“The Sound of Fear”

March 20 2026

There were four sirens in a row last night, just after midnight: first the phone alerts, in several languages, warning us to move to shelters; then, five minutes later, the wailing sirens themselves; then the thumping booms overhead as we tried to tell whether Iron Dome had intercepted the missiles or whether we were hearing a direct hit; and finally the tense silence as we waited to hear if ambulance sirens would follow – or if the night would simply go quiet again.

Jerusalem was relatively spared last night. After the fourth siren, nearly 1 a.m., all of us at home – in sweats and socks, shoes nearby, ready for the next round – went back to bed.

Like most nights this past week, I sat with my elderly mother, who is bedbound after a fall and unable to reach the safe room next door. She sits up in bed as the sirens wail, blurry from pain meds, and sings “Que Sera, Sera – whatever will be, will be.” It is not fatalism. It’s just what it is – some vague faith combined with helpless acceptance. It’s not Russian or Persian Roulette. It’s our fault as much as anybody’s. It’s fate and faith and life and death and chance and will and all at once.

I hold her hand and sing along.

She is old enough to remember the Blitz in London and to tell stories of many wars and sirens in Israel since she arrived here in 1952. To ease her time in bed, I’ve been reading aloud. Earlier this week I opened Virginia Woolf’s 1940 essay, written during the Battle of Britain, Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid:

“I can hear the hum of the aero-plane. It is a sound that should be beautiful… But it is a sound of fear. The only way to stop that sound is to use our minds. We are the thinkers; we are the makers of the world that is to come… We must lie in the dark and think. We must think peace into existence… Unless we can think peace, we shall never have it.”

The alerts vibrate – all clear.

Too wired to sleep, I begin the routine ritual of checking in with friends – especially those without safe rooms, like my sister outside Tel Aviv, or friends in the West Bank who have no shelters at all, no sirens either. Short texts, stickers, emojis, jokes. We’ve learned to Morse-code solidarity with dark humor.

Right next door, my brother and his wife are hosting two families: two of their daughters‑in‑law, one eight-months pregnant, plus nine grandchildren under twelve, while their fathers (my two nephews) are again on reserve duty up north on the Lebanon border. The house is small, but the bomb shelter is big enough, and for three weeks now it has held them all. On siren-heavy nights it feels like a grim PJ party, and it’s hard to get the kids back to sleep.

All clear. Soon the lights go out, phones quiet down, and none of us know when the next alert will wake us. We sleep with charged phones, shoes nearby or on our feet, ears on alert.

It is worse in Tel Aviv, and now in the north. Still, we are expected to get used to the abnormal new normal, though many of us refuse to normalize a brutal war that some insist is necessary, while many others see it as senseless, immoral, and politically driven – a war that will not bring security, only more hatred.

Many Israelis in my world detest Bibi, fight for his removal, work to dismantle the occupation, and yet claim that this war is necessary because Iran has been out to get us and spared no words or weapons to do so. Yes – this ongoing war on Iran is championed by corrupt tyrants who are trying to get off criminal trials and deflect blame for atrocities, by cabinets and colation of war mongers and zealots who do not have human rights in mind – and yet – Iran and its proxy powers, guilty of so much blood including its own people, had to be stopped. At any price? For how long? Do we believe them?

Or? And?

Whatever side we take in the debate, or a few truths held together – when the sirens scream and the booms thud, we seek shelter in the same vulnerable human body. Desire to live is a common bond. It is in the tense silence between sirens, especially at night, that words feel most futile. Then all one needs is another person’s hand. We are in this together.

When my mother grew tired of Woolf’s musings, I turned to poetry.

This fragment by Michael Zatz, in Hebrew, struck a chord:

“In the end, what does a human need?
At least one other human,
who will reflect their eyes back to them,
who will echo their voice,
who will break their existential loneliness,
those transparent walls
between the outside and the inside,
who will hold with trembling palms the soul,
naked, fragile,
and treat it with tenderness.
In the end, all a human needs
is a human.”

The Hebrew word elem (אֵלֶם) means mute or speechless, and that is how many of us have felt these past days and weeks: helpless, wordless, tired, worried, sad, scared, confused – on mute.

I’m sitting now on a balcony in Jerusalem. The sun is shining, and ten days into this round, emergency sirens are still blaring a mile away after shrapnel from a missile fell on a building. No casualties this time. We keep waiting for the next alarm, living the ritual of stopping mid-sentence, or mid-anything, to run for shelter, wait it out, count the booms, and return to whatever we were doing.

