My wife and I did not experience anything like the trauma of war that soldiers in Gaza do, or that Gazans experience, or what the people of Iran must have felt when night after night, day after day, the skies were totally controlled by the Israeli Air Force. It's a whole different thing, but to understand what we did experience, we had to leave the country.
During the twelve days of the war, you wake up in the middle of the night—it always seemed like 3 AM—your phone is squealing, making this horrible noise, which is the special sound from the Home Front Command. It's the sign that a full-blown siren is coming soon, that a missile is on its way. You get this weird warning before the warning of the siren because the missile is coming from a lot further away—Iran, not Gaza where you usually had 90 seconds to find shelter. Even at three in the morning, you're up instantly either because the sound is so jarring or you’re sleeping as they say, with one eye open.
The first couple of nights of the war with Iran we slept in our clothes to be ready for an air raid siren. Then we slept in pajamas that might be a little more respectable than our regular sleepwear because, hey, they’re our neighbors and we all found ourselves in the shelter at 3 in the morning wearing sweatpants or whatever.
You head out the door and cross the street and go down the stairs and find 15 to 20 people there, many of them huddled with their children and many of the children cannot fall back asleep as we hear the dull boom of the explosions overhead of the ballistic missiles being intercepted. Most of the rockets and missiles were headed toward Tel Aviv, Beersheba, or somewhere in the middle.
So that was what the war was like for us in Jerusalem. My neighbor's house didn't get destroyed. None of my friends got hurt, thank God. Some level of anxiety and a lot of nights in a row of mediocre sleep.
Then it ended, and when it ended, we had missed our trip to Italy that we had hoped to take for a vacation because during the war, Ben Gurion Airport was totally shut down and all flights were canceled. It was pretty clear after a few days that Iran wasn't going to win the war or do any serious damage militarily, but we didn't know when we'd be able to leave. So we waited. Every day that passed meant canceling another Airbnb or hotel reservation. No fun but so many people dealt with so much worse. We had to live with a little disappointment. No big deal.
Then the war ended, and the next day or so, we jumped on a flight and got to Rome. What I want to reflect on is what it was like, and to reflect on a strange set of events that happened to us in Italy that reminded us what an unusual situation it is right now for Jews and Israelis.
We got to Rome and then headed out the next morning for a Shabbat in Verona.
I didn't realize it until we were in Rome, but in Israel, if you're in Jerusalem and you hear an airplane, it's not a commercial flight. There are no commercial airports near Jerusalem. What you're hearing could be an air force training mission, but for the last few weeks and for many months, it's not a training mission. It's a fighter plane en route to either Gaza to deal out destruction and death there, or to Tehran or Fordow or somewhere in Iran to do the same. In the last few weeks, you were hoping it was a plane going to do some damage in Iran.
When it was going to Gaza, I'd always have unease about it. You know that bad things happen to people in war and surely many of those who are hurt or killed do not deserve it. I worried that our pilots might be in harm's way, especially going to Iran. But at least in the last few weeks, the ones that went to Iran felt like they were doing something important to make our country safer. Gaza is more complicated—but that's another essay. The point is, when you hear an airplane in Jerusalem, you hear it, you notice it, and it conjures up an image or images you can’t ignore.
Then you're in Rome or you're in Verona and you hear an airplane and something clutches your heart—maybe it’s your stomach but either way it’s a physical reaction—and you stop. Then you realize, no, that sound is not the sound of an instrument of death. It's just a plane going somewhere, taking people on business or vacation. You breathe. It’s just an airplane, a sound you’ve heard all your life without noticing. It’s just an airplane.
And when you lay down in bed at night in Rome or Verona, at first there's still a little bit of anxiety. When you turn off the lights a shadow of anxiety passes through you. In Rome or Verona, the shadow falls on you but then it goes away. You put the shadow down. You push it away. You realize your phone is not going to wake you at three in the morning. And again you breathe.
We got to Rome and had a nice dinner in the Jewish ghetto which was created in 1555. There are a bunch of kosher restaurants—really lovely, with people strolling around. Like much of Europe, the Jewish areas are of great interest as tourist attractions, but their native populations are a tiny fraction of what they had been. They killed their Jews or helped the Nazis kill them, and most of the rest tried to get to Israel or the United States. So it's a little strange as always to be in the ghetto in Rome, but on the other hand, there are no ballistic missiles coming from Iran, so it's a welcome change of pace. Life suddenly seems lighter. And you realize you’ve been carrying some stuff from the war without realizing it until now.
Then we went on to Verona. We didn’t have a chance to make any plans. When we arrived, we discovered there was a rather unusual opera festival going on. A great Italian tenor, Zenatello, decided in 1913 to start holding an opera festival outdoors in the Arena of Verona. The arena is a 2,000-year-old amphitheater, an ellipse that holds about 20,000 people for outdoor concerts.
The problem was that Friday night's performance started after Shabbat, and Saturday night's performance started before Shabbat ended, because Shabbat gets out in Verona around 10 o'clock when we were there, and the opera starts at 9:30, which is bizarre but I think it’s to avoid the heat.
So what did we do? We went Saturday night after Shabbat. We'd get there at 10:30, miss the first hour, and catch the last two hours. Plenty of opera, we figured. And half of the reason to go was just to see the amphitheater. So all good.
What was playing that night, Saturday? It was a Verdi opera called Nabucco. I couldn't have told you anything about Nabucco—I'd never heard it, never listened to it, didn't know what it was about. I like Verdi, though he's not my favorite. It turns out that Nabucco was Verdi’s first hit. How bad could it be? It would be fine.
