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On the seventh morning of this past Passover, I walked gingerly to synagogue. I was still groggy from a 3:00 AM siren and wondering what had become of the ultimatum issued to Iran before I turned off my phone for the final day of the holiday. When I arrived, I saw a friend sitting outside with that weary look common among parents of five young children who have been "jumping off the walls" for nearly six weeks at home during a war. Her youngest lay at her feet on his belly, whacking a stick into a muddy puddle leftover from the previous day’s rainstorm.
"How are you?" I asked.
"Actually, now I’m great!" she smiled. "Did you hear the news? There’s been a ceasefire. They opened the Straits of Hormuz."
I hadn’t heard. But as I entered the sanctuary, the congregation had just risen to hear the "Song of the Sea"—the chapter of Exodus depicting the splitting of the Red Sea. It is read on the final day of Passover each year, the anniversary of the miracle itself. Of course, I thought. The warning had to be issued on the eve of this commemoration; of course it involved another body of water being opened to free passage.
If the ceasefire holds, it would mean the war had run for a course of roughly forty days—a time period synonymous with transformation in the Bible. The Hebrew word for Egypt is Mitzrayim, which in Jewish thought is often read as meitzarim, or "narrow straits." Could it be mere coincidence that a "Strait" sat at the center of the current conflict? Even my friend’s toddler, with his grubby stick, began to take on cosmic significance—a mini Moses raising his staff before the splitting of the sea.
Personally, I have never been one for modern "miracle stories," Bible codes, or hidden predictions embedded in numerical patterns. I teach literature; naturally, I love stories and myths. But I have always understood them as just that: human attempts to find patterns in the world and imbue it with significance. Yet, at some point since I moved to Israel, my mindset began to shift. There is something about being in a land of such biblical gravity that makes a person feel as though she is living within the pages of the Book itself.
Take the start of the recent conflagration with Iran, which ignited on the morning of Shabbat Zachor, the "Sabbath of Remembering." On this Shabbat, we are commanded to "remember what Amalek did to you on your journey after you left Egypt" (Deut. 25:17). Amalek has been "having a moment" lately among certain Western commentators. Despite the fact that the injunction to remember Amalek appears in the same Bible that both Jews and Christians cherish, some have latched onto it as an example of Jewish "treachery." This ignores the straightforward nature of the commandment: to destroy a predatory evil that would gladly murder the weak, the elderly, and the infirm. In truth, the commandment to "blot out the memory of Amalek" has rarely functioned as a practical mandate for modern Jews; we recall it annually as a symbolic reminder of the limits of moral relativism—a call to confront evil where it exists.
This past Shabbat Zachor was the most memorable of my life. Synagogues across the country closed early as sirens rang out. It seemed most Israeli Jews would be unable to hear the biblically mandated passage read from a Torah scroll. In my neighborhood, word spread that it would be read on a street corner at noon sharp. Dozens of neighbors emerged from their homes and safe rooms as if out of nowhere. Just as the Torah reader unfurled the scroll, an early missile warning rang out. I assumed the crowd would scatter, but one older man shouted, "Just keep going!"
The biblical verses were chanted with precision. Upon completion, the actual siren blared, and the listeners disappeared as suddenly as they had emerged. Later that evening, we would learn the improbable news: the Iranian leadership had been struck that same morning. The timing aligned almost exactly with the reading of Zachor.
The Purim that followed was a constrained one. Celebrations were cancelled, and public readings of the Scroll of Esther were curtailed. Children were devastated to miss showing off their costumes. In the Bible, Purim takes place in Persia—the ancient forerunner of Iran. The holiday celebrates the "great reversal" (v’nahafoch hu) of a plot by Haman to destroy the Jewish people. And indeed, we were experiencing a modern reversal of a lot cast against us by a neo-Persian Islamist empire. After decades of Iranian-sponsored proxy terror, our fortunes seemed to pivot—thanks in part to the assistance of a great world power.
Since we were stuck inside for much of that Purim, humorous memes circulated like wildfire: Khamenei contains the same Hebrew letters as Haman; Trump was likened to Ahashverosh; Benjamin Netanyahu to the righteous Mordechai (who the Bible notes is from the tribe of Benjamin). "Who then is Esther?" people asked. "Ivanka? Miriam Adelson?" While the analogies eventually veered into parody, no one could doubt that something remarkable was happening. One friend remarked, "Purim may have been cancelled, but this was the truest Purim we’ve ever had."
For many, these feelings have been gestating since October 7th. While Hamas chose the timing of their assault to coincide with Simchat Torah, it was left to us to parse the significance of it occurring at the climax of the yearly Torah cycle. Precisely two years later, the freeing of hostages during Sukkot—the "Season of Our Joy"—made for one of the most poignant celebrations in memory.
This is not a new concept in Judaism. The requirement to remember the Exodus is a case in point. We do not merely relay the miracles of the past. At the Passover Seder, we say, "In every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he has personally left Egypt." Jewish tradition demands a reliving, not just a remembering.
I recently bought my son a graphic novel called The Mythmakers by John Hendrix, which depicts the friendship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The book explores what "myth" truly is—stories where the categories of "fact" or "fiction" are secondary to how they help a culture understand its soul. A true myth, the narrator explains, "takes place in a 'time out of time' and a 'place out of place'—separated from our reachable world."
What I have realized after the events of the last few years is that moving to Israel changes the nature of the "myth." The events of the Bible stop being distant stories and start to feel like a blueprint. We no longer need convoluted hermeneutic somersaults to see the connections; they are simple and palpable. The terrorists of Hamas do not have to be located in ancient Philistine territory to be associated with our ancient enemies (though they are). They do not have to call themselves Palestinians to recall the adversaries of the Israelites (though they do).
We also read Ezekiel 37 over Passover—the "Vision of the Dry Bones." God places the prophet in a valley of bones and asks, "O human being, can these bones live again?" On a symbolic level, we know the answer: a vanquished people can be reborn. But in the prophecy, the parable takes a literal turn. Ezekiel hears a "sound of rattling, and the bones came together, bone to matching bone." God tells the people: "I will put my breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil."
The beauty of myth is that, with enough exposure, you learn to read between the lines. You recognize where a narrative is heading. But living a story in medias res—in the thick of things—is never as clear. Does this ceasefire spell a meaningful turning point, or is it just a pause in a long grind? Which of today’s leaders is an aging, delusional Saul, and who might emerge as a Davidic alternative?
Living the Bible in real time does not give us prophetic access to the future. It does not immunize us from mistakes, nor does it dull the sharp pain of grief. But it does assure us that what is taking place is far from random. It suggests that a magnificent plan is still unfolding, and that the center of the Jewish story remains where it has always been: here, in the Land.