Frantic texts get shorter: You OK? Where? What? Who?
Emotions contract when communication does. We focus on those nearby, on the people within reach, at the expense of others – even loved ones – beyond the immediate circle. The perimeter narrows. As Leah Goldberg wrote, “The circle is contracted, smaller: another week, another month, another year.”

(Inserted from a 3/10/26 note) Almost two weeks into this “roaring lion” war – whatever the Americans, Iranians, and everyone else are calling it – we knew something was coming, there was clear writing on the safe room walls – and yet that early Saturday morning siren still caught us off guard.

The wail of sirens drowns out the titles and polished language that fail to name the horror now being inflicted upon millions, and the question remains whether there is any such thing as even partially moral war.

I have been trying to articulate my thoughts, to communicate with family and friends abroad, but the fog of war makes language feel thin and insufficient. So this is another attempt: to spill it out now and edit later, as witness, and as someone living through this moment with one eye on the mythic and the bigger picture, while still managing the ordinary basics of body, home, and the people right here who are hiding from missiles.

The pull of the particular is strong right now. Under threat, we turn inward. We cling to those nearest to us, to the people who speak our language, share our memory, and feel familiar in the bones. That pull is human, even necessary. But it can also shrink our moral horizon until those just beyond our circle become invisible, or worse, suspect. We know how quickly solidarity can harden into tribalism, how easily comfort becomes exclusion.

I get it. I am one with those whose fate and future I share, those whose stories and jokes and losses are mine to recognize without translation. And yet I also know that the shift from “we” to “us versus them” is where fear begins to breed hate. We are called, especially now, to widen the circle without denying the particular – to hold both rootedness and responsibility, tribe and humanity.

Purim this year sharpened that dilemma. Can we celebrate Jewish survival without sliding into vengeance? Can we honor the miracle of endurance without turning trauma into triumphalism? Now that Jewish sovereignty is real, the old victim story can no longer be told innocently, and power must be met with responsibility. The question is not whether we have a people; it is whether we can become a people who do not confuse safety with supremacy.

(Returning to 3/20/26 notes) And now – weeks later – impossibly – Spring is erupting – Ramadan draws to an end, with little joy or fanfare. Spring’s season of the sacred flourishes beyond the religious frameworks and also frames them in this land that holds it all.

The moon fills up. We are entering Passover, and the temptation of the particular is more powerful – again: to retreat into our own narrow story. Our liberation. Not yours.

But the tradition keeps whispering otherwise. Liberation was never meant to be private property. The Exodus is for each of us to widen our own empathy and empowerment, to free ourselves of our old fears and shackles, to breathe better. It was always a call to enlarge the circle of care, to remember that freedom is unfinished so long as it is denied to others. When will we learn? Next year in a shelter – or in a place we can’t even imagine yet?

Another siren wails, interrupting this musing. We look at each other, shrug, grab the laptops, and go down two flights to our makeshift shelter on the bottom of the steps – sighing, waiting, counting, exhaling. All clear. And then again.

And still we must imagine something beyond this man‑made mess. Like Woolf wrote:

“Unless we can think peace into existence we – not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born – will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead.”

Not another wall, another partition, another shelter built against one another, but a larger and truer shelter: one made of simple stuff like basic justice, courage to contain the complex even when it hurts the old familiar, mutual responsibility – simple stuff like showing up when someone hurts.

Another word that keeps coming up is Beseder (בְּסֵדֶר) – how are you? Beseder I’m ok. We’re alright.

It’s the same word that we use to describe the Passover procedure – ‘order’ – the wish that everything is as it should be, step by step, like Jacob’s ladder, chaos and order, course by course, linear lineage, land for all and love is love.

We’re not beseder. But also – we are. The words flee. This is just a rough draft of something bigger that may or may not be written, manifest, live on, make sense, make love.

I’m grateful to those who show up, kindly, clearly, like the words and images, the hand squeezes and the smiles, the songs that softly sing themselves to sleep and the silence that is not the loud shallowness of fake friendship and kinda-care we all are guilty of but deep like drinking thick ladles of the most sustaining soup of life. Like Seder soup. The recipes of the imagined comfort, the soul food of my people, the simple stuff of life.

We have to find the words that break the barriers, beyond the crass and careless, to tell the truth, to widen the circle, to build a shelter big enough for all of us with windows all around, and forgiveness, and pillows, and pages and pages of blank pages where we can start again. Here comes another siren. The silence will continue on the other side.

~ Amichai Lau-Lavie