Purim Night: Jets Above, Singing Below

My wife and I had come to Israel for our first grandchild’s wedding, expecting to stay only ten days. Instead, that very Shabbos, the current war with Iran began, and our return home was delayed for nearly two additional weeks. During those anxious days of sirens, shelters, and uncertainty, I found myself writing.

Purim Night: Jets Above, Singing Below

There was only one siren on Purim morning. It came at 1:00 a.m., just a few hours after we had gone to sleep. A barrage of missiles was aimed at the center of the country, in the hope that a few might slip through Israel’s defenses and fall on civilian neighborhoods.

My wife was shaken. She had barely slept and now faced the anxiety of relocating to a hotel — just the two of us, alone, in wartime. Our hosts, however, had already guided us through the training-wheels stage of how to respond when an alert sounds. We knew where to go. We knew what to do.

I climbed over to her bed and held her, spooning together as we have since we were young. She settled quickly and drifted back to sleep. I could tell from the gentle rhythm of her breathing.

About thirty minutes later, just as I began to doze, the thunderous roar of three or four Israeli Air Force jets returning from Iran rumbled across the sky. They took a low approach over the neighborhood on their way back to the nearby airbase. The sound was startling, almost otherworldly. She stirred again beside me. I reassured her that these were our planes, returning home.

A few minutes later, through our closed windows, we heard singing and dancing from a neighbor’s Purim celebration next door.

Sleep did not fully return. But those final sounds — jets defending our people overhead and Jews singing below — spoke of both physical strength and spiritual resilience. That combination carried me through the remaining hours until it was time to rise for a neitz (sunrise) minyan and the Megillah reading.