The Jew Who Stays: With or Without the Missiles (Judean Rose)

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

It’s weird that a person can get used to missile sirens, but there it is. So I wrote on Facebook on June 1st, after I emerged from the safe room. Because it did seem odd to me that it no longer sets my heart racing when the sirens go off. I guess a person can get used to anything, which may or may not be a good thing. It is rare for a rocket to fall in our area, but not unheard of. A cavalier attitude and a chip on the shoulder isn’t very effective at keeping missiles away.

Since October 7, missile sirens have become far more frequent. They’re no longer rare, even here in Judea. The missiles are almost always intercepted by the IDF, but that doesn’t mean we’re safe. Shrapnel can do plenty of damage. Especially when we’re not just talking itty bitty pieces of metal, but giant pieces of rocket, as is often the case.

But grappling with the emotions that accompany rocket attacks is complicated. Generally, in our house it goes like this. There’s a siren, and one of us calls out to the others “Siren! Get in the mamad (safe room).”

At least, that's how it used to be. Now it's more like 'Siren' without the exclamation point. We know the drill. We look at our phones to see where the missile is coming from. If it’s from the Houthis in Yemen, there’s more warning. It takes time for those to reach us. Which means there's no need to rush from the bathroom, and there’s time to gather the essentials: food, a drink, a phone. Whatever you want to have with you for the next ten minutes, which is generally how things go.

Of course, the night of the ballistic missile attack from Iran, when over 200 rockets were launched at us, was different. Far scarier than your average rocket attack, if a rocket attack can be said to be average. I was in the kitchen, cooking and listening to something on YouTube, when suddenly a freaky early warning message cut in that had been prearranged to be broadcast to the phones of every Israeli in the country. It sounded really scary. The voice, the sound. I didn’t know what it was—at first, I thought maybe my phone had been hacked.

From the Jerusalem Post, October:

Israel’s Home Front Command deployed its new "Personal Message" missile alert system for the first time under fire Tuesday evening, following an unprecedented missile barrage from Iran. The system, based on Cell Broadcast technology, sends emergency messages directly to mobile phones in targeted areas without requiring users to download an app or register.

Unveiled in August, the system became operational during the massive missile attack from Iran, which saw over 200 missiles launched toward Israel. Tehran issued a stern warning, stating: "If the Zionist regime responds, it will face heavy attacks."

The "Personal Message" system greatly enhances Israel’s emergency readiness by providing precise, real-time alerts. Its independence from cellular networks and GPS means that it can continue to deliver life-saving instructions swiftly during crises, ensuring citizens have the best chance to respond to missile threats effectively.

The alert system uses Cell Broadcast technology, a long-established method that transmits messages via cellular antennas, similar to how FM radio works. This allows for messages to be broadcast to every mobile device in a defined area—whether it’s an entire city or just a specific neighborhood—without the need for individual phone numbers. The alerts are accompanied by a distinct sound to ensure they stand out from regular notifications.

Yup. It definitely was a “distinct sound.” It scared the bejeezus out of me—I genuinely thought we were goners. Then everyone in the house started calling for everyone else to go into the mamad. Missiles from Iran take even longer than those from Yemen, so we sat there for some 40 tense minutes. And, of course, emerged unscathed.

Another “distinct sound” is the siren app my husband installed on his phone. It goes off at about the same time as the real siren but is slightly out of sync, louder, and somehow scarier. I hate it. But he insists it’s helpful—says it’ll get us to the mamad faster.

I was talking about this during a family meal at my daughter’s house—how much I hated that app. My son-in-law leaned in and said, “Because it sounds different, you think it’s a different kind of siren. Something worse.”

He’d nailed it. It reminded me of the Personal Message missile alert system. When you hear that you think, "Something is very, VERY wrong."

Years ago, there was one of those rare occurrences where a missile came our way from Gaza. It hit only a few miles from us, but fell in an open area and no one was hurt. I was home alone, but I knew what to do. I went into the mamad and waited for the danger to pass.

