The Choice to Listen

September 30, 2023:

A young woman with long, chestnut-brown hair and gleaming hazel eyes sits with her father on their porch. Shabbat morning is their favorite time together. He sips his black coffee, and she tells him all about the last two weeks since she’s been home. She tells him how hot it was in the field, why she suspects her commander is starting to like her more, and how the girl who sleeps in the bunk above her put her favorite chocolate bar from the canteen on her pillow one night just to make her smile. Her father has heard about his daughter’s new friend before. He remembers his daughter telling him how the girl cried for the first two weeks of basic training, and he is proud, he realizes, of a young soldier he has never met, for how far she’s come.

The father splits sunflower seeds between his front teeth, and the two of them make fun of the amount of oil the army uses in its “food.” She giggles when he tells her that he still has an oily film on the top of his mouth from 1993, and he relishes the sound of her laughter and the warm sun on his face.

“Abba,” she starts, and something in her tone makes him sit up and look into her eyes, which have grown serious. “Something is happening on the border,” she says. He pushes her for information and asks whether she’s reported what she’s seeing to the right channels. She tells him everything, even things she’s not sure she should, and she tells him about how her fellow tatzpitaniot (spotters, observers) share her fears. “We’ve been reporting things for months. But they’re not listening,” she says, “not in the way they need to be.” And he hears her deep frustration with her superiors, whom she has been trained to revere.

Early Sunday morning he drops her and the duffel she’s carrying, which weighs as much as she does, at the bus stop. He can’t stop thinking about their conversation. He talked her through all the things she needs to do to make sure those who need to listen to her do. She had had leave for the first day of Sukkot, so she will be on base for Simchat Torah. “You make sure they listen to you,” he says as he kisses the top of her forehead. “I will,” she promises, giving him one more quick hug before rushing off to catch a window seat.

* * *

August 20, 2025:

“They’re not listening.” she says. “No, they’re not,” her friend agrees, “not in the way they need to be.” Two women in their early 30s sit on a park bench watching their children run through sprinklers. There is a bitterness in both their voices, a sense of abandonment. “People have been so kind,” one begins. “But you don’t want to rely on favors anymore,” her friend finishes her thought. “I just want him home for more than a weekend at a time, you know? I want someone else to pack the kids’ lunches, I want to get back into pilates. Remember how good I was getting?…” Her voice trails off. “You want the blood to not drain to your feet every time there’s a knock at your front door,” her friend again intuits her next thought. It’s always their next thought. The kids interrupt them periodically, for booboo kisses and snack breaks, but once they’re out of earshot the women go back to talking about how the marriages they had cultivated for over a decade feel like they’re fraying at the seams, and about the pain of looking into their husbands’ eyes when they finally do come home, only to find strangers looking back at them.

“They’re not listening,” he says under his breath, shaking his head. A man, about the same age as the women, but sitting a few benches over in the park, folds up the newspaper that is agitating him. He uncrosses his legs and the pain that radiates from his calf reminds him of what happened that day when he went out to defend his kibbutz. He has tried to stay positive, mostly for his family, but he misses his old life with every bone in his body, and he can’t wait to get back to work in the fields he grew up in. But he learned a dark and painful lesson on the seventh. He can still see the evil in their eyes when he closes his own, and he knows that as long as the enemy is meters away from his back door, he cannot, he will not, go home.

* * *

“They’re not listening,” he thinks to himself. A frail, elderly man holds up a placard of a hostage at a busy intersection among droves of other Israelis draped in yellow ribbons. He hasn’t slept a full night in two years. How can he, with boys who could be his grandsons, digging their own graves for Hamas’s sadistic pleasure. Drivers whizz by. Some give him a thumbs-up as they do. He doesn’t understand how they are not all standing there with him, demanding their leaders do whatever it takes. He doesn’t understand how, at the very least, they are not stopping to show support for the families.

“They’re not listening,” a 17-year-old girl looks up from her phone screen and shakes her head as they pass the protesters. She’s been learning Arabic in school for three years and dreams of being drafted into an intelligence unit as soon as she graduates. Over the summer, she has taken to reading Al Jazeera daily, to expand her vocabulary and her understanding of the propaganda war being waged from the other side. She has never wanted anything more in her life than to see the hostages back on Israeli soil. But she is also terrified that with every chant into a megaphone, the price to bring them home gets steeper.

* * *

“They’re not listening,” thinks a man with curly payot and a black hat as he makes his way through a crowded mall. People don’t hide how they feel about him as they pass. Even without looking up, he senses every grimace. A newscaster came to interview students from his yeshiva earlier that week and he’s still infuriated that the few callous, shallow statements uttered among the many nuanced and thoughtful ones are what made the cut. Watching the clip only reaffirmed what his rabbis have been saying about their way of life being under assault. He knows that people from the outside can’t understand the fear of losing everything your community stands for. And he knows that they don’t believe that Torah learning is enough. But he does. He really does. He believes it is everything.

“They’re not listening,” a 14-year-old boy says angrily to his mother, as a young man in a black hat brushes past them. “How is it fair?” His mother glances at the young man, and then tenderly at her son, but says nothing. She is walking quickly and intentionally with a school supply list she’s trying not to crumple in one hand and his baby brother in the other. His 5-year-old sister is crying because they can’t find the markers she wants, and he wonders if, like him, she is just dreading the first day of school. Their father would always walk them on their first day, long after they insisted they had outgrown his favorite ritual. But their father won’t be there for their first day this year. He won’t be there for any more firsts, the boy thinks, and in the middle of the mall he feels his 14-year-old chest caving in on itself.

* * *

“We didn’t listen,” says a man with hazel eyes whose gleam has been dulled by grief. “Our enemy brazenly proclaimed their intentions, and we didn’t listen.” He leans on the headstone to his right, taking in the affixed photo of a beautiful young woman in a khaki beret smiling vibrantly. “And no one listened to her when she tried to warn them…” His voice cracks, but he purses his lips tightly, inhales sharply, and persists. “And now, two years into this nightmare, the only ones really listening are our enemies. They are listening to every internal feud and every smear campaign, and they are celebrating a truth we as a people refuse to acknowledge — we only ever break from within.”

The sun is high in the sky, and he knows that the people who have come to pay their respects are hot. He doesn’t care. He refuses to concede that his daughter and the best of our people have died in vain. “Start listening,” he pleads, “to the people behind the voices you don’t want to hear. Start listening to the people to your left, and ask yourself if perhaps what you perceive as misplaced compassion is a remnant of the idealism upon which our nation was founded. And start listening to the people to your right, and ask yourself if behind what you perceive as extremism lies a reality you don’t want to accept because it will destroy your faith in humanity. Look to those who are more religious, and less religious with curiosity rather than judgment, and look at those you malign for leaving, and ask what it would take to make them want to stay. In all the voices around us, there is the same pain, the same fatigue, and the same level of conviction-borne-of-fear that if things are not done a certain way, the entire enterprise might fail. But the truth is,” the man takes a deep breath to slow his heartbeat and lowers his voice, “the truth is that everyone is right, and everyone is wrong. But we need to learn to listen, because our fates are fused, and —” he looks down at the smile that will forever be frozen in time, “we have no other homeland.”

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Yael’s new book, Ezra-Nehemiah: Retrograde Revolution (Koren, 2025) is now available for pre-order at Amazon.