Moment of silence at music festival site commemoration pierced by painful scream
Galia Miller Sprung: It’s Always October
October. It’s always October. The month of surprise wars – The Yom Kippur War and now, October 7th. Two years since the invasion.
October used to be a good month. My parents’ wedding anniversary was on October 7th. The World Series. And my Aliyah anniversary. On October 5th, 1970, at 2:00 am, I landed in Lod, later Ben Gurion, Airport. Easy calculation. It’s been 55 years. That’s what I was going to write about, but it doesn’t feel right. We are dealing with two years of loss, rockets, missiles, drones, sitting in bomb shelters or safe rooms, burials, shiva calls, yahrzeits, heroes, trauma, and fear. Two years of words and pictures we cannot get out of our heads.
And disappointment. Even anger sometimes. Not just mine—my friends’ too. We share our hurt and disbelief. Not about antisemitism, although that’s everywhere. There is something more personal. It’s about the silence from people we thought would be there. The ones we thought would be the first to show concern on October 7th. Even October 8th, or 9th or 10th.
This is not political.
In those first days, we were the #1 news item worldwide. We were – still are – fighting an existential war. Over 300,000 reservists were called up. Thousands more fought for seats on airplanes to get back to Israel to join their units. We were all in imminent danger. 1200 had been slaughtered. 1200 lives that connected to thousands more.
It could have been the San Andreas Fault “Big One,” a hurricane in Miami. An epic disaster anywhere. A time when you reach out to people you know in the danger zone. This disaster happened to be an unimaginable horror directed at the people of Israel.
From day one, friends—especially those we hadn’t heard from in years— found a way to get in touch. It was like a pep rally from those high school and college days. Only now there was support. Love. Caring. That’s all we needed. I treasured every text, phone call, social media message, private or public, even an emoji on a posting. Knowing that someone was taking the time to express their concern for our safety always boosted my spirits.
But we couldn’t ignore what wasn’t there.
“Write about that” a friend said recently. “About the absence of those we thought would be the first to check in. Not out of politics, not out of ideology. Just out of friendship.”
It’s a sobering and painful moment when you realize those close friends really aren’t.
There is residual hurt, but eventually, we continue without them while keeping in our hearts those who did reach out. Now that we are approaching the two-year mark, remembering the hurt is part of the personal reflection of twenty-four months of war we are all going through, whether we are aware of it or not.
There’s a balance we all seek. We all need. We have been living the war for two years. We stopped our lives for a very long time. The strange thing is, I don’t know how long that was. How long has there been no ads on any TV channel? How long were the TV stations 100% news all day and all night? How long did we keep the TV on all day, waiting for more information, listening to interviews with survivors of the horrific attacks from the Nova, from kibbutzim and moshavim and towns of Sderot and Netivot and Ofakim?
How long did we plan each outing to the market or doctor or shiva call or whatever took us away from our protected space? “Wear long pants for lying on the ground along the road.” How long were schools closed, activities canceled?
And then, unexpectedly, a promo on Kan 11 TV station:
“Garlic, Pepper and Olive Oil is returning next Friday evening!”
The first non-news program. What does that mean? We’re going back to normal? The war is over? Of course not. Maybe like a “floater” to see the reaction to something normal. Regular programming. It was my birthday. I didn’t watch the show, and we didn’t celebrate even though it was one of those milestone birthdays. But looking back, I think starting with a culinary program was a good idea. Comfort food. No politics.
The producers were sensitive. They filmed the show at Danny’s Farm, a special therapeutic farm for combat injuries in Moshav Sitria, and dedicated a short spot each week to small business owners, who, like everyone else, were—and still are—struggling to keep their business going. And 18 months later, they are still filming there using the same format. Because we all love our soldiers and our food.
And we put our favorite foods, the non-refrigerated comfort foods- in our safe rooms. I didn’t mention the first Gulf War in 1991 because it was neither a surprise nor an October war, but it did require a stocked “sealed room.” Then my daughters were in high school, and we kept a supply of fresh chocolate chip cookies in the sealed room. I don’t know how we ate them with gas masks on, but those cookies kept disappearing!
This time, it’s just my husband and me. The safe room is still stocked, but we’ve been pilfering the supply. Canned goods, crackers, tuna. Fortunately, we never needed any of it. We never stayed in long enough to need to eat. There is an art to the rockets and missiles and time needed in safe rooms. If the rockets are from the north or south, we’re usually out after ten minutes. From Iran, longer. First, the anticipation that ballistic missiles are on the way, wondering where our interceptors would “greet” them. Then waiting for all the huge chunks from the interception to descend from space. From Yemen? An annoyance. They rarely affect us. We turn to dark humor.
I saw a YouTube comedy clip that sums up our situation: a missile alert sounds. The comedian, visibly annoyed, says, “I want to know where the missile is coming from before I wake up the kids!”
So, we joke and laugh and it’s October again. The war isn’t over. Alerts still sound. But I’m taking back October. I will celebrate my 55th Aliyah anniversary and focus on real friends and on the friends and soldiers we’ve all lost. I’ll kick the news habit and tune into the playoffs and the World Series instead. There’s nothing like the crack of the bat on a homerun pitch and the cracking of peanuts in the shell to revive the spirit.
galia
Galia Miller Sprung grew up in Southern California, graduated from UCLA in 1970 and immediately left all that behind to become a farmer and founding member of a moshav on the Jordanian border. Today, a retired high school teacher, she is a writer and editor and Israel advocate living with her husband near Kfar Saba.
Originally Published in the San Diego Jewish Journal
Permission by the author
