A Magna-Tile bomb shelter — war through a child’s eyes
“Are they green?”
I didn’t really understand what my four and a half year old was asking me, but I knew it was about the people who had fired missiles at us, sending us down into our basement bomb shelter Tuesday night.
“No, they’re not green, although some of them have a green flag,” I clumsily answered. “They look like us.”
”If they look like us, why don’t they like us?”
“They don’t think we should live here,” I tried to explain. Then, thinking I just could not leave it at that, I added after a pause, “but we’re not leaving.”
“Why don’t they think we should live here?” he responded.
I struggled to answer these and his many other questions. I could have used the simplest and clearest explanation: They’re evil people who do evil things; they like to hurt good people like us.
A part of me believes that. Certainly, I believe the murderers and kidnappers of October 7, 2024, were evil people doing evil things. As much as it breaks my heart to see his innocence broken, I want my son to know that there are evil people and forces in the world, and that they are worth fighting. In a world without superheroes who will save the day for us — he loves Spider-Man and I wonder whether his ‘green’ question related to Spider-Man’s nemesis, the Green Goblin — we can grow up to act like superheroes ourselves and fight for peace and justice.
But I know that the conflict we are living through here in Israel today is a complex one, with complex causes, and with — may it be the Blessed Holy One’s will — complex solutions about how we will share this land in peace.
I used to see it in a more black-and-white way. I had very little experience with Arab people before I moved to Jerusalem from the States 10 years ago, and every Arab person I saw scared me a little bit. But — especially after receiving care from Arab doctors and nurses who literally saved my life while I was in the hospital — I’ve come to have a more complex picture. I know that, even if there are some Arabs who want to kill me, that these people — the doctors, the nurses, the municipal workers, the young pizza shop guys across the street who I watch break their Ramadan fast together outside during that holy month — have nothing to do with all that.
The morning after the attack, I was sitting exhausted in my kitchen, doing a medical treatment and deeply lost in thought, the world a blur because my glasses were off. Suddenly, I heard a voice. I looked up and saw that we had, unusually, left our apartment door open. Putting on my glasses, I realized it was the young man who cleans our building’s stairs. He was so friendly and upbeat. It was like an angel had appeared in my doorway, a concrete manifestation sent from above of the message that not all Arab people hate me, and that I need not hate them.
But I don’t know how to communicate this complex balance to my son’s four-and-a-half year old brain. I want him to know that part of what is happening is that evil people are doing evil things. But I also want him to know that there are human beings on the other side and that the Blessed Holy One does not want us to hate. I don’t want him to hate.
On Shabbat, our third day without electronic entertainment after the Rosh HaShanah holiday, my kids were doing a lot of wonderful playing together in a way that doesn’t always happen. It warmed my heart to see them working together, getting so creative in the absence of their screens. Then I heard my daughter say, “let’s build a Magna-Tile miklat,” using the Hebrew word for bomb shelter.
And, you know what, that warmed my heart, too. I knew they were trying to normalize — to understand — the totally abnormal and incomprehensible experience of knowing that people wanted to kill us, and that, while we were protected, we were not 100% safe. They were working it through with their toys. This is what coping looks like.
All his questions were part of what coping looks like. “But rockets can’t hurt us in our house, right?” he asked me. “Yes, they can, but the miklat makes us safer,” I told him.
The endless stream of questions was exhausting and frustrating, but I kept reminding myself that he was working his way towards coping, and that helped me to remain patient.
We will all have to be patient — and steadfast — in the coming days. There are many challenges to come and even just quiet, not to mention actual peace, is a long way away.
I hope we will be able to get there without our children learning to hate. I pray they are not being taught to hate, that my son will not grow to hate, but that he will also grow to be a defender of his nation and his people should the time come.
May it be the will of the Blessed Holy One that peace will come first.