*The Heart Command | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | March 13, 2026*
This week I remembered a story that seems to have nothing to do with what is happening now.
Because what connection could there possibly be between the war, the shelters, the sirens day and night - and the story of how my grandmother took my father out of the children’s house at the kibbutz and brought him back home?
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And yet that is the memory that resurfaced. And it is known that no memory rises for no reason. The mind does not clear valuable disk space for things that are unimportant. And this week I remembered how my father was three years old when he began slipping out of the children’s house at night and walking to his parents’ room. All the children in the kibbutz lived in the children houses. Not with their parents. It was a time when kibbutz members competed with one another over who was more kibbutz than the others. My father was born to the generation of the state’s founding children. And at the legendary kibbutz Kinneret, no less. In other words: it was hopeless - if you escaped the children’s house, they would return you.
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Because the system had clear rules. And everyone enforced those rules on everyone else.
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But my grandmother did not return my father to the children’s house. She let him sleep with them in their bed. And when this began to repeat itself night after night after night, she took action and moved him to sleep at home - meaning in their one room, in their bed. Then she brought back his younger brother as well. And the third son she would later have, she did not send there in the first place.
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it was not accepted quietly. It became the subject of various kibbutz assemblies. They pressured her to act according to the rules and the communal directives. They even threatened her.
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But my grandmother, as she always told it, looked at that child and understood that with all her belief in the kibbutz idea, this was not what she had survived years on the run for - not what she had endured farms and barns for, not what she had crossed seas and ships for, not what she had fallen ill, been imprisoned, and been released for. And certainly not what she had given birth to a child for - so that someone else would tell her how to raise him.
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She set a clear boundary. And eventually the kibbutz got used to it. They surely said she was strange. My grandmother was not someone who paid much attention to what people said about her in any case. And her three sons grew up at home. I think they may have been the only ones who did for quite a few generations of children. But the truth is I have never checked that.
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Only after remembering this story did I understand why it came back to me. This week the Home Front Command directives stated that half the workforce should return to work. And quite a few people close to me were stuck on the Ayalon highway while missiles were being launched and intercepted. It was terrifying. For a moment there was also talk of returning to school. And although that ultimately did not happen, extracurricular activities resumed. Zoom classes resumed. And I began to feel the familiar tightening ring around me: the pressure to follow the directives of the Home Front Command while going against the heart command.
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I wanted to let my daughters sleep in as long as they could in the mornings. I was truly frightened by the thought of the people I love on the roads while missiles are in the air. Most of my Women’s Month events were postponed, but there were places that said they would operate according to the official directives, and once again I had to explain that I do not drive on the highways in a situation like this - and they were genuinely surprised. That was how the tightening ring felt.
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It was not only my grandmother’s figure that crept into my memory this week. I also remembered moments in my own life when I acted in complete opposition to what I was supposed to do and followed my heart - and how lucky I was that I did. The moment I left in the midst of my undergraduate degree in order to travel abroad for an open-ended time. In hindsight that decision changed my life. When I returned, two and a half years later, they were looking for teaching assistants, and my path to academics opened before me.
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Or when I left academics - all my achievements, the scholarships, the perfect mentor - and devoted myself to writing. It was when we were starting our family, and tenure and a steady salary and stability were what we were supposed to cling to. But I followed the directives of my heart - how fortunate that was.
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And also when we left everything and moved to Canada, to live at the edge of the forest. There was no planning in it, no clear program - no jobs, no connections, no property or anything else, only the directives of the heart. What we learned there about ourselves, and what we lived through, would never have happened if we had simply continued in the groove laid out before us.
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In any case, I deeply believe in the directives of the Home Front Command - to go to shelters, to protect ourselves, and to do everything we can to stay safe. But somehow the opposite directives - to return to life, to functioning, to routine, when nothing around us is routine - those directives were beyond my ability. Beyond a resilience I do not have. And above all, they went against my heart, which felt that the most correct thing for us right now was simply to be careful.
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So to conclude I will say that I am a great lover of signs. And just as I was reminding myself that it is alright to draw a boundary when something does not feel right to you - especially when something does not feel right to you as a mother - at that exact moment I received from dear Aliza a bundle of old photographs from Kibbutz Kinneret: my father with the children in his class. My father with a close friend. And then another photograph: my grandmother lifting my father high in the air as a baby.
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The baby into whom years of survival and sorrow had poured. The baby who marked a new beginning. In the photograph my grandmother is perhaps thirty-three, but she looks older than her age. No wonder. Her smile says everything. And the spark in my father’s baby eyes already foretells that he was not born to walk in anyone’s groove. Within a few years he will run to her at night, and she will understand that as a mother there is such a thing as the directives of the heart. And then, despite all the voices around her, she will listen to her child - and bring him home.
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That photograph is saved on my phone now. Also because it is sweet. But especially for these days. As a reminder.
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Wishing all of us a peaceful Shabbat, quiet days and quiet nights,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*