But feelings are complicated. Later that day, I checked my email. At the time I was a moderator for a Jewish genealogy discussion group. The other moderators were not in Israel and they were all chatting away about inconsequential things, nothing really to do with moderation, and I felt myself begin to burn. “Why aren’t they asking about me??” I wondered.

I was really angry. I ended up saying something to the lead moderator, and he seemed surprised to hear I was upset. “I figured the rockets don’t get anywhere near you—you’re not close to Gaza.” He wasn’t wrong. They usually don’t get that far. But occasionally, like that day, they do. And the light banter of my colleagues felt deeply unsettling. As if they didn’t care that people—evil people—were targeting Israelis, targeting me, with rockets.

But the truth is, it’s not that they didn’t care. It’s that they were completely unaware. They don’t hear about the attacks. They’re not on their radar—if you’ll pardon the pun—either because the media doesn’t report them, they’re not paying attention, or they assume, like the lead moderator did, that rockets don’t reach my area.

It’s an easy assumption to make—until one actually lands. Then there's the perception that the rockets aren't really dangerous. Israel has become so effective at intercepting missiles that they rarely get through. As a result, some conclude the rockets aren’t really dangerous—that they’re crudely made, cobbled together from junk, and incapable of doing serious harm.

But that would be wrong.

I know because my son’s house in the south took a direct rocket hit on October 7. Luckily, they were not home at the time. Mainly because my son was already doing reserve duty when the war broke out, so my daughter-in-law took the kids to spend the holiday with her parents. Windows were shattered, the safe room was damaged. The solar collector was a total write-off. My daughter-in-law had to rent an apartment in the center of the country and enroll the kids in a local school until their home was repaired and it was safe for them to return.

Once the repairs were finished and they were finally back home, we went for a visit. My son showed us a massive chunk of rocket he’d kept. They were lucky. Their next-door neighbor's house was a complete loss. They aren't coming back. Being that close to Gaza, the attacks and sirens were constant. They’d had enough.

When the sirens started going off more frequently in our area, I figured it was our turn, now. The south had borne the brunt of things for so long. But we weren't “used” to running for our lives while a siren is blaring. That made it a heart-pounding experience each time it happened. We’d race into the room and count the booms. My husband and kids can tell the difference in sound between an interception and a hit, but my ears are still in training. Usually someone curses the senders of those rockets. “Effers. Effing Houthis." Things like that.

It’s hard on my boys—really men now—especially. It’s not a good feeling to have to run for cover. It makes you feel powerless. Cowardly. It makes you angry that you have to hide from danger, rather than meet it.

As I said, we’ve unfortunately adapted to this situation. My heart doesn’t pound the same way anymore. But a couple of months ago, it was different. One night, the siren went off, and my husband said, “Get the boys!” I ran to the back of the house to herd them into the mamad. (Of course, they didn’t need me to do that. They hear the sirens too. But they don’t run. At least part of that is bravado, for sure.)

A few nights later, the siren went off again, and I just about slept through it. Dov called out, “Siren! Go to the mamad.” The mamad is about two feet from our bedroom, but dazed and disoriented, my brain took over and directed me to repeat what I did last time: run to the back of the house and get the boys to the mamad, to safety. To my misfortune, my autopilot is apparently very bad at what it does. I ran smack into my son, who was already on his way toward the mamad. I mean, I really body-slammed him. He yelled, “EEMA! Where are you going??” So I turned myself around and ran into the wall—and the force of it made me fall down the few steps that lead to that part of the house. I was pretty banged up. Still have bruises one month later.

Later, when I reflected on what had happened, I was kind of awestruck. Clearly, I’d been running on instinct—maternal instinct. And I loved that. That even when my brain couldn’t think, my body still understood: protect your offspring. When the sirens go off in the middle of the night, that’s the prime directive.

Not that you really can. Missiles render regular people like me useless. Powerless. I can herd my sons into a (relatively) safe room. But I can’t keep the missiles away from them—or our home.

