Living without an end game  

 At 6:30 this morning while sitting in synagogue for morning services, we began hearing booms…..oftentimes, they are from the loaded tractor trailers moving through the neighborhood given the level of construction going on here in Jerusalem. But when it became more than one or two, I looked at the “red alert” app on my mobile device to see that an area 20 miles west of us from Modi’in to greater Tel Aviv had been alerted to rockets “from the East.”

Most of us here have an app on our phones that lets us know when there is a need to move to a shelter and how much time we have to do so. While I can see all of them, I only get a warning sound when they are in the Jerusalem area. Although no sirens went off here, we could clearly hear the booms of our Iron Dome air defense system attempting to knock down any incoming missiles.

Later it turned out that “from the East” meant Yemen, presumably fired at us by the Houthis who the world should have disabled as soon as they started firing at ships traversing the Red Sea. Of course, once again, the world reacted inadequately by occasionally strafing Houthi installations but not making them permanently inoperative. This morning’s missile was an attack by Yemen against Israel, using their new supersonic ballistic missile (their claim). Why? Because we are fighting a war against Hamas who continues to vow to destroy us.  Its really a challenge to see the logic of that thinking unless, of course, one lives in the Middle East where the application of logic is often interpreted as naivete.

Thankfully the remnants of the missile that was launched at us fell in an open area although there was some damage from the falling shrapnel as the projectile broke up. Nine people suffered injuries as even with the Iron Dome not every piece of the incoming missile is incinerated.

After 11 months of war there are times when it does not seem like we are making progress. We’re traveling the road of war but seemingly without a clearly defined destination. Regular daily shelling of the north by Hezbollah in Lebanon has become normalized with attacks now reaching further south into Israel, over the weekend even targeting Safed. Hamas still has the capability of firing occasional rockets as they did last week towards Ashkelon, while evening demonstrations against the government, which demonstrations seem to grow in size each week, continue unabated.

In three weeks, we will mark one year of war and it is difficult to chalk up a lot of “wins” from this effort. 101 hostages are still being held by Hamas, there’s still talk of a cease fire/hostage release deal but no forward movement and we have buried over 700 of our best and brightest. Its as if the government has not internalized the fact that demonstrations will continue to grow as long as there is no clearly defined end game and a plan to get us there.

Psychologist know that humanity can accept a lot of discomfort as long as we know that (a) the discomfort will end and (b) it will take a given amount of time to arrive to that end. Living indefinitely under pressure without a known end game is not something human beings handle well.

Earlier today I shared a story with a friend from an experience in the US Army in 1962. I was just entering the office orientation course at Fort Gordon (now Fort Eisenhower), Georgia prior to beginning my active-duty military service. America was seven years into the Viet Nam war at the time and wanted to find out how much stress American prisoners of war could actually endure.

To that end they constructed a mock Vietnamese village somewhere in the forests of rural Alabama and then brought young officers there for two weeks of pain and torture. The conditions were deplorable, the facilities were filthy, bugs, snakes and all types of vermin had the run of the place and the “Vietnamese” interrogators, who were US army personnel impersonating the enemy, were brutal in their attacks on the “prisoners” in their charge.

But what the Army found out is that the “prisoners” were remarkably resilient, much more so than expected. The psychologists involved in the project surmised that the resiliency was due to the fact that the “prisoners” knew that at the end of the two weeks they were there, they were going home to a hot shower, their loving wives and families with no cause for concern about their future. They also knew no harm would come to them while they were there.

Very soon after it began the project was cancelled and a determination was made that resiliency was only put to the test when there was no known end game. The “prisoners” knew the end game and, therefore, could stand any pressure they encountered.

We here do not know the end game, it has not been clearly defined (saying we will fight until we win when winning is not defined is not an end game), and, even worse, we don’t even know for sure that the government has a plan to get us to this undefined final goal.

We, as a nation, are a heck of a lot smarter than that and if our leadership cannot make all of this clear to us, its time they stepped aside and let others give it a shot (no pun intended).

Former US President Harry Truman, who recognized Israel minutes after the state was declared, said (and practiced): “Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.” Indeed!!!