Israeli parents are facing a difficult moment. In recent days, many of our children have been asking questions that are painfully simple and surprisingly hard to answer.

Why is Iran firing missiles at us from the sky? What do they want from us? What did we do to them? What can we do to make them stop?

And the answers we find ourselves giving are almost embarrassing in their simplicity. They want nothing from us. We did nothing to cause this hatred. And there is nothing we can offer that would make them stop.

These answer feels deeply unsatisfying because we raise our children in a culture shaped by rational thinking. The language we teach them is the language of logic: causes and consequences, motives and interests, strategy and outcomes. We teach them to analyze actions through facts, evidence, and reason.

Yet these tools – important as they are – cannot fully explain the theological language with which this war is being waged from the other side.

Iran’s war against Israel is not territorial. It is not about natural resources. In rational, secular terms, it is difficult to understand. Iran acts against its own economic interests. It endangers regional stability, harms its own citizens, and even risks damaging relationships with its allies. From a rational perspective, these actions make little sense.

So why does it continue?

Because the framework guiding Iran is not the rational, Western one that shapes our thinking. It is a theological and messianic worldview.

In this worldview, survival itself is victory. Wars are fought to the last drop of blood. The present can burn if it serves a distant, redemptive future. Time is measured not in weeks or months, but in generations.

Our instinct is to interpret wars using our own intellectual tools. But perhaps we should ask a more unsettling question: what if our tools are not always the most effective ones for understanding the conflict we face? What if the asymmetry between us and our enemies is not only military or strategic – but also conceptual?

Perhaps we are at a disadvantage precisely because we insist on interpreting a theological war through purely rational categories.

If that is true, then what we may be missing today is not another strategy, and not another military tool. What we may be missing is a story.

Not a political slogan, but a narrative rooted in historical memory.

The Jewish people began as a family that carried a set of unusual ideas in the ancient world. Over time, that family became a nation – sometimes scattered, often divided, never entirely unified. It was a people whose customs were different and whose presence was often unsettling to surrounding civilizations.

Yet throughout centuries of exile, conflict, and internal disagreement, this people preserved a vision of the future.

The prophets of Israel gave voice to that vision: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares.” “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” “And through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

At a time when many cultures glorified power and conquest, the Jewish tradition insisted on imagining a world beyond war.

Maimonides later described that future in simple terms: a world with “no famine and no war, no envy and no competition.”

With the exception of Amalek, the symbolic embodiment of evil in the biblical imagination, every nation is ultimately meant to be part of the future toward which this vision points.

This idea, the deeply humanistic core of Jewish tradition, is the beating heart of our story. It is our moral compass. It reminds us of who we aspire to be as a people and what kind of future we seek to build.

Cultures and ideologies that sanctify death stand in direct opposition to this vision. Throughout history, such forces have repeatedly turned against the Jewish people.

At times, we are forced to fight back, not only in order to survive as a nation, but in order to ensure that the idea we carry continues to pass from generation to generation until, one day, it can finally be realized.

The questions our children ask us may seem simple. But the answers they require are not purely strategic or political.

They are, at their core, theological.

Instead of dismissing that language as irrational fantasy, perhaps we should learn to understand it. Doing so may help us grasp the deeper nature of the war we are facing – and give us the strength to endure it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)