It is a balancing act, to be sure. It’s the military front versus the home front. Monitoring terror tunnels and the kids’ doctor appointments.
(JNS)
On with the uniform. Off with the uniform. On with the boots. Off with the boots. On with the gun, off with the gun.
Members of Israel’s miluim—its reserve units—don’t always know when they’re going to get “the call.”
“The call,” as every miluim family knows, means that it’s time to suit up and set off to join your unit’s newest assignment.
Before Oct. 7, life as a reservist in the IDF wasn’t a huge burden, most will say. Often as not, it was a couple weeks each year with training, briefings, and every few years, some operational duty.
But since the war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip began, an estimated 350,000 reservists have been called up for active duty—the largest number in Israel’s history. And now, with increasing needs for soldiers in the north as well as the south, the Knesset has approved raising the upper age limits of service. So more reservists are expected to be on active duty than ever before, ricocheting between their military selves and their civilian ones.
Which can be downright dizzying and disorienting.
Take Josh Bar-on. The tank commander and father of four turned 40 this spring as his unit wrapped up four months of shoring up the border of Gaza and several incursions inside, a time when he lost three close friends. He was called back to duty on Aug. 21.
He says he wished the war had never happened, “but I’m proud and honored to be taking part. On a national level, it’s the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.”
Then there’s Avihai Peretz, a 39-year-old digital marketer and web designer, and a father of four, who spent seven months serving first in the north and then in the Shimron in the Jezreel Valley. “We never know what we were going to encounter but we’ve tried to give both our families and our comrades strength, saying, ‘This is our time and our calling to protect this country.’”
Rabbi Betzalel Heller, a major in the reserves, was celebrating the holiday of Simchat Torah with his family on Oct. 7 when the alarm rang out across Jerusalem, and the dancing with the Torah was moved inside the synagogue’s safe room. By evening, Heller was suited up and on his way north to join his unit. In the nine months since, he’s served in the north and Gaza with a few weeks here and there at home with family.
Any end in sight? “We don’t know,” says Heller. “But as long as we are at war, I’m in it.”
Yoni Tokayer got back from his Simchat Torah services to find his phone logging multiple calls from his commander. Within minutes, he was in uniform, telling his wife that he’d probably be gone anywhere from a week to a month. It was more like five months of active duty in a counter-terror unit near Ramla before he was able to return home.
And, yes, he also expects to be called back: “It’s just a matter of when.”
‘You’re an equal partner’
Indeed the yo-yo miluim life puts pressure on the reservists and their children—for kids, even short daddy absences feel like forever—but often most intensely on their wives.
“I know how hard it is for Rachel when I’m gone; balancing kids and work all alone, it takes a toll,” says Sam Griffin who at 34 is normally a hands-on dad to three young boys while his wife is a doctor who works long hours. But for Griffin, who’s spent five of the last nine months on guard duty on the Gaza border, the long-awaited homecomings also come with challenges. “She’s established her own schedule, but when I get home, the kids are excited—wanting to stay up late—and it breaks the routine.”
Avidan Milevsky, a rabbi and psychologist who teaches at Ariel University in Samaria, points out that “a new family dynamic has developed in his absence, and it takes time for everyone to re-adjust. They need to re-adjust slowly, and have a lot of compassion for themselves and each other.”
But a bigger problem for the reservist returning home may be the radical change of focus. “You go from the big picture—protecting your country—to the small picture, like working or changing diapers,” says Griffin. “It’s hard to feel that same sense of purpose in those things.”
Key to managing the flip-flop is an almost super-human resiliency, says psychologist Milevsky. And for the families as well. “You come and go, and the kids are confused,” says Peretz. “I can see the older ones are afraid but also full of pride, that their abba is a soldier who fights the bad people and saves the country.”
For Tova Heller, left alone with two toddlers and a tour business of the open-air Machane Yehuda market in Jerusalem that fizzled for lack of visitors, suddenly there was a flood of WhatsApp messages from other miluim wives—money to raise for her husband’s unit and multi-family events to organize. As her husband wrote to her from the north: “I’m in the reserves, you’re in the reserves. You’re a part of this mitzvah, you’re part of history. You’re an equal partner.”
‘A dramatic chapter in our history’
For Peretz, the war pushed his music from dream to reality—and wound up being a force that’s helped him heal.
His song, “Miluim,” expresses “the dissonance between my daily life and my service and duty,” he says. And he was determined to share it, taking it on an American tour in March. “I’d always written about following your dreams but, with everything stopping us—money, what people might say—I never really followed mine.”
Until he was called up.
“We’re IDF soldiers, and we don’t speak about feelings, but my music is a place where I can express them,” he says. “It’s healing for me, and I think it touches the people who hear it.”
Sometimes, this creative healing is a shared experience. For Tokayer, who with his wife, Nina, makes up the singing duo Yonina, it was his wife’s initiative. Left alone with four young children, “she was thinking that we both see the same stars even though we were far apart,” he says. The result: “Melaketet Kochavim” (“Gathering Stars”), which is “about finding light in the darkness.”
But recording his half proved difficult. “Every attempt, we’d have to jump to arrest someone or stop cars of terrorists,” he says. Still, the project itself helped. “In the army, you’re living minute to minute but just working on the song opened up a place where I could feel the meaning of what I was doing while I was doing it, and that’s pretty rare.”
Griffin, a staff sergeant, says he’s “lucky to have art as an outlet.” Since reporting for duty in October, his portraits and landscapes have given way to soldiers entering booby-trapped buildings, Israelis who’d lost their homes and those who’d lost their lives.
“These really reflect my current mindset,” he says. “That now, I’m a soldier as well as a husband, a dad and an artist.” (Visit Griffin’s website at: www.samgriffinart.com for paintings and information on this summer’s Jerusalem exhibit).
Bar-on’s podcast, “Giborim” (Hebrew for “heroes”) was also born of a need to wrestle with his wartime experience. “After the terrible things done to us, we’ve seen an awakening of Jewish pride,” he says. “The podcast introduces the listener to our unsung heroes, giving them even more Jewish pride to hang their hats on.”
An upcoming interview will feature one reservist who was part of the first hostage rescue, and another who showed up at the Nova festival and saved lives. “For me, it’s therapy,” says Bar-on. “I get a lot of strength from hearing about these ordinary people who’ve done amazing things they’d never been asked to do before. It makes me even prouder to be part of this people.”
And sometimes, all you can do is write your way through. It had been nine years since Zach Millunchick had served full-time. But from October to February, he was back in—first in the north and then in Gaza. His observations and insights during those months knocked around his mind until he realized there was a book in there.
“When I’d have a feeling weigh on me, writing it gave it shape and kept it from being overwhelming,” says the 32-year-old writer and translator. The book, written in Hebrew, will be titled 120 Days: Thoughts About the War by a Reserve Duty Tank Operator.
But what may come as a surprise is that a reservist has the right to pull out. Interestingly very few do, with many extending their service over the age limit. “Quitting would be giving up on your friends and on yourself, too,” says Peretz.
“We’re now in a dramatic chapter in our history,” adds Heller, who as a rabbi and officer is often asked tough questions by his soldiers. “I tell them that someday our grandchildren will ask us about this war, and we’ll tell them about the explosions and the enemy rockets and drones over our heads.”
“But we’ll also tell them about the prayers said in the north and in the heart of Gaza, the sense of brotherhood, the embrace of the entire people of Israel, and how, as hard as it is, knowing we did the right thing—something we’ll pass on to our family, forever.”