We forgot to look into the plot. Usually it doesn't really matter—the plot's usually pretty simple, and there would probably be supertitles. We'd figure it out, and at intermission we’d Google the plot and figure out what we missed.
Saturday morning, one of the people at Shabbat services, another tourist like us, said, "Oh, Nabucco, it's a great opera. There's a beautiful song.” I said I hope it's in the second act. He said it was. I asked if he knew what Nabucco was about, and he said, "Nabucco is the Italian name for Nebuchadnezzar, and it's about Hebrew slaves."
That’s just great I thought. Couldn't we see something about Japan, like Madama Butterfly, or about Spain, like Carmen? No, we're getting Nabucco. I thought about the Kipling poem "The Widow at Windsor," where he talks about the poor British soldier.
Take ’old o’ the Wings o’ the Mornin’,
An’ flop round the earth till you’re dead;
But you won’t get away from the tune that they play
To the bloomin’ old rag over’ead.Meaning the sun never sets on the British Empire, it’s everywhere, it’s omnipresent, and the people who bore the burden of keeping it preserved are the rank and file soldiers, not the widow at Windsor, who is the Queen of England.
I thought, you can't get away from the tune that they play. I'm out of Israel, breathing differently without realizing it because I'm not in a war zone anymore, on vacation, and yet I find myself at an opera about the Jews. A bit eerie.
Opera at the Arena of Verona is one of the most extraordinary things I've ever experienced. First of all, it's 20,000 people sitting outside, a lot of them dressed to the nines, and we’re sitting in a 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheater built by Augustus and Claudius and finished around 40 CE, right around the time that the Romans captured Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE.
The guy at the synagogue had said, "Oh yeah, you'll love it. The lighting and the costumes will be amazing." I was thinking, hmm, the lighting and the costumes—that's nice, but that's not why I go to the opera. But what he meant was the spectacle of it. To entertain 20,000 people, you can't have a lot of small hand gestures or raised eyebrows. There were well over 100 extras in the chorus. An enormous number of people on stage doing all kinds of interesting things in choreographed ways in what were indeed extraordinary costumes.
We get to the arena. And there are indeed supertitles in English and Italian and in the first few minutes some of the chorus is singing something like “death to the Hebrews!”
I look at my wife. She looks at me. We are both thinking the same thing. Really? Death to the Hebrews? Meanwhile, 20,000 normal people are just watching an opera on a hot Saturday night in June. Hebrews, schmebrews. It’s all Verdi to them.
The Jewish slaves, the exiles from the Babylonian conquest of Israel in 597 BCE, are a big horde of people on stage constantly getting herded around like cattle and for some reason, just to make it more stressful for the my wife and me, two Jews in Verona, the Hebrews were dressed in green and looked like IDF soldiers from where where we were sitting. Coincidence? Political commentary? An overactive imagination on my part? I didn’t know but it felt pretty creepy.
When we had left the hotel I checked my phone for what was happening in Israel and discovered that a performer at Glastonbury that day had led the crowd in a chant of “Death to the IDF.” The more things change the more they stay the same. Trying to enjoy the opera I find myself wondering what I would do if someone from the crowd cries out “Free Palestine.” Will I have the courage to answer “am Yisrael chai?” That I am even thinking about it tells you where Jewish heads are these days and how you think you’re on vacation but it can be a little harder to get away than it looks.
At intermission, we looked up the plot. Nebuchadnezzar thinks he’s a god and wants to kill all the Hebrew slaves he’s brought back from Zion (“Death to the Hebrews!”), then he gets hit by lightning and then decides he’s not a god after all. He decides to convert to Judaism and worship the God of the Hebrews instead of Baal, and ultimately saves the Jews.
The beautiful song in the second act that the guy had told me about that morning is a song that the Hebrew slaves sing in their longing for their homeland, to go back to Israel, to go back to Zion. It's basically a retelling of Psalm 137: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept."
It's a gorgeous song called "Va, pensiero." It described how the Jews from the beginning of their first exile, to Babylon, wanted to get back to Israel. (You can watch the version we saw in Verona here and you will get a sense of the song and the spectacle I’m trying to describe. And you can see just how crazy I am or observant I am when I tell you that the Hebrew slaves were dressed in green and looked a little too much like IDF soldiers for my taste.
Here is ChatGPT’s translation of the words of Va, Pensiero:
Go, thought, on golden wings;
Go, rest on the slopes and the hills
where the sweet, warm, and soft airs
of our native land scent the air!
Greet the banks of the Jordan,
the toppled towers of Zion…
Oh, my homeland, so beautiful and lost!
Oh, remembrance, so dear and fatal!
Golden harp of the prophetic bards,
why do you hang silent upon the willow?
Rouse the memories in our hearts,
speak to us of times gone by!
O harp, like the fate of Jerusalem,
let a cry of cruel lament rise from you;
or may the Lord inspire you with a harmony
that may give us strength in our suffering!
I'm listening to these words in a Roman amphitheater, built around the time of the second exile of the Jews from our homeland from an opera about the first exile of the Jews from our homeland and I can’t help but wonder how anyone in the world can call the Jewish residents of modern day Israel colonizers with a straight face. We’ve been longing for Zion for a very very very long time. The world once knew this and did not pretend otherwise. Now that we are back, the world is coming to understand that we will fight very hard to stay where we are.
That’s how my vacation started. It’s quieted down since then. It had to. It’s good to get away. And it’s good for wars to end. Hoping Gaza is next and the hostages get to come home.
Share this post