Sunday October 8 was a day long anticipated by my daughter and I, with excitement and trepidation. Today was the day she was supposed to move into her dormitory residence at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev for her study-abroad experience. We had arrived in Beersheba on Wednesday in order to spend some time getting to know the city and shopping for dorm supplies, knowing that stores would be closed from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning for Shabbat and the Simchat Torah holiday. As we drove around the city in our rental car, pausing to check out linen stores and admiring model rooms at Ikea, she wondered what her roommates would be like and talked excitedly about the fascinating courses she had lined up, and I silently wondered what it would be like to be alone back in my rented apartment in Haifa, without the company of either of my children for the first time in their lives.
Our plan for Saturday, since everything would be closed in the city, was to drive out to Tel Arad, an Iron Age archaeological site in the desert that I have been wanting to visit every time I’ve been to Israel but that was always too far out of the way. I have been fascinated with Tel Arad ever since I learned about it in grad school, and wanted to be able to use my own photos when I teach about its importance for understanding the history of ancient Israel.
Instead, we woke up Saturday morning in the one bedroom we shared in our rented bunker of an apartment to the steady thud of rocket explosions. From the sounds, some were clearly closer than others, and only a few made our building shake. The explosions continued from 6:30 until around 11:30 in the morning. We stayed in our beds in the inner room, feeling it was safest, while we scoured the internet to learn what was going on.
When I took a gap year between high school and university in 1990, I participated in a program on a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley that was part Hebrew instruction, part kibbutz-volunteer-work, and part history course. The focus of the program was biblical archaeology (a term for the discipline that has since fallen out of favor), and it hooked me in with fantasies of Indiana Jones and just the sheer pleasure of hard manual labor yielding artifacts that no one had seen for thousands of years. I still remember the first time I found pottery shards and imagined the people who made and used them, and tried to fathom what their lives would have been like. As my students know, imagining their lives is still how I spend much of my time.
In any case, the kibbutz program paired each of us students with a kibbutz family willing to “adopt” us, in order to make us feel more at home and provide some community connection for us. My adopted family, headed by R. and A. and including their four young children, became my home away from home. I looked forward to spending every afternoon and evening with them that was possible. Thirty-some years later, my daughter and I spent this past Rosh Hashanah, just a few weeks ago, with four generations of their family.
Sunday morning, as we sat in our beds and listened to the rockets falling, A. called. He knew we were in Beersheba and wanted to see if we were ok. When he learned that I still had a rental car, he said “Come back to Haifa, now. There are no rockets here, and no terrorists have come this far north. And if the situation changes, and Hezbollah starts firing from Lebanon, you will come here to the kibbutz and stay with us, in our shelter.”
I hesitated. It felt safer to stay put in the concrete bunker that passed for an Airbnb in a poor part of Beersheba (we are on a tight budget). A drive north seemed risky when rockets were still falling. At least in the cities the Iron Dome stopped the majority of them from hitting anything. My daughter and I discussed our options. We decided we should pack up and be ready to leave, just in case. And as the hours passed and we saw more and more reports of untold numbers of terrorists roaming through southern towns not far from ours, raping and slaughtering as they went, we decided that it was worth risking rocket fire over the chance of armed psychopaths shooting down our door and murdering us – or worse, dragging us alive back to Gaza.
I gathered up the first load of bags and suitcases to take to the car, which was parked a couple of blocks away, while she finished packing the last of her things. I opened the door and was about to step out when I heard movement and male voices speaking loudly. I froze, my heart thumping and my hands shaking, and it was a few seconds before I realized that the voices were speaking Hebrew, and not Arabic. I continued to the car and started loading it. Then I returned for the second load – we had all of her luggage brought from Canada for a full year away, and we had also bought everything to equip her in her dorm stay – and she joined me, our hands full and our lips tight, bodies tensed and moving quickly.
