My son thought he was going to Israel to spend the holidays with his sister and fiancee. Now he’s stationed at the Lebanon-Syria border.
He completed his three years in an elite combat unit about five years ago, went to work in the travel industry, which shut down during Covid.
He came back to work with autistic adults in New York, as a chef in Miami, and as a financial planner in St. Louis, before launching his own business arranging adventure vacations. What are the odds he would end up back in Israel for a week only to be called up for the latest war? Certainly, he wanted nothing more than to get back to his life.
So he asked his commanding officer on the phone: “Do you really need me?”
“Yes. You’re the unit’s only available reservist who can operate the heavy machine gun.”
So off he went to defend the northern border, giving his sister a hug before catching a ride with another soldier. Because that’s what needed to be done.
A few hours later, my wife read this headline in the Times of Israel: IDF, Hezbollah exchange fire on northern border as nation told to gird for emergency.
Some friends ask if we’re frightened for him. Others don’t ask. They have children on the front lines as well.
Of course, we worry. But we lived through the first intifada and the first Gulf War ourselves. Israelis get good at compartmentalization.
The goal of terror is to disrupt our lives, to force us to live in fear waiting for the next attack. Because to live in fear is to concede defeat. And Israelis are too stubborn to do that, especially when we know that our enemies hate us for one reason and one reason alone:
Because we are Jews.
And so, despite the horrors, despite the pain, despite the desperation, despite the decades and centuries of injustice, persecution, pogroms, and attempted genocide, we still sing on our holidays and dance at our weddings and rejoice in bright moments of our lives amidst the darkness.
That’s what it means to be a Jew. And no one can take that away from us.
Rabbi Yonason Goldson is Executive Vice President of the Missouri Chapter of the Coalition for Jewish Values and host of the weekly podcast Grappling with the Gray. His new book is The Spiral of Time: Discovering New Insights and Inspiration in the Jewish Calendar.
