Our shared home, our shared responsibility

This week I became increasingly uncomfortable reading the news. In just a few days, I came across several stories: border police officers jailed for barbecuing on base over Shabbat, accused of “harming religion”; female soldiers court-martialed and fined for arriving at their discharge in shorts and tank tops; and women in the IDF required to wear long pants during the Jerusalem Marathon, in the middle of a heat wave, while men were allowed to wear shorts.

Now, to be clear, I am Jewish and relatively observant. So this is not sour grapes. I keep Shabbat and wouldn’t barbecue on a Friday night. I don’t keep the laws of modesty, but I can understand the point and my daughter is required to wear a skirt to school. I could have chosen to send her to a secular school, where no such rules would apply, because there is (still) freedom of choice and variety of levels of religious observance in our country. However, it seems like some groups are trying to change that. And what is the other side of the coin?

My husband recently finished another round of miluim which resulted in me single-parenting for nearly three months. This, after two and a half years of war and several other rounds of miluim. And I am not even close to the women whose husbands have, basically, been away more than at home since 2023. I was talking to someone today about how I am so tired from being alone, constantly in charge of one hundred percent of the domestic labor and kids’ needs, that at this point, I don’t even care how things are done anymore – I just need to not be the one to do all of them. Reconnection with a spouse who comes back from miluim is not an easy thing. There is real exhaustion on both sides, there is burnout, and we all understand that he has been doing something important, something vital – but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect the family and the system at home. And when one is alone for too long, a gap appears – and if one doesn’t see a will from the other side to bridge it, to go back to being a partnership, then it’s not hard to imagine a future in which each person ends up on their own path.

And then this person told me about a Midrash about Adam and Eve and the serpent. The serpent engages in conversation with Eve and convinces her to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Where, then, was Adam when this was happening? There are two main explanations as to where Adam was: either he was asleep after being intimate with Eve, or God took him around the world for a tour. Either way, he wasn’t there. “Adam’s behavior [is likened] to a husband who spends too much time at the office and neglects to pay adequate attention to his wife. The biblical text (…) implicitly reflects this emotional distance by having God interrogate Adam and Eve separately.” (https://thelehrhaus.com/timely-thoughts/adams-absence-rereading-the-primordial-sin/)

Is going on the world tour – or to the office – important? Absolutely. Does that mean that no expectations exist on the man being also present at home, also a partner to his wife? I don’t think so. Such a situation appears to end with Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Are we optimistic about the future of a marriage in which the man tours the world, he occupies himself with the “important”, and the woman at home feels unseen, unappreciated, unacknowledged, and alone? Relationships require mutual support, load-sharing, mutual understanding and partnership. Otherwise, the risk is that the house stops being a home. Until one day, there is only space for one there.

And I can’t help but think about the present state of our country. Where our soldiers are stretched out, serving roughly half of the year in miluim, neglecting their families, their businesses, their jobs, risking their physical and mental health, and ultimately their very lives; while a large sector of our population chooses to look away at best, and to be deliberately hostile at worst. And, at the same time, those who are already overstretched, who have given disproportionately to our common home and carry a disproportionate amount of the civic duties, are required to do more – to forcibly dress differently, to give up their barbecues, to wear long pants during a heat wave, and what are they getting in return in the partnership that we should have in our home? True, some of the people in these sectors are learning Torah in a serious and responsible way, and that is “going to the office”, that is “touring the world” – but the home is still theirs, as much as it is their wives. Otherwise, they risk being expendable. Or, they risk the wives getting tired and saying “I am anyways doing this alone, I am out”. Either way, it doesn’t look great for the partnership we need to build a thriving, common home where there is space for all of us.

Everyone needs to pull their weight. A home cannot stand if one side carries it alone. Neither can a country.