Same House, Different Headlines  

t’s interesting to observe how children raised with the same parents, in the same home, can turn out to be so different. These differences were brought to the fore most starkly during last week’s war. (And I’m not talking about the war between the kid who stepped on his brother’s shoe by mistake, and his brother’s retaliatory stretching out of his leg to make him trip davka.)

On Friday night, Day Two of the war with Iran, the flashes of missiles and interceptors streaking across the night sky brought out my children’s personalities in dazzling detail. And I, looking for something to distract me from my anxiety, did something entirely illegal under normal circumstances: I labeled them.

Like this:

The Panicker. “Quick, get away from the window!” he shouts, as we watch the flashes in the sky in wonder. “It’s dangerous! Resisim (shrapnel) can fall! Move away, move away.” In a frenzy, he slams the windows closed and shoves us in the direction of the reinforced room.

The Chiller. “You don’t need to go to the mamad unless there’s a siren. And that loud, grinding sound on the phone is not a siren. It means there’s stuff in the sky heading toward Israel, but they don’t know where, and if it rains down on Yerushalayim, we’ll hear a siren, and only then do we need to go into the mamad.” A few minutes later, when the siren sounds, and the panicker is yelling from the mamad that we all come join him, the chiller is heading toward the kitchen to fill up a plate with cholent, later complaining that the Home Front Command instructed the mamad to be stocked with food and water, and there’s not a speck of food to be found in his inhospitable sisters’ bedroom. I’m actually quite touched when I see how the panicker is almost hyperventilating at the thought of his brother risking his life for some cholent, considering that just the day before he’d threatened him with unmentionable acts of violence over the leg-tripping incident.