This is not a funny time. People have been injured. People have been killed. We are at war. And yet somehow there is a strange humor, a strange continuity of life and hope, that allowed us to enjoy a Passover celebrating freedom in improbable circumstances, not unlike the story of the Jewish people throughout the ages, and in fact it allowed us to fulfill strangely the words of the Haggadah.

All in all, all genuine seriousness aside, It would be dishonest not to admit that parts of the last 24 hours contained more than a little comedy. Dry. Dark. Certainly not for everyone. But if I didn’t have humor in me, I don’t think I’d cope at all. So let me work backwards.

As the festival drew to a close this evening, we once again found ourselves under attack, praying the concluding service of Passover in our safe room listening to rockets overhead. But to understand the full absurdity of that sentence, I need to go back to earlier in the day. And to the night before.

Earlier that afternoon came what may have been the most bizarre moment of the entire Passover day. Picture the scene. I’m in the park with my sister, my mother, my brother-in-law, my youngest nephew, my wonderful carer, and our dog Buddy. I should mention at this point that I am 50 years old, have a terminal illness called PSP, and am wheelchair bound. Buddy chooses this precise moment to almost start a fight with an unleashed four-legged friend. For reasons known only to my body, this triggers a very significant powerdown. I’m sitting in the park, staring straight ahead into the ether, looking fairly out of it.

Then the warning siren sounds. This helpful noise informs you that you have a few minutes before a ballistic missile may land somewhere nearby. We’re four or five minutes from home. My carer takes off with me in the wheelchair, the family following, and we rush back. By now I’m in considerably worse condition than when the dog kicked things off. Stress and noise are triggers, by the way.

Then comes the second siren. The one-minute warning. The one that tells you something is genuinely inbound in your area and you need to be in the shelter now. I am now practically frozen. And for some bizarre reason I start humming, making soft rhythmic noises to myself, very quietly. The sort of thing you might remember from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Because it is a Jewish holiday and people are around in the streets, my sister quite rightly invites those outside our house into the shelter. My wife counts 22 people in our safe room. Of those, 10 were people we didn’t know at all. We’re there for 10 minutes. Nothing lands. I am mute. About an hour later, I come back to myself and return to something like normal.

Now rewind again. The night before. Three in the morning. The advance warning siren goes and I make a decision. A real decision. Considered. Under time pressure. With consequences. I decide I need the toilet. Being stuck in a shelter for 10 minutes, possibly longer, desperately needing the loo is a specific form of misery I was not prepared to experience. I just made it in time. Assistance was required. This time it’s just the family in the shelter: my carer, my mother, my wife, two of my kids, four nieces and nephews, and my brother-in-law. It was not a chatty room at three in the morning.

On Seder night, we say the words we say every year. All who are hungry, let them come and eat. We say them knowing that people are not going to randomly turn up at our door looking for a meal. We have already invited our guests. This year however we did exactly that. Not during the Seder but hours later, in the afternoon, when we welcomed strangers into our shelter during a ballistic missile attack. We didn’t offer food. We offered shelter. It may not be what the Haggadah imagined but it felt uncomfortably close to what it meant.

None of this is funny. We are being attacked by ballistic missiles. We are running for shelters again and again. We are celebrating the end of our slavery in Egypt and our journey toward the Land of Israel, where we now are, under fire. I am a 50-year-old man with a terminal illness, pushed in a wheelchair, humming softly to myself in a bomb shelter. Absolutely nothing is funny. And yet strangely it is. It’s absurd. And absurdity has a way of turning into laughter once you survive it, which is why I find myself the following evening laughing about it.

I am not a brave person. That’s my son. He ran into battle on the 7th of October. We have many people like him, who thankfully keep us safe. We have lost too many of them. Yet we all persevere. You can call it resilience, stupidity, a coping mechanism, absurdity, or simply the Jewish story. Twain called us immortal. What he noticed, I think, is that we are constitutionally incapable of treating the apocalypse as a reason not to live. We hope.

Despite what looks like a nightmare of a day, we had fun and a lovely festival. We argued about Twain’s statement on Jewish immortality , around the Seder table, and whether it was true and why. We invited strangers into our bomb shelter because that is what you do. We carry on, we fight, we laugh, we live, we love, whether or not we are under existential threat, whether or not we are tearing ourselves apart, whether or not terminal illness is doing what it does.

Twenty-two people in a small room on Passover in Israel, under fire. Somehow, we had fun.

Chag Sameach. A happy and kosher Passover to everyone. May we all be safe.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)