Ten Dispatches from Haifa — a City Under Attack

1. As the sky begins to dim outside, I prepare my go-bag, refilling the water bottles and packing something to eat. 

When I get the warning on my phone, I text my friends and family that I’m on my way back to the shelter at the school next door. 

This has become a routine, and there is comfort in routine, even this one. 

2. During the first attack on Haifa, my neighbors and I held our breath as the shelter shook from the impact of explosions overhead. I texted my partner Yoav—stuck in the US on what was supposed to be a weekend trip—and told him that I love him. 

I thanked God for my life and apologized for having spent so much of it wasting time—being bored, staring at screens, obsessing over petty things. 

An hour later I found myself in bed, restless, scrolling on Instagram. 

I had again forgotten the value of life—a sign that I again felt safe. 

3. A family home in Tamra. An apartment building in Bat Yam. A school in Bnei Brak. 

Other cities. Other buildings. 

Men and women and children. 

4. Down the street from my apartment, people hold signs and beg the passing cars not to forget about the hostages—not to let the novelty of today’s crisis eclipse their ongoing nightmare in captivity. 

5. I plan a daily online mishnah class for my community. We’ll study Masechet Peah—which deals with the commandment to leave the corner of one’s field unharvested so that the poor may come and glean. The masechet asks how much of one’s field must be left unharvested, and whether the portion must be from the edge of the field or if it may also come from the middle. 

This is what it is to be a Jew—to be all the time facing the crisis of God, humanity and history while never desisting from the holy yet banal minutiae of the Torah. 

6. I learn that someone threw a brick through the window of my kosher grocer back home in Brookline, Massachusetts. On the brick, they had scrawled the words “Free Palestine.” 

I write to my friend and colleague, a rabbi who lives not far from the grocer. 

“Strangely I don’t feel unsafe,” she says, “but I do feel the ground shift under my feet in mysterious ways.” 

7. The shelter underneath the school has everything a person could possibly need. 

Outlets. A bathroom. An air conditioner. 

A curious baby to smile at. 

A barking dog to be annoyed by. 

How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob!

Thy dwellings, O Israel! 

8. When you hear the boom, there is a split second where you wonder if this is it, if the structure around you will crumple up like a piece of notebook paper and the lights will go out suddenly and forever. 

In the second that follows, I remember that for the hostages in Gaza—and for countless Palestinian civilians—this fear has been unrelenting for over 600 days.

9. During the day, the café down the street is packed with people. A sign on the door says “Takeaway Only Because of the Situation,” but every table is full—a clear violation of the current security orders. 

The loophole at work, it seems, is that they give you your coffee in a disposable cup. If you insist on drinking it at one of their tables, well, that’s your business. 

Thus they sell us an illicit sense of normalcy like speakeasies once dispensed bootleg booze. 

10. In the shelter, I read psalms from a pocket sized Tanakh issued by the army to my grandfather during the Korean war. 

“You need not fear the terror by night,

or the arrow that flies by day.”

The most oft-repeated commandment in the Torah is “do not fear.” 

Sometimes, it comes as the startling exhortation of an angel as it manifests to human eyes. 

Other times, as in this line from Psalms, it is a soft and gentle reassurance, whispered like the whisperings of the mothers in the shelter who tell their crying children “just a few more minutes and we’ll go home.”

Matthew Schultz is a Jewish Journal columnist and rabbinical student at Hebrew College. He is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (Tupelo, 2020) and lives in Boston and Jerusalem.