War with Iran

Let’s start with agreement. We all hope and pray that all Israelis stay safe and sane during this terrifying time.

Israelis have been living with a certain constant background level of not-quite-rightness since October 7, 2023. That’s two and a half years of being resilient, of feeling joy and eating well and listening to good music and reading good books and watching good plays and movies, of playing with their kids and helping those kids recalibrate back to normal. But it still hasn’t been exactly right.

I’ve been thinking about how Israel’s enemies have hit on the two holidays when joy is not only suggested but prescribed. October 7 happened on Simchat Torah, the day when we rejoice in the giving of the Torah. It usually involves singing and dancing, a joyous end to the intensity of the High Holy Days and an invigorated return to regular life.

It’s been different since 2023. Resilience is a wonderful state of mind, but it has to be tied to memory, because we as people and we as a people remember.

And now this war has gotten Purim. It’s a complicated holiday anyway — all about masking and unmasking, self-preservation but also the massive slaughter of our enemies. Most of us have tended not to focus on that bloody part of the story, but now we have to.

Everything has been unsettled. The war in Gaza has ended, but it wasn’t clear for how long. The rifts inside Israel have been growing. And the outside world has become even more threatening.

So now it’s happened. Israel and the United States struck Iran, a nation ruled by ideologically driven thugs whose solution to unrest has been murder. Israel can never be safe as long as the mullahs whose prime motivation seems to be Jew-hatred are in control. (For that matter, even regular Iranians can’t be safe until the mullahs are gone.)

So once again Israelis have had to rush to the shelters and figure out how to explain it to their children. They hope — and many believe, with certainty — that this war will end well for them. We hope and pray that they are right.

Feelings about the war itself range from the certainty that it is necessary, wise, and thoughtfully conducted to the equal but opposing certainty that it is foolish, ill-conceived, and poorly planned. We have no choice but to wait to see how it plays out.

We must realize, though, that polling shows that it is unpopular here in the United States. So, unfortunately and unfairly but increasingly, is Israel. As Americans, we pray that our servicemembers can come home quickly and safely. As Jews, we pray that every IDF member similarly returns home safely and soon, and that Israelis are safe at home. As American Jews, we pray that the war not provoke any more antisemitism than already is running rampant in some parts of the country, and that it not give rise to any more anti-Israel feeling than we already face.

Reality can be unsparing. Let us hope and pray that it need not
be.

—JP