I took the kids to the beach on the eve of Yom Kippur, when the sun was still hanging high. My heart was also hanging, torn between fear and the need to make sure everyone returned home breathing and whole. Yet for a few brief moments, I was able to surrender to the waves. Those rare, fragile moments reminded me how wildly freeing it is to give yourself over to the sea in a storm.
After Yom Kippur, we began building our sukkah in the yard under the large pergola. I say "began," even though it's been standing there, decorated, for two years now. The Sukkot before the war broke out, we celebrated the birth of our baby girl there. Our seventh child, but we celebrated her as though she were the first.
When the holiday ended, the joy drained away and fear began to gnaw at the walls. We took down the sukkah reluctantly. Since then, those same colorful paper chains have hung on the pergola. Not out of laziness. On October 7, I promised myself I wouldn't remove them until the war was over and the hostages came home. A year later, I added black chains. For the humor, if nothing else.
But really, paper chains can't possibly survive the rain, the sun, or my son swinging up to the roof. It shouldn't be possible. Then again, neither should being held hostage in Gaza's underground.
I've been looking at those chains for 730 days now, asking myself how we manage to endure in a sukkah, a fragile, temporary home. Maybe that's exactly what the sages meant when they ruled that a sukkah's roof must be thin enough to see the stars through it. Maybe they wanted to remind us that even in transience, there must be an opening to the heavens, a glimpse of hope that after the darkness, light will return.
Invisible pains
Over the past two years, I've been writing short stories about heroes of the war, and in the past year, about the widows left behind. I gathered their stories into a book called What Do You Know About Longing. One woman wrote me a message that pierced my heart: You write about women whose homes collapsed, but some of us lost our homes before they were ever built.
She's 30. She searched for love for years. Recently, she had found it. A love unlike anything she'd known. They met in strange, fateful ways, while he was on reserve duty and she was in a sensitive position herself. But the war consumed him. He wasn't killed or wounded, yet trauma took him over and he couldn't return to who he was. He left her, and she had to let go of her dream of building a home. "What's left for me to do?" she wrote. "I'm flying east, one-way ticket. Just so you know, some of us fell apart before we even began."
Her words ached. So many walk among us carrying invisible pain. No recognition, no heroic medals, no flag to wave. I wanted to talk to her for hours, to tell her that from all I've learned walking beside widows, I've come to understand something about holding on amid impermanence. You can never be sure you're standing on solid ground, that you're truly stable. You can't know if you'll rebuild your home, or if it will ever feel permanent again. But you can know that it's possible to hold all the pieces: to cry and still laugh, to feel dead and yet alive, to love one man and still open your heart to another.
If we had met, I would have told her about a widow from the Yom Kippur War I once interviewed. She sat shiva on her first wedding anniversary. Years later, she married her late husband's best friend. When I asked to photograph her holding a picture of her first husband, she hesitated. "I'm not sure I can," she said, glancing toward the room where her current husband was sitting. And I thought, maybe the process of breaking down and rebuilding can take 51 years. Maybe even forever.
After the book came out, she sent me a message: "Last Shabbat, I heard my daughter-in-law and my grandson's wife talking about love. I joined them, and suddenly there we were, three generations, each speaking about love and its meaning in our own way."
I bet that conversation told a love story across three dimensions, all with their ups and downs. Because love is revealed through our fractures, large and small. And life itself is about holding all these fragments, while surfing one wave after another.
A teacher and friend of mine, Rabbi Yemima Mizrachi, once told me that someone suffering from post-trauma can use that same inner mechanism for something positive, post-romance. If the mind can relive painful moments from the past in the present, then maybe it can also bring back moments of life and joy.
It may sound like a cliché, but something in me believes this perspective could be a lifeline: to look back, gather the colorful moments we had in 5785, and carry them with us into 5786. That would be wonderful, because not only individuals, but all of Israeli society, is yearning for a little post-romance, and for skies full of stars we can still see through a temporary roof.
