Even Better

This past Thursday night in Machane Yehuda

Here in Jerusalem it’s Sunday morning. Shabbat was surreal. All synagogues cancelled services. My wife and I had a quiet dinner at home and at some point, the sirens sounded. Not the somewhat quiet kind, off in the distance where you even wonder at first if it’s an actual siren, but loud, howling, like a banshee.

We don’t have a safe room—a room especially constructed to withstand a missile attack as best as it can. A safe room is either windowless or has metal shutters you can close to protect you from flying glass. The goal is to reduce or eliminate the risk of injury or death from shrapnel or debris. I think they’re mandatory in new construction, a painful reality of Israeli life. Our apartment is maybe 100 years old. No safe room back then, and no retrofitted one, today. So the past year, when the sirens sounded, we sat in our stairwell, which is old and solid and mostly likely to be free of risk from flying glass.

But Friday night we decided to head across the street to our neighbors who have a serious shelter—a bunker-like room below ground with electricity with an entrance from the street. No running water so they stocked it with bottled water and we prepared a bag with supplies as well. So some time after dinner when the bashees howled we hurried across the street and sat around with the neighbors’ family and their parents. Another family from our building joined us. And then at some point a family with two small children showed up. No one knew them. They treated the room as a public shelter but no one said anything to the contrary.

So there were maybe 15 of us and a dog, sitting in a small space the size of a dining room, listening to the radio that our neighbors had plugged in and turned on before Shabbat. There were small children, teenagers, adults, old folks. Some of us had been born in America. Some here in Jerusalem. We spoke Hebrew and English and tried to get through the moment, not knowing how long we would be there.

Sitting there and watching the children laying on mattresses on the floor trying to sleep, you can’t help but wonder what it’s like for a child in that situation. And yes, we are lucky here. We have a safe place to run to and an incredible missile defense system. I can only imagine what it is like in Gaza or Tehran these days. No fun, to put it mildly. And I thought about the blitz in London or the bombings in Berlin in WWII. Every night, British men and women went down into the Tube stations to wait for the all-clear hoping to find their house intact on their return. And having no idea many nights like that await you. And hardest of all, not knowing how the war will turn out. So despite the uneasiness we all felt last night sitting around talking somewhat nervously, waiting for the signal to go back home, there are worse times and places in history and in the present.

We ended up going to the shelter twice. The second time, we awoke from a pretty serious sleep around 1:00 am and hustled down to the shelter but not before an interception boomed, seemingly right over our heads. The Israeli missile defense system—Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, miraculously shoots down missiles in mid-flight resulting in a large boom—the size of the boom depending, I assume, on both the size of the incoming missile and how close it is. The boom we heard hurrying next door was probably not really right overhead but we did pick up our pace.

Down in the safe room, we could hear up above the steady explosions of intercepted missiles. At times they were a multiple cascade of one explosion after another, sounding something like the grand finale of a fireworks explosion. Bam-bam-ba-bambam-bam going on for 20-30 seconds. Being underground muffled the sound some. But it was an ongoing cacophony.

And then it stopped. We went home hoping that was it for the night. It was. Shabbat was quiet in Jerusalem. No sirens. We stayed home, had another quiet meal and read. My wife and I try to read books in Hebrew, especially on Shabbat when we are forced to rely on only our wits, our slowly growing vocabularies, and a dictionary. Right now we are reading a novel of Haim Sabato which in English is called From the Four Winds. A literal translation of the Hebrew title is Come, Spirit.

It’s the story of a little boy from Egypt who has just arrived in Jerusalem in the 1950s and who finds himself in a neighborhood of recently arrived Egyptian and Hungarian Jews. I can’t convey the poignance of the challenges they face which dwarf mine and my wife’s as new immigrants. Suffice it to say that they are very poor and life is not easy. Part of the power of the book comes from the contrast between Egyptian immigrants who have been kicked out of their country vs. the Hungarians who have lived through the Shoah. But both groups are very happy to be in the Jewish homeland instead of where they came from.

