enemies that genuinely pose an existential threat to us. And while we huddle near our front door as the building shudders from the shockwaves, all we can do is hope that just as we always managed to win the wars we had to win, we might finally learn how to end the wars that do nothing but inflict more death and suffering.

Translated by Jessica Cohen