12:35 a.m. My husband elbows me until I hear my phone on the far side of our bedroom bleeping through the earplugs that I wear to block his nightly snoring.

It is a red alert signaling an incoming missile, an imminent siren.

Wordlessly, we rise. He heads into our bomb shelter-cum-walk-in-closet, while I cinch my bathrobe and creep downstairs to a safer spot.

At the bottom of the landing, I eye our freshly packed go-bag. It contains passports, birth certificates, United States social security cards and jewelry, along with shekels and dollars plus keys to my mother’s condo in Oakland, Calif., and our recently updated and notarized wills.

My 26-year-old daughter greets me in the kitchen. In the nearby guest room, my 30-year-old daughter-in-law shares the queen-size sofa bed with her daughter, our first grandchild, who is 5 months old and fickle—one second giggling and the next, growling. They are all here because none of them have shelters or safe rooms in their rented apartments. Meanwhile, our son is stuck abroad, originally in San Francisco and now in Athens, where he awaits an El Al rescue flight that will bring Israelis home.

Home. After two and a half decades of wrestling with living here, Israel, and whining about leaving there, the United States, I have fallen hard for Tel Aviv.

Together, we exit the front door and join our neighbors two floors underground in the stairwell.

Nobody speaks.

Thanks to thick stone walls and solid construction, booms are detectable but muted, softer on the psyche.  

When I close my eyes, I picture the night sky alit with massive bombs and missile interceptors, parrying and reposting like swords.  

Ten minutes later, after the all-clear alert, we return to our rooms and pray for sleep. For peace. For an end to being pawns in a treacherous game between ego-mongering leaders in this volatile region.

But in a prone position, my head spins, husband snores, ceiling fan whirs. A plane—quieter and slower than a fighter jet—passes overhead. Once a common occurrence, this is now a rare sound since Ben-Gurion Airport’s closure several days ago.

3:31 a.m. My husband elbows me until I hear my phone bleeping through my earplugs. It is another red alert, signaling an incoming missile, an imminent siren.

Wordlessly, we rise. He heads into our closet, I creep downstairs.

I meet my daughter and daughter-in-law, cradling an unconscious infant, and together we descend dozens of steps and sit alone, without neighbors this time, without cell service.

And in that silence, we hear a not-far-enough-away boom—and our breath.

8:45 a.m. A daytime alert pings our phones. This is a new and unwelcome event, when daylight no longer offers a false sense of security, and we are sent back to the stairs.

Breathe, I tell myself, breathe.

Breathe for me, for my children, for my granddaughter, breathe for all the future generations.          

מדור לדור                                                                                                                 

Breathe.

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Jennifer Lang, a San Francisco Bay Area transplant to Tel Aviv, runs Israel Writers Studio and leads YogaProse. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts with essays in Baltimore Review, Under the Sun and elsewhere. Places We Left Behind: a memoir-in-miniature (2023) was a nonfiction and memoir finalist for the Foreword Reviews Book Awards and Landed: A yogi’s memoir in pieces & poses (2024) won a Zibby Award for Best Midlife-or-Late-in-Life Coming-of-Age. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.