What I loved even more than the maternal instinct itself was that my son—the one I’d body-slammed—noticed it and said something. “You were completely out of it, and yet you came to protect us. Because you’re our mother.” It pleased me no end that he understood—and let me know it.

After that, the sirens stopped feeling like such a big deal. My heart didn’t race, and I didn’t rush into the safe room.—I walked.

We’re supposed to stay in there for ten minutes, but the boys never last that long. They leave after a few minutes. Then Dov and I look at each other—should we really stay? We’ve already heard the interceptions. The boys are out. We shrug and stay another minute or so, mostly to set a good example for them, even though they’re long gone.

But it’s a funny thing. Any noise that sounds anything like a siren makes us stop and strain our ears. Is it a siren? Could it be? It might be background music in a film, or something in someone’s voice from another room—just a pitch or tone that echoes the sound of a missile alert. And our bodies react. There’s a physical jolt, like that maternal instinct I had. Some deeper brain process takes over. I think we’re always listening, even when we don’t realize it. Our brains are listening in spite of us—and they’re ready to tell us to run.

Our street overlooks a highway, and the sound carries in odd ways—making everything seem closer than it really is. Because it’s a long, open stretch with no traffic police in the Gush, local Arabs like to drag race there. They usually do it on Shabbos, when most Jews aren’t driving, so the road’s wide open for them to show off what their cars can do. It’s LOUD. And it’s unsettling. It keeps us awake. It’s not a pleasant sound.

Last night it was not Shabbos, but only Tuesday, but they were out there and even louder than usual and it was freaking me out. I knew exactly what those sounds were, but it just kept sounding to me like sirens. Yet, there lay my husband next to me, in a sound, deep sleep.

One morning not long ago, around 5 a.m., I got up to use the bathroom. A siren went off—and I didn’t hear it. What I did hear was my husband calling the boys, which told me what was happening. He was wondering aloud where I was. Had I run for the boys and slammed into a wall again?
But no—I was just in the bathroom. And as it turns out, it’s soundproof. I never heard the siren at all.

Not long ago, it being a hot day, I trained a fan on my bed and lay down to nap. A siren went off—and nope. I did not hear it. The fan apparently obscures the sound. Should I be afraid to use the fan or go to the bathroom, for fear I won’t hear the siren? I don’t think so. It’s not likely that anything would happen to me even if I don’t hear the siren and don’t go into the safe room.

Then again, on Lag B’Omer, as we were walking to a neighbor’s barbecue, I said to Dov, “Do you know where their mamad is? Is it big enough for everyone?”

I felt compelled to ask, though I didn’t feel especially anxious about it—just a passing thought. Still, we all know the enemy—whether Houthi, Hezbollah, Hamas, or whatever; the list is long—loves to target us during our holidays. I don’t know. I just had a hunch.

We’re always saying things like that, “Be ready. I have a hunch,” and it’s almost always wrong. There’s also the Monday morning quarterbacking thing going on. The siren goes off and someone will say, “I knew it! I knew it was coming.”

But it’s ridiculous, because a part of us is always watchful now, watching and waiting.

A bit later, Dov came to tell me there was a mamad right on the same floor. Our host wasn’t sure everyone would fit, but I was welcome to use it if I wanted. I looked at Dov and said, “He’s not going to use it.” It wasn’t really a question.

Some people just don’t—or won’t—do it. They won’t cower in a shelter. They just won't. And you know what? They aren’t wrong. It’s not bravado, false or otherwise. It’s more like what I always say about terror and things like that: “If it’s got your name on it, there’s not much you can do. And if it ain’t got your number on it, why worry?”

So there we were—sitting around a long table, eating hot dogs, burgers, and wings, having a good ole time—when sure enough, the siren goes off.

Instead of jumping up, I looked around the room to see what people would do. What struck me later, in a strange sort of way, was that the first person to rise from the table was an Israeli woman—the only one in the room with no Anglo background. She stood up, then seemed not to know what to do because others weren’t getting up as quickly as she expected. Still, others did, in fact, get up. A friend asked me, “Why aren’t you getting up?” She couldn’t figure out what I was doing.

