Tamar Shalem ’10

Posted on November 24, 2023

If you ask me how I am now, then, in all likelihood, I’ll answer, “Fine” in an optimistic manner, quietly and tersely, and I’ll pull my shoulders up.

But the truth is that nothing is fine. For a month now, I’ve been raising my son Kedem alone, because my partner is at the Lebanon border. Yes, war is taking place there now, also—not a tense calm and not intermittent rockets, but actual war.

Between moments of anxiety and worry about my partner (and my brother-in-law, my cousin, my husband’s nephew and more and more people who are situated at the front and about whom I worry all the time), the national mourning also bursts out; really it is omnipresent. There are days when the mourning is so heavy that it’s impossible to breathe. The air is physically so dense and tough that it’s impossible to expand the lungs to take a breath, not even a very small one. Because the human evil spread out over the land and consumed every piece of good, of beauty, and of quiet. And how can we possibly ever go back to being anything like we were before that terrible Shabbat?

A week and a half ago, my close friend was notified that his father-in-law and mother-in-law’s bodies were identified among the killed in Kfar Aza. Yes, you’re reading that correctly: it took more than two and a half weeks to locate and identify their bodies. And, yes, there are still tens of bodies that have not yet been identified. When I went to offer condolences to my friend and his wife on their personal loss, I couldn’t find any words of comfort. Because I, myself, don’t find any points of hope or light amidst the great darkness. Thus, I am so not fine.

There are certain moments when I succeed in laughing and smiling, mostly thanks to my child who still doesn’t understand anything but manages to light up my world. But then I look at him and understand that he is not yet two years old, but it’s been a month since he saw his father. Not to mention that he doesn’t sleep in his bed and doesn’t play with his friends, because we relocated to live with my parents since that Shabbat. And then I remember that it’s nothing and inconsequential. It’s nonsense. We’re alive and that’s what’s important! Everything else shrinks and disappears compared to that. But again, there’s no air. It’s impossible to breathe.

The hardest thing to recognize is that our lives will never be the same again. Everything changed. Forever. There’s no more security, not even inside my house. The only thing I can think about is how I would block the door if terrorists tried to burst in. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg of the new fears that have been created inside me since that dark Shabbat.

If only it were wrapped up in one Shabbat! But we’ve been at war for a month already, and we don’t know how long it will continue, the other costs it will exact from us, and how we’ll come out on the other side of it. I remember in the first week, I thought to myself that certainly, my partner will return by Kedem’s birthday in January and we’ll celebrate it together. We will make a big, festive party. Yet suddenly I’m uncertain that it will happen.

And it’s impossible to breathe. And nothing is fine. And what of the young children who were kidnapped? No, no, I must not think of them. That’s a danger zone. There, it’s not just that there isn’t air—there, one also can’t sleep, or eat, or function at all.

This is my life. I don’t know if it will ever look different, and if so, how it will be. I can only hope that I’ll be able to, once again, feel the faith that I had before, that there can be good here.