When your kid calls to say he loves you.
This is a segment from The “Kids Out, Kids In” Edition.
And now it’s time for our second discussion, which we are calling Kids In.
And here’s the story behind the story.
Linda, you sent me a couple of days ago a link to an article in the Times by Miriam Jordan headlined, “Israeli mothers knew their sons would serve, but they didn’t expect war.
” And I was grateful to read it because I am one of those Israeli mothers.
The article begins with six mothers making challah together on a Friday in a Jerusalem apartment, maybe because there is an ancient ceremony that goes along with making challah that is called hafashat challah, separating the challah, when you set aside a piece of the dough symbolically for the priest who serves in the temple.
And the moment of separating a piece of the dough is by tradition considered a moment when the gates of heaven are open to accept prayer, including especially prayer for children, prayer for the sick, and prayer for the endangered.
And while the Times does not get into this somewhat mystical tradition, the article does describe one of the mothers, her voice breaking, saying, “With this challah, I want to bless my three sons who are in the army and all the soldiers.
” Just after that, the article says the phone of one of the women, Rebecca Khabib, buzzes a WhatsApp buzz.
And the message is from her 29-year-old reserve combat soldier son, Adam, who wrote, “I’m going to be without a phone soon.
Love you so much, Ma, and we’ll be in touch.
” Here is an exegesis of that short text if one is needed.
“I’m going to be without a phone soon” means, “I will soon be going with my unit for an operation inside Gaza.
” This, because soldiers do not bring their phones into Gaza, to prevent these phones and all the information they hold from falling into Khamas’ hands.
“Love you so much, Ma” means, “I know, as you know, and I know that you know, and you know that I know, that maybe I’ll be killed before we can speak again, so let my almost last words be that I love you.
” And “we’ll be in touch” means, “But don’t worry too much.
Chances are, everything will be fine.
” I know how to interpret Adam Khabib’s text to his mother, Rebecca, because early one morning this week, my boy phoned me up while I was at the gym and said, “Hey, pops, I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to be without a phone soon for a while.
I don’t know just how long.
I just wanted to say I love you so much.
” After we hung up, I phoned Susan and she was crying.
The boy called our girl, who is in America this week.
It was two in the morning when he phoned her, waking her up, but he did not want to go off to do whatever operation he was going off to do without telling her, too, that he loves her so much.
Miriam Jordan’s article says, “More than a dozen mothers said in interviews that even as their sons were trained in front-line roles as snipers, paratroopers, and commandos, they never imagined themselves raising warriors.
Nor had they expected their children to have to fight a full-blown war after Israel reached peace agreements with several Arab countries, normalization with Saudi Arabia was progressing, and Israelis were vacationing in Jordan, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates.
” The article goes on, “The mothers said they were grappling with intensifying and sometimes debilitating anxiety.
To cope, some have turned to their faith for solace.
Others meditate or both.
Some have joined support groups.
The agony is not just on the battlefield.
” So, Linda, you got kids fighting and I got one, too, as I said.
What is this experience?
What are these weeks like for you?
It’s not easy.
I think denial and whine help.
I think I’m definitely in denial a little bit about just how dangerous this is.
Now, my kids are not in Gaza.
They’re more closer to the north, one of whom is a former paratrooper who, the day the war started, he lives in Hawaii, which is about as far from your mother as you can get.
It’s literally the opposite side of the world.
And the day the war started, he just jumped on a plane.
He bought his own ticket and came here.
And so, first of all, I mean, this may sound a little, I don’t know, nuts, but it’s actually been nice being in the same country as him.
Rather, he had been gone for almost five years before he came back to fight in the war.
And he’s in the paratroopers and his unit was really on the front line with Hezbollah.
And he actually managed to keep his phone because he said to his commander that he has a business that he has to keep tabs on, so he really needs his phone.
And I think that’s the hardest thing is the not being in touch, not having a phone, not knowing, you know, somebody wrote a blog in the Times of Israel about the two check marks.
All I want to see are those two blue check marks that, you know, he got the text or an emoji.
Like I did say to my kids, you know, you don’t have to call, just send me an emoji that you’re okay.
And my younger son who was in a commando unit and finished about six months ago, there must have been some project to send flowers to your mothers because I got a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a note, which at first I thought was written by Chet GPT as his mother’s day card to me was, but it was just that he dictated it.
So that’s why there were no spelling mistakes.
And he basically said something like, you know, all of my strength comes from you and if anything should happen to me, you should know that, you know, I died doing what I thought was the right thing to do and I just started to cry.
And at the same time, I’m personally very, very busy working.
So it’s this strange kind, which I think for me is better.
It’s this strange combination of working really, really hard and yet, you know, mostly at two o’clock in the morning saying, what are they doing?
And yet also being proud.
In other words, you know, I’m the mother who, you know, wouldn’t let their kids play with guns.
And, you know, of course that’s kind of ridiculous now.
And over last Shabbat, I had my two sons, we have a lone soldier who we’ve kind of adopted and we had a couple of others and there were like, you know, guns and ammunition and tactical vests and tactical helmets all over our house in every, you know, corner.
And yet, you know, we came to Israel knowing that this was a possibility.
