This was shared with us by someone we have supported who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. He serves in an elite IDF unit and is currently on his seventh round of reserve duty. He wanted his story told.
Purim morning, my wife sent me a photo.
My son was a pirate. My daughter was Queen Esther, complete with a plastic crown she had been asking about since Chanukah. They were standing at the front door, ready for the carnival. My wife was smiling for the camera but I could see what was behind it. She had done the whole morning alone. Costumes, breakfast, hair, the little one's tantrum about the mask. All of it, alone.
I was three hours north, in a staging area near the Lebanese border, going through my kit and realizing my ceramic plates were the wrong size for the new vest the unit had issued. My old gear was fine for Gaza. Up here, the threat profile is different. You need the coverage.
So I spent Purim morning on the phone trying to track down plates that would fit, while my kids posed for photos I was not in.
I have been called up since October. Not continuously. Miluim works in rotations, in and out, never quite settled. You come home for a few weeks and the kids cling to you and then the tzav comes and you pack again. By now, my wife has stopped asking when this ends. We both know the answer is that nobody knows. So we stopped asking.
The north is different from Gaza. Anyone who has served both will tell you that. The terrain, the threat, the pace of it. Hezbollah built what they built for years and we are working through it systematically. My job keeps me moving, making sure the right equipment reaches the right people in the right time window. There is no drama in it. There is only the list, and whether the list is complete.
The list is never complete.
When I was home in February, my wife and I sat down and made a Pesach plan. Her parents were flying in from the States. We had found a place to rent near the Kinneret for the first days of chag. Something to look forward to. Something to hold onto. The kids had been talking about it for weeks.
Last week, El Al suspended most of its routes again. Her parents called the airline four times. The flights were cancelled, rebooked, cancelled again. The place near the Kinneret is still available, technically. But my wife is not going to load three kids into a car and drive north alone while her husband is stationed north.
So Pesach is now a kitchen table in Modiin. Her parents on a screen from Boca. Me, if the rotation works out, sitting at the head of the table for maybe one Seder before I have to get back.
I have thought a lot about what the Haggadah means this year.
We read it every year and say the same lines and they have always felt like history. Slavery. Plagues. A sea that split. A long walk into the desert. But this year it reads differently. Leaving a place is one thing. Building something in the land you were promised is harder and takes longer and costs more than the text captures in a few pages.
My grandfather came to Israel in 1948. He did not make aliyah. He fought in the War of Independence as a teenager and then built a life here because there was no other option being considered. His Pesach stories were not abstract. He knew what it cost to get here and what it cost to stay.
I made aliyah in 2020. I joined the IDF because that is what you do when the country needs it and you are capable. I do not say that to sound noble. I say it because it was the only answer that made sense to me when I looked at the situation clearly. My kids are Israeli. This is their country. If I want them to have a future here, I have to be part of building it.
That does not make it easier to miss Purim. It does not make my wife's Pesach prep any lighter. It does not get my in-laws on a plane.
But it is what it is.
We are building the kind of country where the cost is real and the reasons are real and the people paying the price are not abstractions. My kids will grow up knowing their father served. I hope they will understand, later, what the Seder was actually about when we sat down in our apartment in Modiin without the Kinneret view and without their grandparents and with one less seat filled at the table.
Next year in Jerusalem.
This year, we do what we can with what we have.