We were stopped in the alley outside our apartment by a woman in her late 30s/early 40s. She asked if we spoke English, Hebrew, or Russian (we have been asked a lot if we speak Russian during our month here). I said English but could do Hebrew if necessary. She said Russian was better; I told her that wasn’t an option, but offered Spanish or French as alternatives. We settled on English. She asked where we were going and said she was looking for a ride north for herself and her son to join her relatives in Holon. I told her apologetically that we really didn’t have room – the trunk and half the back seat of our tiny compact were already full, and we were carrying a whole other load of stuff at the time. She begged me; she said she would leave all her luggage here, she just needed to get her son away. I hesitated. She offered money, but I refused. Her son joined us at that point, a large young man maybe 17 or 18. He blinked a lot and said they would squeeze into whatever space we had. My daughter turned to me and said “We don’t need all of this stuff. We can leave some here.” I knew she was right (and I’ve always known her heart was bigger than mine). We left behind some of the supplies we had bought for her dorm, and squeezed the two of them into the back seat.
I had promised A. we would take route 6 because it was safer – there had been roadblocks set up early on route 4 for fear that terrorists were using it to move northwards. But the fastest way to Holon was on route 4, so we went. At first the roads were unbelievably clear and we drove much faster than was probably safe. But about 45 minutes in, we hit a full stop. Cars were bottlenecked and not moving. We waited, inching along. A little boy got out of the car ahead of ours and went off on the side to do his business. There was a steady stream of emergency vehicles passing us on the right shoulder. There were busloads and jeep-fuls of soldiers heading in the opposite direction as thousands of troops were continuously deployed southwards to deal with the ongoing rocket destruction, home invasions, and increasing carnage.
We talked with our passengers. We learned that they were Ukrainian refugees, who had been back and forth between Israel and Spain since they escaped the war at home back in July. The son had managed to be accepted to an Israeli program for refugees who wanted to study in Israel, a program that provided a path to citizenship for him and his mother. They had been so grateful to be able to be here, but now were wondering if they would, or should, stay. “This is much more terrifying than anything we faced at home in Ukraine,” the son told us. “Ukraine is very big, like a hundred times bigger than Israel. Israel is so small, and the rockets and terrorists are so close.” They were both clearly traumatized. His mother was playing a soothing mantra softly on her phone, and they whispered fearfully to each other in Ukrainian or Russian as they embraced periodically in the back seat while we waited for an interminable time for the traffic to move. Though none of us mentioned it, we knew that on the open road, away from the cities, we were sitting ducks for rocket attacks because the Israel defense system only operates over populated areas.
After more than an hour we reached what was a make-shift checkpoint on the highway, with emergency vehicles and heavily armed police and soldiers checking the license plates and peering into the windows of each of the cars before waving them past. Some cars had been pulled over to the side of the road and were being searched. We were waved through, and the road opened up again in front of us. We made very good time from there to Holon. Once we were in that district, we knew that the Iron Dome would once again cover us and thwart the majority of rockets that might be falling. We were all so strung out and distracted that it only occurred to us in the third hour of sitting together in the car to exchange names.
When we pulled up at the apartment building that was our Ukrainian passengers’ destination, the mother pressed us to accept the US $100 bills that she held out. We refused, and gently eased them out of the car. We hugged and said goodbye after sharing our phone numbers, and my daughter and I proceeded back to the highway and north toward Haifa.
There were two more improvised highway checkpoints before we could enter the city. Even so, we felt a palpable difference from the mood in Beersheba when we left. Everyone in our neighborhood this morning who had dared to be outside had been looking suspiciously at everyone else, fearing armed terrorist incursions. Back in Haifa though, and even in Holon when we drove through, people were out in the streets, gathered at cafes. The mood was still hushed and tense, but much closer to the Israeli norm that we had become accustomed to during our time here so far. Although less than 200 km apart, Haifa felt like a whole other world from Beersheba.
Back at our apartment, exhausted, we ate, though we weren’t hungry. We watched and read the news. We tried to sleep. We spoke with my parents and my son, and received emails from friends and family sending us their love and support. Some of them asked us when we were coming home (or straight up asked us to come home). Not my parents though. In fact, I have put them through this before, and they didn’t ask me then either.