To me, the strangest part of being in a war is not the disruption to routine, the uncertainty, the sirens and the news.

It’s that it feels so familiar.

We got the alert about Israel’s pre-emptive strike on Iran on Shabbat morning, shortly followed by the first siren of the day.

With barely a thought, we made our way to our mamad [safe room].

The message that gatherings were prohibited, and school cancelled until at least Monday night, came soon after.

And I could feel myself automatically going through the week, recalibrating, reforming what I thought the near future would look like.

Because I’ve been here before. Once, twice… in fact, more times than I can count, since March 2020.

There’s a question in a mental health questionnaire called the Adult Hope Scale (Snyder et al. 1991). It asks participants to rate how true certain statements are in order to assess their level of hope.

One of the statements is:

“My past experiences have prepared me well for my future.”

When I read that line, I can’t help thinking about the COVID years. Not that anything can justify the very real pain and difficulty they caused. But they may have prepared us to manage uncertainty, pivot when needed and be resilient — skills that are undoubtedly needed in wartime, when we don’t know what the next minute will bring, let alone the next 24 hours.

My oldest daughter is nine years old. Two-thirds of her life has been dominated by world events that disrupt her day-to-day routine. For my youngest daughter, who is two-and-a-half, that fraction rises to about 95%.

Thinking about this gives me a new understanding of one of Yeshayahu’s prophecies about the End of Days:

“.כתתו חרבותם לאתים וחניתותיהם למזמרות לא ישא גוי אל גוי חרב ולא ילמדו עוד מלחמה…”

“…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” (Isaiah 2:4)

While this verse clearly refers to weapons and military strategy no longer being necessary, I choose to interpret it much more widely.

All of us in Israel, whether we are on the battlefront or the home front, child or adult, have “learned” war. We know the stress and exhaustion of being woken by sirens, being kept awake by the booms, having our lives and routines unexpectedly and indefinitely disrupted by world events far bigger than our small lives.

So just as I am blessed to be raising children who do not know what it feels like to grow up as a minority in a non-Jewish society, I bless my children that their children will grow up not having to “learn” war.

And I am proud that they pray for that too.

Just this week, as we were choosing that afternoon’s soundtrack, my six-year-old son requested Hatikva 6’s song ‘Vayehi Ohr’, “because at the end they say ‘כולם יחזרו הביתה ולא נדע עוד מלחמה’ [‘Everyone will come home and we will not longer know war.’].”

I looked at him with pride and wonder, as well as grief for the carefree childhood denied him.

“Why aren’t you saying amen?!” he demanded.

I invite you all to heed his request and say amen.

Snyder, C. R., Harris, C., Anderson, J. R., Holleran, S. A., Irving, L. M., Sigmon, S. T., Yoshinobu, L., Gibb, J., Langelle, C., & Harney, P. (1991). The will and the ways: Development and validation of an individual-differences measure of hope. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(4), 570–585.

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