The hostages are home. Most reservists are back at their desks. The sirens come and go. And the war is not over.

Decades of clinical practice with trauma raise a concern about what Israel is now living through. The country expected relief. The country is not getting relief. The conditions for relief do not yet exist. Israel is in something the trauma literature handles poorly: a condition between war and peace, where the threat has eased but not ended, and the body cannot tell the difference.

Here is what the patterns look like. Marriages that have held through more than two years of war and uncertain pause are coming apart now. Mothers who functioned beautifully under rocket fire cannot get out of bed on a Tuesday. Grandparents who watched grandchildren go to war cannot let themselves feel relief, because relief feels premature. Hostage families adjusting to homecoming discover that the reunion does not look like what they pictured. Mental health clinics fill up after the fighting eases, not during it.

The country is reaching for the word it has always used for chronic threat. Matzav. The situation. The word may no longer be holding what it is being asked to hold.

The word may not be enough

Matzav has carried Israelis through wars, intifadas, and rocket fire. It has been more than a description — it has been a way of coping, a casual word that says we know what this is, we have been here before, we will be here again.

What Israelis are now living through may be more than the word can hold: vigilance without action, relief without trust, and quiet that cannot be fully inhabited as safety. Matzav before October 7 was a shared cognitive shorthand. After October 7, it became something else. The first Iran confrontation, the uncertain pause that followed, and now a second active war with Iran have changed it again. Matzav no longer points simply to what has occurred, but to what may yet unfold. It now carries the burden of indeterminacy: a state in which threat is neither fully present nor safely past.

This is not a matter of semantics. The word a person uses for what they are living shapes what they allow themselves to feel. When matzav is used for the current condition, it carries an implicit message: that what is being experienced is the same kind of thing that has been managed before, and that the person struggling now should be able to manage it too. The casual register can also do quieter work. It can let the person say something about their experience without quite saying it. It can substitute description for engagement. This kind of avoidance is not deliberate, and it is not failure — it is what casual words do when they are asked to carry too much. But the cost is real. The body knows what is being avoided, even when the mind has found a word that lets it not look. The word no........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)