Opinion: How a rabbi talks to her kids about the war in Israel

The brownies we baked Friday before the long weekend of the Jewish holidays of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah still sit untouched in our kitchen. My kids and I made them for a play date on Sunday; we had invited their new friends whose family moved here from Israel just a few weeks ago.

By Sunday, much in the world had changed. I decided to tell my kids about the war in Israel at breakfast; I knew that they would hear about it when we got to our synagogue and I imagined it would come up at the play date later.

As a rabbi and parent of elementary-age students, I started with the familiar. I asked my kids if they say a prayer for shalom (peace) at their Jewish day school during prayers each day. They both nodded, munching on their yogurt parfaits, clearly wondering where this conversation was headed.

“Where do we pray for peace to happen?” I asked. My second-grader proudly stated: “Yisrael!” I explained that although we pray for peace every day, today we are especially praying for peace, because there is a war in Israel.

My second-grader began to tell us about other wars in Israel that he had learned about in school, including one that was only six days long. He wondered if this war was going to be as quick. I wondered aloud with him, knowing this would most likely not be the case.

I showed my kids the cover of the newspaper that had arrived in our home that morning, which had a photo of rockets in the sky over Israel. My kindergartner asked: “Does God like the people who are sending the rockets to Israel?”

“What do you think?” I calmly responded, as I do whenever my kids ask me a powerful question. We didn’t have a chance to process this question as my older son moved our conversation from the theological to the personal.

“Will my moreh (teacher) be in the war?” my second-grader asked about his assistant Hebrew teacher from last year. My heart sank. My son had grown very close with this instructor, who was part of a program that allows Israelis to spend their gap year before their army service as ambassadors, which can include teaching at Jewish schools abroad. He wanted to know if his teacher was now helping to block the rockets from coming into Israel. My son happily concluded on his own that his teacher was probably at a “computer coding things, because he likes coding.” I wasn’t so sure.

My kids also wondered about their cousins who live in Israel. I explained that instead of going to synagogue, their cousins had spent most of the holiday in bomb shelters. My sons were curious if we have bomb shelters here in America too.

The conversation ended with me assuring our kids that we are safe here in the United States and that if they have more questions about the war, they can always ask me or Daddy.

When they finished breakfast, we headed to our synagogue, where different emotions filled the room. There was plenty of dancing with the Torahs in honor of Simchat Torah but there were also quieter songs connected to recognition of the sad moment. We concluded the dancing by singing a hopeful song about peace: “Lo yisah goy el goy cherev, v’lo yilmadu od michlamah” (Nation shall not lift up sword against another nation, neither should they learn war anymore).

Hearing the words to this song, which comes from the Book of Isaiah, brought me back to when I was a kindergartner, as my younger son is now. This was the song we learned in my class during the Gulf War. I recall singing those words each day, seated in a circle on the carpet, hoping that the constant images of war I saw on television would come to an end.

As I sang this song Sunday as a parent, I realized that, like many other prayers, it’s a way for us to bring comfort to ourselves and to our communities when the world around us feels so dark.

After the dancing ended, we walked home to get ready for our visitors and to serve the brownies that my kids had been eyeing for two days. But my husband informed us that the play date was canceled.

When I told my kids that their new friends couldn’t come over, they asked if it was because of the war. “Yes,” I responded, “your play date was canceled because of the war.” Right now, I don’t feel sure of much else.

Yael Buechler is the lower school rabbi at the Leffell School in Westchester, N.Y., and founder of Midrash Manicures.