On choosing life when the sirens sound

A personal essay from Israel

I do not know if I will be here next week. This is not a metaphor. And yet, I get up every morning and make choices as if my life matters, as if the people I love are worth protecting, as if tomorrow is worth imagining. That, I have come to understand, is what hope actually is. Not a feeling that arrives or disappears. A stance. A daily decision to live in a life-affirming way rather than a life-diminishing one.

I did not arrive at this understanding lightly. I am the daughter of two survivors of the Shoah. In my family, hope was never a comfortable or decorative thing. It was a choice made in the face of annihilation, a decision repeated daily to continue, to build, to love, to bring children into the world. For my parents, and therefore for me, hope was always a near-political act. A refusal. A declaration that life has value even when everything around you is trying to prove otherwise. Choosing hope, in the world I came from, was choosing life itself.

Hope, in ordinary life, is so natural we barely notice it. But what happens to it when the sirens sound three times in a night, and you run to the shelter half-asleep, your body already trained to fear before your mind has fully woken? I have found that hope, under this kind of pressure, asks three things of me: that I maintain a sense of agency, however small; that I locate safety in the present moment rather than an imagined future, I am safe now, the alert is over, this is enough; and that I witness suffering without collapsing into it. To be moved without being swept away. These three things together are what allow me to imagine a future.

The Western world has lived, since the Second World War, inside a parenthesis: a fragile, historically unusual period in which many people came to believe that war belonged to the past. That parenthesis is closing. The grief of that lost innocence is real and should be named. ‘Make peace not war’ was not wrong as a value. But as a description of the world, it turned out to be a wish. What this reckoning demands is a different relationship with time: not confidence about the future, but a hope rooted in the present tense. And it is precisely this hope, grounded and clear-eyed, that becomes an agent of change, insisting that how we live now matters, even when now is all we can be certain of.

My people have always known this. The resilience you witness here in Israel runs deep, through generations of people who chose to build rather than abandon, to sing rather than fall silent, to bring new life into a world that kept threatening to extinguish it. It expresses itself not in grand declarations but in acts of radical, instinctive solidarity. I think of a paramedic, working during a missile alert, who covers a newborn child just delivered in the ambulance with his own body. That image stops me every time. It is the most precise image of hope I know: a human being, in the middle of danger, choosing to protect the most fragile piece of the future with everything he has.

I think too of the parents in the shelters who sing, invent games, tell stories, reshaping fear into something bearable for their children. Like Roberto Benigni in La Vita è Bella, they do not pretend the danger is not real. And yet they sing. That is hope as action, not a feeling, but a choice made on behalf of life.

Here is the paradox I find most remarkable: Israel, where the sirens are not a memory but a present reality, ranks among the happiest nations on earth. This is not denial. It is the result of something profound. When the illusion of permanent safety is stripped away, what remains is meaning, connection, the knowledge that the people around you will cover your child with their body if they have to. Happiness does not require the absence of danger. It requires the presence of love, purpose, and the daily choice to affirm that life is worth living.

What hope does to me is keep me capable of all of this: oriented toward the people I love, toward the morning, toward the possibility of next week even when next week is not assured. And what I do for hope is carry it as my inheritance. My parents survived the unsurvivable and chose life anyway. That choice was handed to me. I intend to keep it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)