But I had seen the lay of the land. Our host wasn’t getting up. Neither was his close friend beside him. I said, “Well, if David’s not going to the mamad, I’m not going to the mamad.”

Dov decided to take my cue and sit there. Something we wouldn’t have done at home. I don’t even now know why I felt we couldn’t go to the mamad because we’d look like wusses. LOL. Like is it really better to be hit by a missile, God forbid, than to look like a wuss??

So there we were, and even our hostess wasn’t wussing out, but calmly refilling trays of food. And then there was a huge WHUMP. The floor moved violently under my feet. We looked at each other. “That was CLOSE.”

Everyone moseyed on back from the safe room to the table. My friend sat across from me and said, “Why didn’t you go? You know, there are kids here.”


Oy. I hadn’t seen them. The fact that grownups sat there during a missile siren was not good at all for them to see. I totally would have gone to the mamad had I known there were kids. They need to see us acting like—um—responsible adults. They need to take these things seriously.

Then my friend showed me her phone. A huge piece of shrapnel had fallen not far from Efrat—quite close, in fact, to homes.

A large chunk of debris from the intercepted Houthi ballistic missile landed in the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut.

No injuries were caused. pic.twitter.com/621CLfDYlF

— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) May 15, 2025

It’s not that we don’t take these things seriously. But sometimes it’s like, “I’ll be damned if I’ll let those Houthis make me run away and hide.”

It does sometimes make you seethe. Other times you just feel blasé—like, “Whatever.”

So it’s strange. So many tangled, conflicting feelings. And yet, this is our life for now—deciding whether to heed the sirens or simply stay put and carry on with whatever we were doing.

On Shabbos, I don’t use my computer. In fact, I try not to email people or go on social media even after Shabbos ends—especially when it’s still Shabbos in places like America. I don’t want to be the reason someone else ends up using their computer on Shabbos to reply to me.

It’s a gray area in Jewish law, for sure. But for me, it feels right to avoid engaging during that time. Since Shavuot is one day in Israel and two days outside, I stayed off Facebook for a couple of days.

The last status I’d written was, “It’s weird that a person can get used to missile sirens, but there it is.”

After Shavuot ended, I checked my notifications—though I wouldn’t be replying to anyone for another day or so. It was a popular post and drew a lot of responses. My friends here in Israel related. They, too, had noticed the slow process of adaptation and shared their own experiences. (The thing is, we’re so WESTERN here in Israel. It’s surreal for people like us to be under missile fire. We’re practically American, and this just doesn’t happen in New York or California—at least not yet.)

Friends outside of Israel had also left comments—admiring ones, concerned ones. And then, sticking out like a sore thumb, was a comment from a “friend” whose name I didn’t even recognize. I didn’t know we were friends. (I have more “Facebook friends” than actual friends.)

“We left Israel a week ago. There were sirens. Big deal. Not scary at all.”

That comment had me doing a slow burn. I kept going back to it, like a tongue probing a sore tooth. What was it that bothered me so much? It was difficult to explain it, even to myself. Part of it was that it didn’t ring true. You can’t hear a missile siren for the first time and not feel at least a little fear. But maybe she was just an emotionless bot. Or showing off. Or trying to one-up me—because she never had to adapt to sirens. She was going home to America after one or two of them. She had no right to that kind of bravery. Not compared to those of us who live here, under the prolonged, grinding strain of a painful, relentless war.

I decided I didn’t need to analyze it any further. People on social media are just zeroes and ones. And this woman—she was what my mother would’ve called “a pain.” I didn’t need the aggravation, whether it was real, imagined, or self-inflicted. So I was kind to myself. I deleted her comment and unfriended her. It felt good. I just hoped she wouldn’t notice and confront me—I didn’t need that either. I just needed her out of my virtual space. She wasn’t good for me. She can claim to be as tough as, or tougher than, most Israelis. But really, she’s not tough at all. She’s the Jew who left. And I’m the Jew who stays. With or without the missiles.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)