My family lives in a small town between Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee. Like most Israelis, last night we were still trying to understand the explosions of thousands of enemy beepers held by Hezbollah in Lebanon, not to mention a possible IDF ground invastion. We have sons in the armed forces. So we are always walking a thin line between hoping for maximal defeat over our foes, while quietly preferring that our own family doesn’t have to be in unusual danger for it to happen.

So, last night we watched the news on television, which we usually do NOT do. It was all about the beepers and the precision strike to eliminate senior Hezbollah commanders. Then after the news there was a program documenting the rise of Hezbollah and its present leader Nasrallah.

We left our cell phones on while sleeping in order to be able to hear any emergency communication from people we know, and to hear warnings of incoming rockets. In the small hours of the night, the response to these two latest blows we struck in Lebanon, came indeed. Our “friendly” neighbor decided to pull out heavier weapons that they have received from the “peace loving” sponsor of international terrorism known as Iran. These longer-range missiles were sent in several salvos towards areas just west and just east of us.

Since none of these weapons were aimed directly toward where we live, we did not hear sirens, but rather only the smartphone app notifications for other areas. Each time this happened, within less than a minute we heard a series of thuds, muffled “boom… boom, boom.” The bombs were aimed at Ramat David Air Force Base, and many other civilian centers in the North including the town where my parents live, and including Nazareth and its suburbs. We heard the Nazareth booms, and the Cana village boom – closer than others we have heard in the past months over Tzfat and the Golan Heights. Sometimes we can’t tell if the faint thuds are normal noises of trucks and highway work. Last night it was very clear, especially when the windowpanes rattled.

Inexplicably, I was able to fall back asleep quickly, my wife less so. And then while it was still dark, our son had to wake up and get ready to go back to his army base for more basic training.

During all those booms, we did not go to our bomb shelter room, blithely trusting the army computer trajectory predictor that those particular rockets were not headed our way! (For if the trajectory predictor had predicted the bombs would fall on our town, our sirens would have sounded.)

Later, after waking up and sipping coffee, when the next “booms” arrived, we did sit in the bomb shelter for the designated 10 minutes, next to our emergency food, water and blankets. Unfortunately, we also have quite a few books there, which give the room a musty smell when we close the thick metal covering over the window to seal ourselves in.

It’s so surreal to realize day after day that: no, life is not as it was. No, the jets overhead are not doing practice flights to get young pilots up to speed. Rather this war is with us to stay – for months and maybe years. The pilots are not practicing. They are again and again, all throughout the day and night, leaving Israeli airspace, to venture into enemy territory on their varieties of missions.

How can life go on, you ask? After months (and years) of constant bombardment. I’ll tell you. I don’t know. But life does go on. The world-famous Jewish thinker Max Nordau, saw this dystopian future in the late 1800s – that human progress was “progressing” towards less civility and not more, less love among nations and not more.

Wars and rumors of war, anyone?