A motorbike revs outside. My heart leaps.

The rapid rising tremolo lifts like the opening notes of a siren. The choke kicks in. No, not this time. Just a dratted bike.

I turn over in bed, but it’s no use, I’m startled, primed to run.

It’s been a week since I left the war, fled to Egypt. The Wrong Way, everyone joked. Moses went up, you’re going down. I’m guessing Moses wasn’t a light sleeper.

After 30 days of war my mind narrowed to a thin central plank, the reptile brain that deals with sheer bloody survival and snaps at people for no reason.

My body bloated. Perhaps it’s the cortisol, they said. Cute excuse. The guilty truth is quick packets of potato chips – each crisp could be my last! – padding a thick ring of tummy blubber.

It’s been a week now of regular sleep. My mind gingerly expands to its outer rim. I can think again.

I was scribbling notes those 30-something days of Tel Aviv under fire, snatches of experience jotted raw. I planned to write it up, a compendium of upside-down underground life:

Girls in a bomb shelter comparing dates; the stiff-backed neighbour in a wheelchair who wouldn’t let me out the front door — ‘better lose a moment in your life, than your life in a moment’; the hyena laugh of Russian boys in backwards caps on an emergency stairwell, that fateful Passover eve when at sunset they fired six solid salvos; the morning in my dressing down, Shoshi the neighbours’ dog on my lap, and I was someone else.

Was a theme emerging? Will I put our suffering on a pedestal? How we persevered, how we kept calm and carried on. How after endless sirens (what if they go on forever?) we showered and dressed for Seder, picked up friends in the car, a little girl, a dog, a chile con carne leaking into the backseat because that’s what we do, that’s who we are, davka how much more so when they try to kill us.

I didn’t keep calm. I was so shaken I drove a red light, lurching the wrong way down a main road, terrifying my Passover guests in the backseat. Surely better to cast off tradition than die a crumpled heap under a traffic light.

Why glorify the wreckage of our lives? It was awful, plain awful. There is no beauty in the propaganda of survival, no joy in fresh collective trauma, no grace in the fumbling fingers of God. As the poet says: go tell children that old lie, Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori.

Some contemporary writer gushes: How Wonderful! The Almighty saved many in Haifa that night! The missile landed, but did not detonate. How merciful is The Lord!

Please explain, Dear Sir, why that very same God let a family of four crumble and die on the intact tip of that warhead? Would that God like to take this conversation outside?

Yes, Israelis are tough and they smirk and scroll and light cigarettes and pet their neighbours’ dogs. But under courage we are lonely and frightened and doubt ourselves, second guessing every move. As I drove up the highway I watched hundreds of frightened human shapes crouch by the side of road, duck behind the guardrail, peer from ditches, waiting, watching.

I drove on, blaring Army Radio to block the siren. Brave? Stupid? Adrenaline and denial.

Thanks to the Iranians I could finally drive fast on this damn highway where I’ve wasted months sitting in traffic. And if God is such a smartass, killing four to save 40 or 400, I’ll trade in all my plagues, 10, 50, 250 at the Red Sea, for some driving pleasure. Let His Outstretched Arm and sword-wielding angels and cartwheeling prophets watch over my traffic-free revenge at 160km.

Enough, enough, dayenu.

I’m slowing down. The war is 400 miles away.

On my first day here in Dahab, the day of the ceasefire, I dropped into the store to pick up detergent, oats, honey. On the television was a scene of terrible destruction, craters of rubble and the tall red arm of a digger.

‘Beirut?’ I asked. The shopkeeper nodded.

I made a face and shook my head to say ‘What Devils!’ He handed me my change. Can he smell I’m a Jew?

On those ragged ruined nights in Tel Aviv I cursed blue murder on my sprint to the shelter, slipping into boxer shorts, boots on naked feet, fumbling my key in the door.

‘Bastards!’ ‘Bastards!”

Who gave them the right to harry me? My lips wished suffering on the men firing at our tender sleep, at my bespectacled elderly neighbours, at the lesbian couple hidden in hoodies with their backs to the wall, at poor Shoshi, at me, my hands clenched into fists. To hell with them, actual hell, the one they believe in, with fires and pits and whips. And their families. And their neighbours. And their tv stars. And their vile, vile civilisation. Let them burn and writhe.

As you can see, I don’t like to be woken up.

Here I am by the sea listening to the call to prayer, a muezzin whose voice whistles off the red cliffs, willing my mind to expand, to smooth out the curses crumpled like dirty laundry in my heart. How can I hate such a beautiful song? Is God not Great, even if he’s flaky?

Does an IRGC artilleryman not bleed? When we demolish their cities, wake their parents and children and dogs with our bombs, do they not curse us? We two peoples are banshees shrieking back and forth across Arabia, over Lebanon and the Galilee, down the Red Sea and back again, insults become missiles, missiles become insults.

We cannot bomb their God to death. Our old stories have led us astray. We are not Elijah on the heights calling down holy fire on lesser altars, nor are we Moses whose rod transformed into a giant snake, beheading the tiny Egyptian snakes, bite after bite after bite.

No. We are fools locked in a tennis match of fire. No use keeping score: the umpire is in paradise.

It’s gentle here, Sinai. The muezzin chants Friday prayers over the tannoy. I slip into cool water at the edge of the sand where water is greener than cat’s eyes, until a sharp cut at the reef to paintbox blue, a two-tone sea. The contrast tastes perfect on my eyes. It is as tranquil out here, in the bright soft day, as it is, for a moment, inside me.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)