What do you think?
I think a lot of things.
We came to Israel knowing that this was a possibility.
I came and, you know, went into the army not exactly straight away, but really pretty soon after I came here and then I was in Lebanon in the war and it didn’t worry me and I didn’t give it a second thought.
And I certainly didn’t think about what my parents thought at that time.
And so the idea that I’d like come to Israel to this society that was embattled, it didn’t seem like a thing.
But this, having your boy in that position is such a different thing and so much worse this final words thing that everyone, like that you can’t exactly not do so that when you’re having this conversation, every conversation ends with you maybe only realize it at the, you know, after it’s over.
It ends with them clearly having thought, okay, how do I want this?
What do I want the last words that my Abba heard from me to be?
And I know that I think the same thing too, though I’m always trying to find some way to just say, to make a joke of it or to be human or to say no, no, no, or to break that last words thing.
Like that, the first, he called actually twice with a similar message because the first time he called, they told them they were going in right away, but then it didn’t happen for 12 hours or something.
So then he called after 12 hours and I said, you know, actually I’m feeling completely lordly with this is the first time you’ve told me twice in one day that you love me so much.
Like all thanks to the army.
And he responded by saying- You know, in basic training, they have to call their mother every day.
That’s part of basic training.
I know these days they do.
And now, by the way, the boys unit has put together a WhatsApp group.
I don’t know exactly who runs it.
Susan says the RASAR or the RASAP, one of the like administrative non-commissioned officers of the thing.
And so we get updates basically that are meant to say without saying it, no one has been killed, no one has been injured and no one has been killed.
But instead, like they wrote us last night saying, we are putting together a little Hanukkah booklet for the soldiers.
So please send in pictures and stories and poems so that we can put them together and we’ll print them out and we’ll give them in Gaza to all the soldiers.
Like nursery school.
Remember, we used to have to do that in nursery school.
But I think that, well, Susan said, and I think that she was right.
It’s like, they’re trying to let us know that like nothing going on here.
This is all fine.
Everything is fine.
Look, and when you think about it, I was at the gym the other day and one of the women was crying and her son was about to go into Gaza.
And she said, I’m not as strong as you.
I can’t handle this.
And I said, whine, exercise and denial.
And I said, honestly, there are, who knows, 50,000, 60,000 soldiers in Gaza.
And I understand how terrifying it is.
But your statistical chances of it being your son are tiny.
But the every day waking up to the, I think it’s at 6.
55 every morning, the army releases its list of the people who died in the prior 24 hours.
And it’s always two to four people every day.
Two to four people have died.
And it’s not, first of all, you immediately imagine what it’s like for their parents.
They never learned from the radio.
It doesn’t get to the radio until all the loved ones know from the army directly.
But you immediately imagine what it’s like for them.
And then, I don’t know, I can’t, I’m unable to not say, oh, but then, and what would it have been like if it was me?
Every morning at 6.
55.
Well, I have to tell you, we have good friends whose son is an officer in Givati and has been in Gaza since pretty much the beginning.
And they came over to our house for Shabbat lunch a few weeks ago.
And they said that on their way over, they thought, well, what happens if the army sends someone to tell us that our son was killed?
Do they wait for us?
Do they, and it hadn’t even occurred to me.
And my husband said the same thing, that we went to someone else’s house a few weeks ago.
And he said, as he was walking home, he just was like, he just said, I hope there’s no soldier standing at my front door.
And then I saw on Facebook that somebody’s soldier, they had made packages for the families, but they had a soldier deliver it.
And so, she got a knock on the door and opened the door.
And it was someone dressed in uniform.
And she almost fainted, who was bringing her a cake for Shabbat from her soldier’s unit or whatever.
And my older son told me that they were at Kentucky Fried Chicken yesterday.
And he said that they haven’t, you know, everywhere they go to eat, people are paying for them.
And I spoke to someone who said that she went up to the, you know, went up and said, I want to pay for the soldier’s meal.
And he said, well, I’m sorry, but you’re the sixth person who’s asked so far.
And there’s something like just kind of amazing about that.
And you know, people baking cookies and halot, and you know, there’s this sense that it really is everybody’s kid.
But I mean, I think, I don’t know.
I just try not to.
There is.
And I feel that too about everyone else’s kid, but it is entirely a different world than your own kid also.
Yes.
And both things are true.
For sure.
And I have an app on my watch and my phone that tells me how I’m sleeping.
And the app is like really, really alarmed, has been growing more alarmed since the boy went into Gaza.
It started by hectoring me.
It’s like, dude, what are you doing?
You’re not sleeping.
And then it was like truly alarmed.
This is a threat to your health.
This is whatever.
And I’m a big fan of wine, but.
Wine will only take you so far.
And I think, I register, I think this is genuinely true that you are much more sane and psychologically healthy than me.
But.
Denial.
I’m genuinely in denial.
But also, I mean, I really try to look at it statistically, but that said, I think it’s also the not having the phone thing.
That’s just so hard.
Remember the David, is it Amos Oz?
No, David Grossman.
David Grossman.
Yeah.
David Grossman.
And it’s like, if you run away from it, then it won’t happen.
So I’m just in denial, I think.
