‏There is a rhythm that keeps this country alive, and most people don’t notice it.

It moves through stairwells. It hums in apartments where the television is always just a little too loud. It sits beside hospital beds and plastic-covered couches and the slow, fragile passage of time.

The Filipino community in Israel, tens of thousands of caregivers, are the hands that lift, the voices that soothe, the steady presence at the edge of life. They bathe our parents. They learn their medications. And they memorize the stories that repeat and repeat and repeat again.

They are there when memory falters. They are there when dignity needs protecting. They are there at the very end.

And often, they are more present than we are.

Not because we don’t love our parents and grandparents.

But because modern life and stress has made caring for our elders difficult without help.

So we bring people from halfway across the world and ask them to carry what we cannot.

On Shabbat, when much of the country folds in on itself, when buses stop and shops close, there are places that remain open.

Filipino grocery stores. Places where caregivers, on their single day off, can gather and shop. Buy familiar food, speak their own language, and be something more than just “the help.”

For a few hours, they are not invisible. They get to be daughters again. Mothers. Friends and sisters. People with their own lives waiting somewhere far away.

My mom used to live in Palawan in the Philippines and she sang a song about such a place:

“Even though the house is small, The plants around it are varied. Turnip and eggplant, Winged beans and peanuts, String beans and hyacinth beans, Lima beans. Bottle gourd, sponge gourd, White gourd and pumpkin, And there are also radish, mustard, Onion, tomato, garlic, and ginger. And all around are Sesame seeds.”

And on Shabbat, one of those spaces was attacked.

A Haredi man entered a Filipino store and violently assaulted the woman behind the counter. This wasn’t just a shop — it’s the heart of the community.

And this is not happening in a vacuum.

Christian communities in Jerusalem have been dealing with their own quiet, grinding hostility for years. Priests spat on in the streets, harassed, processions disrupted, and churches vandalized.

Most people look away, or they minimize, or they say it is fringe.

The thing is, these attacks happen early and often and are no longer an aberration.

This latest one is an abomination.

We are in the middle of a war, and war does not ask why you are here. Missiles do not distinguish between Jewish citizen and Filipino caregiver.

One of the earliest casualties was a pregnant Filipina caregiver, Mary Anne Velasquez de Vera, “an angel on earth,” killed by an Iranian missile while trying to protect her elderly charge who could not make it to the bomb shelter in time.

On October 7, several were murdered while caring for elderly Israelis as well.

If you want to understand Israel, you have to sit inside this.

A deeply Jewish state, built on memory and law and sacred time, sustained in part by people who are not Jewish and who give up their own families to care for ours.

A society that reveres the commandment to honor one’s father and mother, and fulfills it in practice through migrant labor.

A city that more or less shuts down for Shabbat, except for the people who cannot afford to stop.

A war that claims everyone within its reach, whether they chose to be part of it or not.

Shabbat matters for many. So does human dignity.

Tradition matters. So does the reality of who is holding this country together when no one is looking.

The question is not whether a store should be open or closed. The question is who gets to rest and who keeps working so that rest is possible.

Who gets to enforce so-called holiness. And who absorbs the cost of it.

And here is the part we don’t like to say out loud:

We rely on the Filipino community along with others who aren’t Jewish not only for care, but for the very things we forbid ourselves.

On Shabbat and Chag, when we do not turn on lights or adjust the heat, we ask them to do it for us.

We build a system where our holiness is, in part, outsourced along with caring for our elderly.

They know when to step in quietly, when to anticipate the need, and when to make themselves seamless so that our rituals can remain intact.

But when their one single day off arrives, when they step out into the world as themselves, when they gather, shop, speak their own language, exist beyond the roles we have assigned them — suddenly, there are RULES.

Suddenly, there is OUTRAGE.

Suddenly, their presence becomes a problem for some who call themselves religious.

We will ask them to turn on our lights.

But we will not always allow them to stand in their own.

And this happened during Passover.

The holiday where we sit around our tables and say: we were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Not THEY were strangers. WE were.

We retell a story of bondage and liberation, of dignity restored, of a people commanded, again and again, to remember what it feels like to be powerless and to be dependent on the mercy of others.

And yet, in the name of holiness, in the name of preserving sacred time, there are those who abandon the very principle at the heart of that story.

What does it mean to celebrate freedom while denying dignity to the people who make our lives possible?

What does it mean to remember that we were strangers, and then turn away from the strangers in our midst?

Passover is not just about leaving Egypt.

It is about what kind of society we choose to build once we are free… whether we remember — or forget — who carried us when we could not carry ourselves.

Because long after the shouting ends, and the headlines move on, and the arguments settle back into their familiar routine, there will still be a woman from Manila sitting beside an elderly Israeli holding his hand as he forgets his own name.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)