What was intended to be a “kvell” in this issue of The Shofar — a boast about the state of our shul and the Visionary Award we just won from the USJC for our Lunch and Learn Hybrid idea — faded with the crisis in Israel. It appeared for all to see that “the little shul that could,” competing with the larger, more affluent, well-staffed synagogues on Long Island, had come out on top. We were a star in that present universe. Until the past…

The past in the present. The unending conflict in Israel. The hail of rockets and bombs. The primal struggle in yet another round of evolving violence with Arab neighbors, coupled now with the civil unrest that stirs fear when carrying out the most mundane of everyday tasks.

But life goes on — in bomb shelters, in safe rooms. It is a heartbreaking political symphony of hate-filled fundamentalism. It is an intractable and dissonant reality, coupled with fear and death. And when my children with family in Ashkelon and two grandchildren in the IDF are under the hail of rockets and incendiary kites, it is a gut-wrenching clash of life and death, of the past imposing itself in soaring relief on the present.

The past is the present. How well I remember those terrifying conversations with my daughter huddled in a safe room in Tel Aviv in 1991 as Saddam dropped scuds on Israel. That was 30 years ago. But then is now without the gas masks.

Now we have a cease fire — a fragile cessation of destruction. How long will it hold? Ten days of fighting. Hundreds of lives lost. Even as the cease-fire announcements were made, the sirens wailed.

The past is the present…

—Judith K. Weiner