*The Roof Ceremony | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | October 10, 2025*
This week we received a video on WhatsApp from our dear friends Anna and Benedikt. They’re building their home in Austria, and this week the new roof was placed. In the video you don’t actually see the roof, but you do see the family celebrating- Anna’s aunt playing the accordion, her uncle on the saxophone, the aunt singing, and Benedikt striking a hammer on a big barrel of beer - apparently that’s part of the ritual: each time a roof is placed on a house, you must open the barrel and insert the tap without spilling too much beer in the process.
.
It’s a traditional, local custom. It looked very joyful. There’s still plenty of work left on the house, you can see it from the photos attached to the video, but the new roof is red and large, covering an entire floor, ready for long snowy days. As we watched the video, we started moving to the rhythm of the accordion - it was contagious - and soon we found ourselves swaying side to side, smiling, suddenly touched by a roof being placed thousands of miles away from us.
.
That was before the hostage deal was signed. Only later did I realize how long we’ve been missing a roof. Metaphorically, of course.
.
Two years that reached their peak this week - swinging between headlines about an emerging deal, speculations, wagers, while at the end of every decision the fate of so many people and families hung in the balance. Two years of loud, clashing opinions with endless exclamation marks. Two years that began with a home invasion, a border breach, which continues as long as our hostages are not home, as long as the metaphorical border remains broken. Two years of missiles crossing borders. And in addition - Sukkot, the holiday most preoccupied with the idea of home, of temporary walls and a roof made of branches, the holiday that tests our boundaries. I looked at the red roof in the photos from Austria and suddenly I wanted a roof.
.
Suddenly I understood how much of a miracle it is, that there is even a roof holding all the walls from above. I understood why when a dear person dies we say, “the crown has fallen from our head.” People, too, are a roof that holds the family walls together. I understood why, the moment this deal was signed, something in my body filled with quiet - even though there’s still so much work left on the house. Why every time a roof is set, it’s worth stopping for a moment and celebrating it with an accordion and a saxophone.
.
What is a house without a roof? Since the beginning of the war, many people close to me have had the same recurring dream: someone breaks into their home. A stranger enters, or sometimes several people - they burst into some event, or simply into the study. They come home and find strangers walking around inside. “You won’t believe what I dreamed of again,” my friends tell me in the morning. But I do believe. I do.
.
My mother too had recurring dreams: Nazis would come and raid the house - the kitchen, the bedroom, the balcony. At some point she built a tall stone wall around the house. Of course it didn’t help. She slept enclosed within her stone fortress, and in her dreams the Nazi soldiers still broke in easily.
.
When she met Benedikt in Germany and adopted him as a friend who became family, she told him how, from a young age, her heart longed for Europe’s calm; for generations of passing down houses, lands, century-old dishes and embroidered linens to one another. She explained to Benedikt that, among us, there is almost no inheritance from generation to generation; every few generations the chain is broken, the property taken or exiled. Even the “antique” furniture in our antique stores is rather new. For her, that was part of the Jewish story.
.
When my mother died, the strongest feeling was that the house went with her, even though it still stood there, surrounded by its tall stone wall. Once, only people who’d lost a parent understood what I meant. But these past two years, even those with two living parents understand what it feels like to stay exactly where you are, to have left nothing behind, and still wake up one morning to discover that the house has left you. The walls, windows, doors - breached. The roof taken. You didn’t move anywhere, but the house is gone.
.
For two years now we’ve been talking and trying to make sense of the shock and the grief, the loneliness in front of a world that doesn’t recognize our sorrow. We’ve been waiting for the hostages with held breath, accompanying the displaced who were uprooted from their homes, and saying how lucky we are to have a country, to be able to defend ourselves. But only now, maybe, we’re ready to talk about two years of homelessness for an entire people - even those not directly touched by the headlines or the war, those who dream at night, who look up each morning with awe and find there’s still no roof.
.
There’s a good chance that next week the roof will be placed again, our crown restored, and we’ll finally be able to breathe - and then begin to understand how to rebuild what lies beneath it.
.
And I want to end with two things. The first is a poem from The Wandering Jewess, my new poetry collection, which I dedicated entirely to the question of home, and which ends with a poem of hope – with the understanding that every war eventually ends not only with treaties and fanfare and leaders, but truly because the soldiers want to go home.
.
*Studying for the History Final with My Daughter / Maya Tevet Dayan*
In this book all the stories
end the same. No matter how long
the war was, how global.
In the end, the soldiers grow tired, homesick
for the small wooden porch, the cup of coffee,
and the cat. They say they can’t
anymore. And suddenly history
turns. This time in your favor.
After you almost ran out of fear,
no longer knew where to flee, how
to survive, after even the walls of your home
gave you nightmares. So long the air
was bitter. Terrible things were done to you,
for you, in your name. No more.
Now the exclamation marks from every side
are replaced again by the familiar doubt,
blessed, soft as grass.
And life is soft. The house is once again a house.
History bows its head
saying: I have no idea
what came over me, why it happened to me again.
And again you believe her, and yield,
lay what happened behind you.
With whatever strength you have left,
you open a new page.
.
And the second thing I want to tell, before closing, is that toward the end of this week we watched the roof video again. Maybe we just wanted Anna’s aunt to sing to us a bit through the screen. Only this time we noticed something we hadn’t before: somewhere in the background, beyond the accordion, deep in the living room - tiny, but there - was my mother. Two framed photos of her standing on a shelf. Even though she’s been gone almost twelve years, there she was - all wide smile and white teeth. When I sent it to our family WhatsApp group, my father wrote: “She never misses a party.” And that was funny. But I also remembered her dreams - her Europe dreams, the home, the peace - and that my mother is our own fallen crown, and here she was, smiling at me from there, from the roof-laying celebration, this very week, sending us a little wink from beyond. A wink with a promise.
.
Wishing us all a peaceful Sabbath, and quiet, that next week we wake up and see a roof above our heads.
*Maya Tevet Dayan*