Everyday tears

Sometimes it's the normal that brings the tears. 

Not the overwhelming tragedies, the horrors, the terrorist atrocities, the cruel fate of battle, the bone deep, heartsick pain we all live with since October 7. 

Sometimes, maybe even often, what brings the tears are the intrusions of normal life, everyday joys, peacetime routine or ordinary childhood innocence. 

The moments of repreve. The glimpses of a life that was. 

Like on Friday watching our traditional local Adloyada Purim parade. 

Last year it was cancelled due to the war and we substituted a much more low key event with just our school, a tribute to Israel and the many, many families and staff in the school with a parent or sibling, or both, or more, called up to emergency reserve duty. 

This year the mayor decided that the Adloyada would go ahead, despite the war and the terrible sadness engulfing the country after the return of several dead hostages, including Shiri Bibas and her two little boys Ariel and Kfir. 

As I have done for so very many years, even before I had children to take to the parade, I grabbed my camera and made my way down to the central palm tree lined boulevard closed off each year for the Adloyada. 

My younger kids and I found a nice spot with a clear view along the road ahead and were joined by an elderly relative as excited as the little children for the spectacle to begin.

As the first marchers and colourful floats came down the street though I made a new discovery. It's hard to see through the camera lens when your eyes are full of tears. 

The smiling children, the upbeat pop arrangements of Israeli heritage songs, the bright homemade costumes, the whimsical floats and handwritten signs - it all hit me like a sledgehammer of innocence, of the carefree peaceful days we all desperately long for, of normal life that seems like another world. 

A tumult of emotion that has been frozen, submerged, through wartime weeks and months of body blow after body blow. 

Every red headed small child, every Batman costume this Purim season has been a twist of the knife to the heart. It's feeling that agonising pang all over again, just like the day Shiri, Ariel and Kfir's bodies were returned to Israel after a sick Hamas gloating ceremony over their murders. And then the agony all over again of the pathology reports that confirmed that they had been murdered in cold blood, strangled by their kidnappers. 

Seeing the throngs of happy, smiling Jewish children strolling along in the Purim parade though I felt that surge of pain even stronger, a sucker punch of images of all the Jewish children Hamas murdered on October 7 and since who will never have another Purim parade. 

At the same time though I realised that I was also feeling something else, something I don't quite know how to express, but an opposite reaction to the pain and grief, though I wouldn't call it joy. It was something more profound, not pride, not elation, not victory.

For want of a better word I will call it an intense feeling of being alive. 

Of being a living Jew, a living Israeli rooted in my homeland. 

An awareness of the generations of Jewish blood flowing in my veins, an overpowering sensation of life, mine, my children's, my fellow Israelis in the parade and watching from the sides, of our connectedness like a an invisible mycelium, regenerating, carrying on even us pieces might be picked off or damaged. 

My children were fortunately enraptured by the parade and their "auntie" was too, all enthralled so much that they couldn't see how I was affected by it all, too overcome to speak, tears blurring my vision, my camera clicking on automatic even though I couldn't really see what I was photographing.

I wasn't really seeing the details through it all until suddenly everything came in to focus again, the signs of the group walking past in the parade "Am Yisrael Hai", "We are a nation of superheroes" - words from a popular, moving, wartime poem turned in to an anthemic song. The children and teachers had dressed up with simple capes and headbands illustrating the song.

It took my breath away again, lyrics that encapsulate so much of our nation's experience, a feeling of mutual care and responsibility, a sense of duty and purpose, a willingness to risk everything one has to protect our people and our homeland. This is why we are still alive, Am Yisrael Hai, because our superpower is that mutual care and responsibility, whether it's the thousands who've put aside their civilian lives to defend our country or the thousands more civilian volunteers holding the country together so that they can go and protect us.

The people making vast quantities of meals each week for the soldiers and their families, the people rebuilding the Otef and the north, the farm volunteers, the folks who go round the country each week to provide support and raise the spirits of the Nova survivors, the refugees, the wounded, the military families, the bereaved and the returned hostages and their families, even the huge numbers tying tzitzit because so many have asked for them.

It doesn't take a village, it takes a nation. This is our story, the nation of Israel lives.