Time spent in a shelter raises an unsettling question: are we simply at war—or witnessing something larger?

As I sat in the shelter of my building in Jerusalem, I heard a sound I had never heard before—a low, menacing roar overhead, like a freight train tearing through the sky. It was not the familiar whine of jets we hear all the time. This was deeper, heavier, closer.

You don’t forget a sound like that.

It is the sound of something meant to destroy—passing just above your head.

Moments later, the all-clear sounded. People stepped back into the street. Conversations resumed. Life, as it so often does in Israel, snapped back into place.

And yet nothing is quite the same.

Missiles fall. Sirens wail. People run for shelter. And then—almost impossibly—life resumes. A building is struck here, while another, just meters away, remains untouched. A family is shaken but safe. A street bears the scars of impact, while the one beside it looks unchanged.

It is in those moments—when danger and normalcy sit side by side—that the question begins to press in:  What exactly are we witnessing?

My dear friend Julie Weissman, affiliated with Nishmat and a Bet Shemesh resident, struck me with a comparison that felt both ancient and immediate. She spoke about the biblical plague of fire and hail—the storm that devastated Egypt while sparing the homes of the Israelites.

“They must have been dumbstruck,” she said.

It is an arresting word. But it captures something real.

Because today, in Israel, there are moments that feel eerily familiar. Missiles rain down—real, deadly, indiscriminate—and yet there are also moments of protection that defy easy explanation. A near miss. A warning that comes just in time. A miklat (a shelter) is just a few feet away. A building is hit but lives spared.

Again and again, Israelis find themselves standing in that narrow space between catastrophe and survival.

You do not have to be naïve to notice it. And you do not have to claim certainty to feel that something about it is larger than the moment itself.

War is, of course, brutal, human, and strategic. There are enemies, decisions, consequences. But layered on top of that reality is something harder to explain: the experience of living through events that feel, at times, almost biblical—not only in their intensity, but in their stark contrasts.

Destruction here. Protection there. Fear, and then relief. Over and over again.

Julie did not offer conclusions. She asked a question—one that lingers long after the sirens stop.

Are we simply watching another chapter of history unfold?  Or are we living through something that we will only recognize for what it is when it is over?

The Israelites, standing in Goshen as fire and hail fell around them, could not have understood the full meaning of what they were experiencing. They could only see the contrast. They could only feel the astonishment.

Perhaps that is where we are now.

Not at the end of the story, but somewhere in the middle of it—hearing the roar overhead, stepping back into the light, and wondering whether we are merely surviving history… or living through something far greater.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)