*How Many Days of Your Life Have You Spent at War? | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | June 12, 2026*
When the launch alerts started again on Sunday, we went down to the shelter with our blue mattress and our square white mattress, our regular ones. We arranged our usual corner: the peeling wall no one ever got around to fixing, the flickering lightbulb. Someone remarked that it would be hot this time, unlike the previous round. We should probably bring down some fans as well. The families around us quietly settled in too. Children rode the elevator up and down, practiced and efficient, carrying their shelter supplies. Water stations for dogs. Blankets. A snack corner. A circle of chairs for the younger children. Shelter games.
We barely exchanged a word. What was there left to say? Everything unfolded according to some ancient internal order, as though we had been born knowing these movements. As though the shelter was simply an extension of all our apartments. As though this was part of the natural order of things. The way we shop for Shabbat, prepare dinner, drive children to and from activities - that was how we arranged the shelter.
On Monday, the children immediately found their groups in the shelter. The movements were familiar to them too. Even after the all-clear was announced, their game continued. Later they moved it to the lawn in the afternoon. And the next day, when yet another ceasefire took effect, they packed their backpacks, organized their Tuesday schedules, and walked to school with those same familiar motions.
Around noon, a friend sent me a link. It led to a website that calculates how many days of your life you have spent at war. I entered my birth date, and within seconds the count appeared: 8,954 days of my life had been spent in wars. They included four major wars, twenty-four military operations, and eight waves of terrorism. In large bold numbers, the app declared that 47 percent of my life had been spent at war. I am fifty-one years old. That means twenty-four years of my life have passed in wars.
I leaned back and sighed. Twenty-four years is a very long time. That was my first thought.
In fact, I could not think of anything else I had done continuously for twenty-four years.
Is war the longest thing I have ever done in my life?
That was my second thought.
Then I thought about the fact that the app does not really count everything. After all, war does not begin and end on official dates. There are days of waiting for war, sometimes many days of waiting. There are days of mourning and recovery afterward. And then there are countless more days when your body remains on alert, long after the headlines have moved on to the next story.
So how many days, not to mention years, have I lived not only in war, but also in its shadow? In worry, in sleepless nights, in preparation and recovery?
That was my third thought.
But then a fourth thought arrived. I remembered the children in the shelter. The conversations with neighbors. Some of them were genuinely funny. War is made up of many different kinds of moments and encounters. During the last war, I built a writing and learning community of hundreds of people. Who would have imagined that? And in general, war is not a solid, opaque surface. It is made of countless pieces within it. Those twenty-four years that I spent in wars, military operations, and terrorist attacks are made up of those pieces too.
The website does not know how to count that.
And no one has yet invented an app that counts how many days we spent in love, how many days we were new mothers, how many days we sat beside the beds of people we loved because they needed us, how many days we wrote poems, danced, cried, or laughed.
And finally, I thought about the fact that every war is not only what happened to us, but also what did not happen. Every day of war is a day in which something else did not take place. I am not talking only about the optometrist appointment I canceled this week because I was afraid to go. Or the poetry evening I had to postpone. Every day of war is a day in which we did not travel. Did not take exams. Did not build. Dreamed and forgot. Did not do yoga. I think about all the thoughts I began, only to watch them disappear like the tail of a kite drifting away in the wind.
How many days has war taken from me?
How many days have I spent surviving?
And how many days within that survival did I spend being creative, inventing things, being an amazing mother? Meeting people and, against all odds, finding joy?
By this point, after so many thoughts, I closed the website and left the definitive numbers glowing on the screen behind.
Instead, I started thinking about the fact that while history is happening and counting itself, we simply keep living. Sometimes deeply affected by it. Sometimes managing to push it into the background of our days.
It reminded me of a prediction by an astrologer who wrote that the coming week would be intense and turbulent (astrologers use words like that), but that on a personal level there would be extraordinary opportunities for success and love. And I found myself envying the ease with which she separated the large from the small, the fate of the world from the fate of the individual within it, the grieving nation from the people inside it who might still, quite unexpectedly, fall in love.
And so I want to end with the question that stayed with me this week, and which I believe is the most important one:
Not how many days we spent at war, but how many days we managed to remain human within it.
How many days we managed to live.
And I will also end with this poem of mine, from The Wandering Jewess, my most recent book, which was published during the war, and which also contains both the great war and the small lives within it.
Because in the end, and in the mirror of history, it is the small days that prevail.
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*Studying With My Daughter for her History Final / Maya Tevet Dayan*
In these books all the stories
end the same way. No matter how long
the war lasted, how global it became.
In the end, the soldiers grow tired, they long
for the small wooden porch, the cup of coffee.
and the cat. They say they cannot go on
anymore. And suddenly history
flips over. This time, in your favor.
After you were nearly devoured by fear,
no longer knew where to flee, how
to be saved, after even the walls of your home
Ignited nightmares. For so long the air
was bitter. Terrible things were done to you,
for you, in your name. No more.
Now the exclamation marks from all around
are replaced again by the familiar doubt,
blessed, soft as grass.
And life is soft. The house is once again a home.
History bows its head
saying: I have no idea
what possessed me, why it happened to me again.
And again you believe her, and give in,
leave what happened behind you.
With whatever strength remains,
you open, with her, a new chapter.
Wishing all of us Shabbat Shalom, and many good memories
*Maya Tevet Dayan*
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