I Can't Sleep

(This story contains sensitive subject matter. It deals with the current war going on between Israel and Hamas. There is not explicit violence but it does talk about what Hamas did on October 7)

I can’t sleep. It’s not all that unusual for me. When I turned sixty-six five years ago my sleep patterns changed and insomnia set in. Most nights I count backward from 200 and generally get back to sleep. But tonight felt different. I just felt something wasn’t right. Maybe it was nerves–I was trying to memorize my lines for a play I was recently cast. I was one of the lead parts and at age seventy-one my memory isn’t what it used to be. 

I turned over and looked at the clock, 2:25 a.m., which meant I’d had two hours of trying to sleep. Ron, my husband, was quietly snoring beside me. He could sleep through an earthquake, damn him! Fluffing my pillows, I turned again and tried to go back to sleep. The minutes crept by ever so slowly while I tried to imagine myself lying on a beach, under the stars, drifting on a cloud. I tried the 4-7-8 breathing method. Nothing. I tried the Buteyko technique. Still nothing. 3:57 a.m.

I quietly put on my slippers and bathrobe, stepped over Guiseppe, my dog, who, like my husband, was quietly snoring in his bed, crept downstairs, made myself a cup of tea, picked up my script, and started memorizing my lines. After a few hours, I finally started to drift off to sleep. Before I did, I glanced over at my phone, which I keep on ‘silent’ during the night, and noticed I had thirty-seven texts. I don’t even get thirty-seven texts in a week so why did I have thirty-seven texts in less than an hour?

I looked to see who had sent them. I saw texts from my daughter, son-in-law, granddaughter, and grandson. “Eema (mommy), something terrible is happening on our kibbutz. Hamas is here. We’re in the safe room but I don’t know if we’re safe.” “Savta (grandma) I love you.” “There are terrorists outside” “They’re in the house” “They’re banging on the door” “They’re breaking everything” “I love you” “They’re shooting and shouting Die Israel” “We don’t know what to do!” On and on the texts went until they were no more.

I screamed. Not just any scream. A loud, blood-curdling scream that could wake the dead. Ron came running down the stairs, along with Guiseppe. I was standing in the living room just screaming and crying and shaking. “What happened?” Ron asked me. I couldn’t get any words out. I just handed him the phone and continued to scream. “Oh my God,” he said as he wrapped me in his arms and began to cry. 

We read through every text: “I don’t know if we’re safe” “Know that we love you”. On it went until the last one “Shema Yisrael.” Shema Yisrael. It’s the prayer that best sums up the centrality of what it means to be Jewish. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord God, the Lord is One.” It is what we say when we rise up in the morning and when we go to bed at night. And it is the prayer we recite on our deathbed.

We turned on the TV. As soon as we did my neighbor, Bella, came running in. “Did you hear? Did you hear!?” she shouted. “My Ori and his family, I don’t know!” I showed her my texts from Tuval and we both broke down crying. Not long after we heard cries and screams coming out of many of the homes in our development. Although we are two hours north of Gaza, many of our children live on border kibbutzim or were attending a music festival and celebrating the end of the holiday Sukkot, the Festival of Booths, and welcoming in our most joyous holiday, Simchat Torah, Rejoicing of the Torah. Ha! The irony. A day of rejoicing will forever now be a day of mourning.

Every day we sit together and watch the news, hoping for any morsel of information. First, we hear hostages had been taken. We hear that Hamas had launched a vicious attack and was shooting up people, setting fires to homes. Killing babies. Raping women and parading their dead bodies for all to see. There is blood everywhere. Some of us have children who were taken hostage, some of us have children whose bodies have been identified, and some of us don't know yet what has happened to our loved ones. There is nothing to say, nothing for me to do but to plan four funerals. Yes, all four bodies have been identified. My beautiful Tuval. My oldest daughter. She was a human rights attorney who would do pro bono work on behalf of Palestinians. Her husband, Gal, works for Google. And my two beautiful grandchildren, the apples of my eye, whose beautiful faces I’ll never see again. Tal, almost 13 and getting ready for his Bar Mitzvah. We buried him in the tallit he’ll never get to wear. And my beautiful sixteen-year-old, Dora, with the long, dark, curly hair, large blue eyes, and beautiful smile, who calls me every day, no matter what, “Hi Savta. You’ll never believe what happened today.” Every day was something exciting. Her latest venture was being accepted into her Tzofim, her Israel Scouts, performance troupe. She was so excited because this meant she would spend the summer touring North America, just as I did when I was in the Scouts, and just as Tuval did too. My family. My future. Wiped out. Erased. I’ll never kiss those sweet faces again. Now I know why it is called “heartbreak.” Every time I breathe I feel like my heart has shattered into a million shards of glass. 

They came to Netanya every Sunday.  Gal’s mom and dad, Miriam and Shai, live across the street. We’d all be together, cooking, laughing and playing. Our homes would be filled with music and laughter. How can I ever laugh again?

We watch the news. We see all over the world people are protesting. Against Israel! Our people were just massacred. By terrorists! Hamas started a war and yet people are marching in the streets saying Israel is to blame. That’s like saying the United States was to blame for 9/11. It’s insanity. And yet from Sydney to Paris to college campuses all across North America students and PROFESSORS are rising up and calling for the death of Jews. Don’t they get it? Don’t they know what Hamas is? Don’t they know Iran is behind it? My family fled Nazi Germany to Palestine (yes, that is what our country was called in 1939) because it was one of the few countries taking in Jews, and not very many at that since the British-controlled Palestine restricted immigration to just a few thousand Jews a year.

So now, my family, whom the Nazis never had the chance to kill, die at the hands of the new Nazis. I see the signs these protestors carry: Israel = Genocide. They know nothing of genocide. Israel’s Arabs make up over twenty percent of our population and are growing every year. If we were committing genocide would their numbers be shrinking? Ron and I, and our children in turn, have always done what we could to promote peace. Tuval could have been earning much more money if she didn’t do so much pro bono work for Palestinian clients. Yet she believed that everyone is equal and should be afforded the same rights. We hear on the news that the Gazan workers, men whom Tuval helped get work visas, gave Hamas maps of the layout of the kibbutzim. Hamas knew exactly where to go. 

By week two our neighbors have divided into two camps–those whose children have died, and those whose children are hostages. It wasn’t deliberate, it just happened. They have hope, we don’t. We pray for their families–that they should never know the horrors we’ve gone through, that we’re still going through. That we’ll always go through. 

We watch more news. We see what’s going on in Gaza. No one here is celebrating. No one here wants to see more death and destruction. It will not bring our children back. It will not bring back all those babies dying in Gaza. We want this to stop. We want our hostages back. Why won’t Hamas return them? They know Israel will keep bombing and yet they won’t do anything to stop it. Their hate for us is so great that they’d rather let their people be bombed than give us back our parents and children. Why won’t it end? When will it end?