Because of the possibility of another set of missiles, we stayed home almost the whole day on Saturday. It seemed like a good idea to stay close to a shelter. So we read a lot more Sabato. What would those Egyptians and Hungarians think about the country they came to, now 70 years older? The incredible prosperity would shock them. The fact that we still have angry neighbors in nearby countries would, I suspect, be greeted with a shrug. Calling those early immigrants, brave, is inadequate. My wife and I came with Schwab accounts and a job. They came then with nothing or close to nothing and made do. They were excited, especially the Hungarians, to have an orange, a luxury they rarely could afford or experience. The resilience of Israel today is an echo of what they built and how they built it. Their DNA—coming from Europe and the countries of the Middle East—runs through the veins of the people as we sat together in the shelter, patiently waiting to get back to life.

When you think about those early immigrants, you can’t help but be hopeful, even with everything insane that has been happening for the last 20 months. Despite the horror of hostages unreturned and Hamas undefeated. Despite the uncertainty of what will happen with Iran. Optimism is the thread that is woven into the fabric of this country. Irrationally so, some might say. Some of that optimism is based on faith—on trust in God. But even for those here who are not religious, they expect things to turn out OK.

One measure of that optimism is family size. Israelis, religious and non-religious, have big families:

From the full report:

Another argument is that Israel’s high fertility is driven by certain parts of the population, such as Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) women, having many children (the fertility rate of Haredi women is indeed quite high at around 7 children per woman).

However, the rise in Israel’s fertility over the last two decades has been largely driven by the secular and traditional Jewish populations, whose combined fertility rate is greater than 2.2, which is itself higher than the overall fertility in any other OECD country.

But optimism is also part of everyday life here. On Thursday night before the attacks on Iran, we took some visitors from America to the shuk—the market called Machane Yehuda—the area of Jerusalem where bakeries and sellers of spices and fruit and vegetable merchants hawk their wares. At night, Machane Yehuda is mostly bars and restaurants blaring music. It’s a giant dance party and you will almost always see someone, sometimes not a young person, up on a table or chair dancing. This country loves life.

On Thursday night, at one of the crossroads of the shuk, there was pedestrian gridlock. There were maybe 75 young people, standing together, singing at the top of their lungs. Half of them were essentially blocking the intersection. The other half were standing on the equivalent of bleachers—ledges from closed storefronts at the intersection and available for getting above the street level of the people at foot level. A writhing mass of young people hands in the air swaying with the music that they were making, a capella. It looked like spring break in Florida. Everyone, except for the people who were trying to get by, was delirious with the happiness of the moment.

What were they singing?

They were singing Tamid Ohev Oti (He always loves me) a song that has become a handful of songs you hear over and over again these days. You will hear it in a restaurant on a Thursday night and because of the nature of the people who live here, people will start clapping along with the song and dancing, and yes, sometimes standing on chairs even in normal restaurants not in the shuk. This is a country that even in wartime (and this war with Iran is really not a few days old but 20 months old) is full of joy and exuberance. And you can find the song on social media—people singing it in the bomb shelters or stuck in tunnels waiting for the all-clear signal. People just start singing it because it captures something deep in the DNA of this country.

The “He” who always loves me in the song is God. Tamid Ohev Oti isn’t a romance song. It’s a religious anthem. The crowd screaming it out in the shuk was probably thinking more about the infectious beat than the meaning of the words. Because you don’t need to know Hebrew to enjoy the song. Crank it up:

Put aside the theology of the song that not everyone finds palatable. Just listen to the refrain: V’od yotair tov. It means “It’s going to get better.” Or “It will be better, still.” Or as good as life is now, it will be even better. Did the singers in the shuk really believe it as they belted it out? I like to think so. It’s an anthem of optimism in the middle of an ugly ugly war where all we do every day is wish each other b’sorot tovot, Hebrew for “May we hear good news.” One of the craziest things about this country is that we actually can imagine the arrival of good news. We almost expect it. We believe it’s going to get better. It may get worse before that happens. But ultimately, od yotair tov. Things will be better.