Cana Galpeein ’18

Posted on December 8, 2023

Having been asked to write this, it’s the first time that I’m looking at the past month and a half as a series of separate incidents, and not as one, long, continuous account. It feels either like just one day or my entire life, but there are distinct moments within it.

There is the moment on Simchat Torah, when we spent Shabbat with soldiers from the Nativ military company, which is comprised of soldiers who are undergoing the conversion process. We celebrated the holiday together—soldiers, commanding officers, and rabbis. There were sirens; it was a long and emotional day, but when I think about it I mostly remember my soldiers who took off their white [holiday] shirts and put on their uniforms. The Rabbi blessed them and they got in their cars and drove south. For me, that’s where the war began.

There was the moment when my husband called to tell me that he was turning off his phone and going into Gaza with his soldiers. He asked me to pray for him and since then, I always wonder if my prayers are good enough, protective enough for him.

I was discharged from the army a week ago, after three and a half years of service as an officer in the education corps. I always thought it would be a moment of release, of freedom, but when it’s like this during a war, I simply feel like I’m not in the right place.

My teacher’s father died of old age. He wasn’t a casualty of combat, he didn’t live in the Gaza Envelope, and a missile didn’t fall on his house; he was very old and he died at a ripe old age. I read the announcement twice; it took me a moment to understand it.

I feel like part of history; I feel all of the generations of this nation with me – leaving Egypt, writing the Mishna, the Shoah, and the establishment of the State of Israel—and this gives me strength. Even murder like this can’t annihilate us; there is sufficient confirmation of this from the entire world. We now feel like the nation that we are and this gives me strength.