A few years after we arrived in Israel, we were blessed with a baby boy. On the day I left the hospital, I was handed papers to sign. In America, on the day I left the hospital, I was handed a piece of paper with my infant's footprint. This would serve to identify him if he was kidnapped. When my son was born in Israel, there was no paper with a footprint - babies are very rarely stolen in Israel; children are not kidnapped nearly as often. And more likely, if a child disappears it is because a parent accidentally left the child in the car and someone stole that.
So, there was no paper with a footprint, but two strange things did happen as I was being discharged with my new son. The first was that I was handed a check for several hundred dollars (in shekels).
"What's this?" I asked the nurse at the station.
I wasn't sure what to do next, so the nurse told me to go to the room down the hall, "The door is open."
I walked down the hall, tired, not very focused, anxious to get home and really introduce my children to their new baby brother, the first of my children to be born in Israel. The room I entered was more warehouse than hospital and there was a soldier there. I walked up to him with the paper from the nurse, never suspecting anything. He smiled with all of his 18 or 19 years of charm and said, "Mazel tov" - congratulations.
I thanked him as he turned around, pulled a small blue suitcase from the pile and started to complete some forms. He asked me to sign something and pushed the case towards me.
In America, when I left the hospital, I was given diapers and formula and samples of products the manufacturers hoped I would try and later buy. It was handed to me by a nurse as I was leaving.
"What is it?" I asked the soldier.
"A gas tent for your baby," he answered, not quite understanding how I failed to know this.
My eyes filled with tears, "You're giving me a gas tent to put my baby in?" Now I had his attention. I wonder how many women started to cry in front of him. "That's not normal. Do you understand? That's not normal."
It was 1996. Israel had already been attacked once by Iraqi SCUD missiles fired at its citizens. Though none of those missiles had chemical weapons, the threat was there, and therefore all Israelis were issued gas masks. Children under three were issued gas tents.
"Yehiye b'seder," the soldier said to me and smiled gently. "It will be okay," he was telling me.
'Okay?' I thought. 'You're telling me that I might have to put my infant in a gas tent.' We had been issued gas masks, each of us, at some point during our early years here, so this shouldn't have come as a surprise. And yet it did. Obviously, you can't put a gas mask on a newborn, so they developed a tent in which you place the child. To the soldier, this was a part of life and so he tried to reassure me. Everything will be okay.
More than a decade and a half later (actually last month), I received a card from Home Front Command, responsible for making sure Israel's citizens are ready for any type of threat. This card reminded me of that soldier and that suitcase I was issued.
The card is designed to be hung or, using the magnet conveniently located on the back, stuck to the refrigerator door. The slogan says, "To be protected, exactly in time." (Trust me, it sounds better in Hebrew.) The rest of the hand-out features a colorful map of Israel. To the right of the map, the question: "How much time do we have to get to a protected area?"
Below the question, there's a legend, divided into two parts. The top part covers the bulk of Israel from the north (bordering Lebanon and Syria), the instructions say to enter a shelter immediately. The next area, just to the south and west of these areas shows that you have 30 seconds. From there, down through the rest of the country, you have anywhere from 60 seconds to 3 minutes. To comfort those who know us personally, we are in the three-minute zone; aren't we lucky?
The lower legend is for those communities bordering Gaza. As they already know from the last war, they have 15 seconds to 60 seconds to prepare and enter the protected areas.
What I find both humorous and a bit sick, is that they thought enough to add some symbols to the map. Tel Aviv is marked with several tall buildings. As it is our most cosmopolitan city, this is appropriate.
Jerusalem is marked by the Western Wall, all that remains of our Holy Temple, destroyed more than 2,000 years ago; and this too is appropriate. The vast area (by Israeli standards, don't forget, all of Israel is the size of New Jersey) of the Negev Desert is marked by a single camel.
The resort town of Eilat, our southernmost city, is marked by a dolphin and a snorkeling man in a red bathing suit. He is balanced out by the man on skis high atop Mt. Hermon in the Golan Heights.
All this, I assume, is to try to lend a sense of normality to what is quite simply a warning to our citizens. The real message of the handout remains: be prepared, because at any given moment you have anywhere from no time to three minutes to run into a shelter.
Long ago, with a new baby, I stared at an Israeli soldier trying to make him understand that this wasn't normal. In a world where a woman is handed a gas mask for her newborn baby, I guess it is natural for her also to have to know how long she has to protect her family, to get them to a safe area.
The shame, then, goes not to this country, which is simply doing what it can to protect its citizens, but to our neighbors, who have created and perpetrated the violence and war-like actions for so many years. Israel has done so much for peace and for the illusion of peace. The hand-out reminded me of how hard we try to make normal something which is so incredibly not.
Just as years ago I felt the need to remind that young soldier that in a normal world, babies don't need tents to protect them against missiles that might carry chemical weapons, in a normal society citizens shouldn't receive a note from their government telling them they have, at most, three minutes to find shelter.
When that young soldier tried to reassure me, I was a woman in my mid-thirties, the mother of four children, but the wisdom, ultimately, was his. And, as the soldier reminded me, all will be well. It will be okay. I've put the announcement on my refrigerator, but more out of amusement than fear.
The larger lesson, I think, is that sometimes, as we move through our lives, our definition of normal moves with us.