War Children, 2025

I looked upon the 70 or so people gathered for a meal at the Shabbat celebration following my daughter and son-in-law’s wedding last week. See these people from Australia, Israel, and the United States now newly connected as a family, honoring a couple that met by chance while one of them was on reserve duty and the other had been evacuated from Metula after October 7. Except for a few of them, everyone in the room were either descendants of survivors of the Shoah or refugees expelled from North Africa that made new lives out of trauma and dislocation.

A verse came to mind, a song by Van Morrison:

We were the war children, 1945
And when all of the soldiers came marching home from war
With love looks in their eyes

Here was our moment of war children basking in the light of a new partnership born during conflict. And as it often does, that week’s Torah portion, Naso, reflected wisdom relevant to a lived life today. It had war and love on its mind just the same as my family, new and old. Towards the beginning of the parsha we read:

You must count them from the age of 30 to the age of 50, all who are eligible for the troop, to perform service in the Tent of Meeting.

As the Israelites’ troops were gathered and people were counted clan by clan and tribe by tribe, the entirety of the nation was ultimately mobilized for action. But where were they directed to go before the battles to come? To the Tent of Meeting, a place that could literally be translated as the tent of “celebration.”

In the same way I took a grateful census of the people in the open tent of my family’s celebration with the wars of both past and present on my mind, the Israelites came together knowing both hope and the heavy task that awaited them. Then as now, even amidst the fog of war, gathering to celebrate is not only important, but obligatory. So often sacred text, like art, imitates life. Or rather, life echoes the texts we cherish.

We are all called in some manner to make choices about how to serve in war and love, and sometimes the division between the two can be hard to discern. We fight our enemies because we love our loved ones. We protect our families even as we are broken by the costs of war.

There were many moments in the wedding ceremony itself when we prayed for the hostages, the soldiers, the suffering, and the innocent victims of war because no joy of union should be celebrated without a broken glass, without longing, without remembering those who are hurt, lonely, or lost.

As we held the poles of the wedding canopy to bring together an expanded clan of one small, contemporary tribe’s Tent of Meeting, we took in both the magnificence of love and the awful toll of war. We also dreamed of a time of peace, as far away as that seems. Just as the Poet sings, slightly paraphrased for our own story and slightly out of tune: “We were the war children, 2025.”