On the seventh morning of this past holiday of Passover in Israel I walked gingerly to synagogue, still groggy from a 3:00 am siren, wondering what had come of President Trump’s ultimatum to Iran issued before I turned off my phone for the final day of the holiday. When I arrived, I saw a friend sitting outside with a weary look – common among parents of five young kids 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 synagogue, the congregation had just risen to hear the Song of the Sea, the chapter of Exodus depicting the splitting of the Red Sea, which is read on the final day of Passover each year when our tradition believes the event took place. Of course, I thought, Trump’s warning had to be issued on the eve of this miraculous commemoration, of course it involved another body of water being opened up to free passage. Of course, if the ceasefire holds, this would mean that the war had run for a course of 40 days more or less, a time period associated 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 just be a coincidence that a Strait is at the center of the current conflict? Even my friend’s toddler with his grubby stick started to take on cosmic significance – a mini Moses raising his staff before the splitting of the sea.

Pharaoh and His Army Drown in the Sea. Isfahan, Iran. 19th Century. Property of the Israel Museum

Personally, I have never been one for modern miracle stories, for Bible codes or hidden predictions embedded in numerical patterns in the Torah. I teach literature, so naturally I love stories and myths. But I understand them as just that, human attempts to find patterns in the world in which we live and imbue it with meaning and significance. Yet, at some point since I moved to Israel, my mindset has begun to shift. There is something about being in a land with so much Biblical significance that makes a person start to feel like she is living in the Bible herself.

Take the start of this recent conflagration with Iran, on the morning of the Shabbat before Purim commonly known as “Shabbat Zachor,” “the Sabbath of Remembering.” On this Shabbat we are required to “remember what Amalek did to you on your journey after you left Egypt” (Deut. 25:17). Amalek has been having a bit of a moment lately in the American anti-semite camp. Despite the fact that the injunction to remember Amalek is mentioned in the same Bible that both Jews and Christians cherish, Tucker Carlson and others have been latching onto it as yet another example of Israeli and Jewish treachery. This despite the straightforward nature of the commandment – to destroy an evil nation that, if given the chance, would gladly murder us first, with a particularly malicious focus on abusing the weak, elderly, infirm, etc. In truth, the commandment to “blot out the memory of Amalek” has never really made it to the rotation of practical commandments for religious Jews. We recall it every year as a kind of symbolic reminder of the limits of moral relativism – that we are commanded to wipe out evil as best as we can.

This past Shabbat Zachor was the most memorable one of my life. Synagogues all around the country closed early as sirens rang out, and it was clear that most Israeli Jews would not be able to hear the biblically mandated passage read aloud from a Torah scroll in its proper context. In my case, word got out that it was going to be read on a nearby street corner, and at noon sharp dozens of neighbors emerged from their homes and safe rooms as if out of nowhere. Just as the Torah reader unfurled his scroll and began to chant, an early missile warning rang out. I assumed everyone would run home but one older man shouted “just keep going,” and the biblical verses were read out in a clear and precise fashion. Upon completion, the actual oncoming missile siren blared and everyone listening disappeared almost as suddenly as they had emerged. Later that evening we would discover the improbable news that the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his senior leadership had been killed that same morning by an Israeli strike. Of course, this occurred right around the same time Zachor is normally read in synagogue.

The Purim which followed was a constrained one as the war with Iran increased in intensity and rockets rained down all across Israel. Celebrations were cancelled, public readings of the Scroll of Esther were curtailed, children across the country were devastated that they would not be able to show off their costumes to their teachers and friends. Purim in the Bible takes place not in the Land of Israel but in Persia, the ancient forerunner of Iran. Purim celebrates the improbable overturning of the plot of Haman, the evil advisor to the Persian King Ahashverosh, to destroy the Jewish people. The catchphrase of the holiday is “v’nahafoch hu,” “and it was reversed.” And indeed, what we experienced was the great reversal of a terrible lot that had been cast against the Jews by the neo-Persian Islamist empire. Decades of Iranian sponsored terrorism, money and training funneled to Hamas and Hezbollah and other terror groups, all for the purpose of strangling Israel and murdering its Jews. Finally, our fortunes were reversed, thanks in significant part to the assistance of a great world power and friend (Esther and Mordechai didn’t do it alone either). Now, the sovereign Jewish state directed and influenced the sort of situation in which we previously found ourselves the victim.

