On living with mortal danger and the inexplicable joy of belonging to this people

A personal essay from Israel

I do not know if I will still be here next week. This is not a metaphor. If a one-ton missile falls on my house, no shelter, however solid, will be enough. I know this. I live with this. And still, every minute I remain alive, I find myself struck by something I can only call admiration: for the people I belong to, for the country that holds us all.

The fear is real. It lives in the body, not just the mind. Yesterday, when the sirens sounded and I moved to the shelter with my manicurist, a woman I see often, whose hands are steady and whose smile is warm, I watched something happen to her. A heaviness settled in her chest. Her breathing changed. Standing beside her, I didn’t need words to understand what was happening. This was not a single moment of fear. This was the weight of accumulated years: wars, terrorist attacks, the chronic, grinding knowledge that life can end without warning. The vortex of that trauma, the depth of it, was palpable. I could feel it pulling at her.

There are many people like her in this country. Millions, in fact. The cumulative effect of living under existential threat, for generations, not just years, manifests in ways that are well documented: collective trauma, hyper-vigilance, polarization, a constant hum of unease beneath even the most ordinary days. This is real, and it must be named. To look away from it would be dishonest.

And yet, and I say this with full awareness of how strange it sounds, if I am truthful, I must also confess to joy.

Not the joy of someone who has forgotten the danger, or chosen to ignore it. Not a performance of optimism. A real, quiet, stubborn joy, one that coexists with the fear rather than replacing it. I have been asking myself where it comes from, and the answer I keep returning to is this: it comes from witnessing the extraordinary life force of this people.

Consider, for a moment, the creativity that blooms here even in crisis. Someone built an app for singles to meet in shelters, because why should war stop love? Someone else wrote an algorithm to calculate whether there is enough time to shower before the next siren. I laughed when I heard this, and then I felt something swell in my chest that was not quite laughter and not quite tears. It was recognition. This is who we are. This is the absurd, brilliant, irreducible will to live, not merely to survive, but to live fully, with humor and ingenuity and romance, even inside the shelter.

But the image that moves me most is simpler than any app or algorithm. It is the parents. Every time the sirens wail and families scramble into shelters, I see parents doing something quietly extraordinary: they transform the moment. They sing. They invent games. They tell stories. They take the raw material of fear and reshape it, for their children’s sake, into something bearable, even wonderful. I think of Roberto Benigni in La Vita è Bella, turning the horror of a concentration camp into a game so his son would not be consumed by terror. What those parents do in these shelters is the same act of love, the same defiant insistence that the human spirit will not be extinguished.

I live in a paradox, and I have stopped trying to resolve it. The fear is true. The joy is also true. The danger is real. So is the love, the visible, daily, unashamed love and devotion people show for one another here, in ways that can take your breath away. A country that knows it may not survive has, in some profound and counterintuitive sense, learned something about how to live.

I do not know if I will be here next week. But I am here now. And now, for all its terror and its grief, is filled with a people whose resilience, creativity, and capacity for love I find, there is no other word for it, magnificent. To witness this, to belong to this: even in danger, even in fear, I would not trade it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)