We are not as fragile as the moment seems

This morning reframed everything for me.

Like many people, I woke up with what I can only describe as a “war hangover” - feeling slow, heavy, a little nauseated from the emotional whiplash of it all.

I’m tired of the politicking.

The push and pull.

That constant feeling of standing at the edge of a cliff - and then the lurch of the sudden, disorienting stop.

And then comes the eerie quiet.

The kind where you can suddenly hear your own inner world again.

And it’s… a mess.

But this morning, I had to shake it off because we had somewhere to be.

We drove to Alon Shvut to meet the sofer (Scribe) who is making my son’s tefillin, as we prepare for his bar mitzvah. My parents met us there. The plan was simple: to learn how tefillin are made, and to understand something of the spirituality behind the process.

To begin, the sofer told us about a great scribe from just over 100 years ago, during the Ottoman period.

“Every 17-year-old boy was conscripted into the Ottoman army,” he said.

“Can you imagine? Being forced to serve in the army of your conquerors?”

And then he paused.

“What a different life we live now.”

And obviously, he’s right.

Our children are not being taken to serve foreign empires.

Our soldiers and pilots fight under our own flag, to defend our own people, in our own land.

In the span of history, that is not normal.

That is new.

That is miraculous.

Later, he invited my husband and my father to place the parshiot into the bayit of my son’s tefillin.

And as he explained each detail, the three-branched shin for the Avot, the four-branched shin for the Imahot, the twelve divisions for the tribes, I felt a tethering.

Not just to tradition, but to our people.

To a story that is ancient, continuous, and alive.

Driving home through Gush Etzion, past vineyards and rolling hills, we talked about Bereshit, about how the stories of our ancestors didn’t happen somewhere abstract, but here. In this land. On these roads.

And I kept thinking:

Tefillin are not just a mitzvah, they are an inheritance.

An unbroken thread, from Sinai, to exile, to return.

So yes, this moment is complicated.

But this morning reminded me:

We are not living inside an ordinary chapter of history.

We are living inside something our ancestors could only dream of.

There is something amazing about realizing that while history shifts and wars begin and end, there are threads that remain untouched and pass quietly, steadily, from hand to hand, generation to generation.

This morning, I felt those threads tighten just a little, pulling me back into place, back into a story that is far older, and far more enduring, than this moment alone.

The fact that scribes make teffilin and young Jewish boys join our covenant, in a time of war and chaos, says everything about the Jewish priority of peoplehood, the seriousness with which we take our mitzvot, and the continuity of our peoplehood.

That too is miraculous.

I felt humbled to witness this holy tradition.

I felt the chains link, the generations merge, and my heart gave a little sigh of relief.

We are not as fragile as the moment seems.

Our eternity does not depend on the whims of politics.

Maybe it rests in little black boxes that lie like crowns; a daily, unbroken promise of who we are, and who we will always be.