One Funny Meme Among Many

Since we were stuck inside for a great deal of that Purim, humorous memes circulated like wildfire. Khamenei contains the same letters as Haman, Trump likened to Ahashverosh (in addition to his relative Cyrus the Great), Benjamin Netanyahu to the righteous Mordechai (who the Bible says is from the tribe of Benjamin). Who then is Esther? Ivanka Trump? Miriam Adelson? At a certain point the analogies turned into Purim parody but no one could doubt that something remarkable was happening. Legends of the past were turning into reality, past and present mingling. One friend said “Purim may have been cancelled but this was the truest Purim we’ve ever had.”

For many of us, these feelings have been gestating since the breakout of October 7th, for some of us even longer. While Hamas chose the timing of their assault to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, it was left to us to parse the significance of it occurring at the climax of the Jewish holiday and yearly Torah reading cycle. Precisely two years later, the anticipation toward the freeing of the final batch of hostages during Sukkot, also known by its Rabbinic name “the time of our joy,” made for one of the most joyous Sukkot celebrations many of us have ever experienced. This idea isn’t a new one in Judaism. The requirement to remember the Exodus from Egypt is a case in point. We don’t only remember the details of the story, or relay the miracles wrought by God. 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 supposes a kind of reliving, not only a remembering, of the events of the Bible in every subsequent generation.

This past year I bought my myth and fantasy loving son a beautiful book called The Mythmakers, a graphic novel by John Hendrix which depicts the famed literary friendship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The book aims, among other things, to get to the heart of what myth is – stories for which the category of “fact” or “fiction” is irrelevant because they explore the way a culture understands itself and its history. A true myth, the book’s wise Gandalf-line narrator explains, “takes place in a ‘time out of time’ and a ‘place out of place’ – separated from our reachable world.” This is part of the magic of myth, that something so completely distant and foreign can also feel so incredibly familiar. The book contains an entertaining visual romp through examples of ancient myths that include among them the book of Genesis and Jonath and the Whale.

What I’ve realized, I suppose, after the events of the last few years, is that moving to Israel means that the events of the Bible stop being myths and start to be something else, maybe something closer to prophecy – or a blueprint, a pattern, for the world we live in. This is different from the relationship that Jews outside of Israel have to the weekly Torah portion, which they read, find personal connections in, or use to generate a wise insight that connects to life in some meaningful way. That sort of reading treats the text essentially as myth, even if you happen to believe the myth is true even on a literal level. What’s going on now in Israel is actually a bit more prosaic than myth, maybe even less intellectually exciting. We don’t need to perform convoluted hermeneutic somersaults to see the connections between the Jewish story here in Israel and our foundational texts – rather the connection is simple and palpable. As sophisticated readers, we shouldn’t need the current war against Iran to be completely geographically aligned with our ancient Persian struggle in order to draw parallels (though it happens to be). The terrorists of Hamas don’t have to be actually located in ancient Philistine territory in order to be associated with those enemies (though they are). They don’t have to voluntarily call themselves Palestinians in order to recall those bloodthirsty adversaries of the biblical Israelites (though they do). We know how to read texts and draw subtle inferences, create complicated analogies, and find meaning where it isn’t obvious. But what is there to say when the parallels are so simple and present?

Another Biblical text we read over the Passover holiday is Ezekiel 37, the vision of the dry bones. The vision takes place after the first destruction of the Jewish temple, when the Jewish people are in the Babylonian exile. God places the prophet Ezekiel in a valley full of bones and asks him “O human being, can these bones live again.” We all know the answer, on a symbolic level. Old ideas can be refreshed; a once vanquished people can be reborn. Ezekiel probably has a sense of where God is going with this and starts prophesying. In the midst of his prophecy he is startled by a strange sound, “suddenly there was a sound of rattling, and the bones came together, bone to matching bone.” To Ezekiel’s surprise this rich and literary parable has taken a literal turn: the breath of God enters the bones and they actually come to life. God does not say “as if.” He tells the people of Israel: “I will put my breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil.”

Ezekiel Sees the Dry Bones (Dura Europos Synagogue, 244 CE)

The nice thing about myth is that, with enough exposure, you learn to read between the lines- to recognize where a narrative is heading and what it asks of us. Living the story in medias res (in the middle of things) is never as clear. Does this current ceasefire spell some kind of meaningful turning point for the Jewish people or is it just one pause in a long grind of missiles and war? Which of today’s leaders, like an aging and delusional Saul, is nearing his end—and who, if anyone, might emerge as a Davidic alternative? Living the Bible in real time doesn’t give us unique prophetic access to what the future holds. It doesn’t immunize us from mistakes, nor does it make our pain or grief over loss any less acute. But it assures us that what’s taking place now is far from random: that God’s magnificent plan for the Jewish people is still unfolding, and that the center of the Jewish story remains where it’s always been, here in the Land of Israel.