The Ayatollah owes me a vacation

I was supposed to spend the third week of June glamping in a yurt on the banks of the Kinneret. I am not entirely clear on what a yurt is, but back in May, when I was itching for summer, I saw an ad that included the words “air conditioned” and “available” and I clicked “book now” while simultaneously googling “what to wear in a yurt.”

The war with Iran kept me from debuting my yurt-forward fashion. Instead of roasting marshmallows on the beach and falling asleep to the sounds of the sea, we stockpiled cookies in our bomb shelter and woke to the sound of missile alerts from the Home Front Command.

I was disappointed about missing my vacation, but I was grateful for my safety and thrilled to have had the opportunity to watch from a secure distance as my small country went to bat for the entire free world. So it was hard to be too sad. Many others had it far worse – people lost their lives and their homes, they got stuck in or out of Israel and spent the war apart from their families, they missed weddings and family reunions that they had been planning for months. In the greater scheme of things, losing out on a 2-day, fully refunded getaway was a small price to pay for a non-nuclear Iran.

But I don’t live in the greater scheme of things. I live in the petty space of now, where I was thrown back into my day-to-day routine after a week and a half of living on the edge of my seat, with one hand scrolling the news while the other reached for a cookie. And as I return to my regularly scheduled program of going to work and shopping for groceries, I alternate between extreme gratitude for my nation’s victory, and a mild yet persistent grumpiness that yearns desperately to see the inside of a yurt. 

We are all well-versed in the classic description of Jewish holidays – They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat. But with the alarming uptick in the frequency of their attempts on my life of late, I believe this phrase needs an upgrade: They tried to kill us, we fought back like nobody’s business, let’s glamp on the Ayatollah’s dime. 

That’s right, I said it. The Ayatollah owes me a vacation, and I will not rest until I am comfortably ensconced in a yurt! Can one even comfortably ensconce oneself in a yurt? I don’t know! And I blame the Ayatollah for this glaring gap in my yurt awareness. 

I hear the Ayatollah is hard to locate these days. And there are rumors about his assets being frozen. But I accept Bit and Paybox, and even cash. I am flexible on the dates of this excursion. So come on, Ayatollah, step up and meet me halfway! After the hell you’ve put us through, it’s really the least you can do.

Life returned to normal here with a speed so shocking that I have taken to calling it warplash. There was simply no time to process the experience or digest all the cookies. What just happened? Is this war really over?  Did we accomplish our goals? No one knows.

Much has been written about the surrealness and confusion of starting the week in a bomb shelter and somehow ending up in the office with enough time to start wondering if the weekend will ever arrive. But nothing has been written about this subject from a yurt! It would really provide a whole new perspective. 

And so, Ayatollah, I am asking – nay demanding – 3 days and 2 nights on the Kinneret. Just me and my family and a big old box of marshmallows. And throw in some chocolate – because you had the audacity to enrich uranium while the price of chocolate was skyrocketing. I don’t care how frozen your assets are, I plan to melt the chocolate anyway.

Give me my vacation. Restore the sense of normalcy and balance that you and your terror counterparts have stolen from us over the past year and a half. Allow us the time to parse our feelings or to simply continue eating them if we choose. Because I don’t want to be grumpy in the face of miracles. I want to be grateful and hopeful and well-rested. Give me time to recover from my warplash like a dignified human – ensconced in a yurt.