Exhilarated but Frightened

On the one hand, I was exhilarated by the feeling that we in Israel are living through a world historical event that could change the face of the Mideast forever. On the other hand, I was terrified by the danger of the Iranian response sure to come. In davening that morning, I looked around and thought to myself: Every single person in this minyan has all that is most precious to him — wife, children, grandchildren — in a situation of danger.

Apparently, I was not the only one overwhelmed by the feeling that something momentous was taking place. As soon as we finished reciting Tehillim, one soft-spoken member of the minyan — neither a recognized talmid chacham (in a minyan with several), nor, I think, a native Hebrew speaker — suddenly stood up and delivered a speech on the miracles we were witnessing and urging everyone present to increase their kavanah in davening and to work on their mitzvos ben adam l’chaveiro. I would have thought him the least likely person in the minyan to do so, but he obviously could not contain himself.

TO TELL THE TRUTH, I was taken by surprise by the news. True, the day before, Michael Oren, the distinguished historian and former ambassador to the United States, had written that an Israeli attack felt imminent. But I was not convinced. As Oren himself admitted, a large contingent of the anti-Netanyahu press and some in his own Likud party had long dismissed his threats against Iran as bluster, and concluded that given his instinctive cautiousness, he would never undertake an action fraught with so much danger without an explicit green light from President Trump, which did not appear to be forthcoming.

But I and many much more knowledgeable and astute observers than myself, including Haviv Rettig Gur, were wrong. As Oren told the Free Press’s Bari Weiss Friday afternoon Israel time, “This was the moment for which Bibi feels he was born. To save and to preserve the Jewish People.”