In 2018, I was sitting on a Hadassah Hospital bed with the mother of a literally heartsick child from Syria.
In the midst of the Syrian civil war, the soldiers of the IDF’s Operation Good Neighbor had snuck the mothers and sick babies into Israeli hospitals to have their hearts repaired. While we were talking, the frail, dark-haired mother suddenly got a panicked look in her eyes. She pointed to the sky. I hadn’t paid attention to the sound of the airplane – a tourist flight over the cerulean skies of Jerusalem. I reassured her. She was safe here.
Over the past two years, we Israeli civilians have unhappily sharpened our hearing. We’ve become attuned to the aural side of the war: the unsettling rings of the phone alarms, the undulating waves of sirens, the knocking of rockets out of the air, the crashing of those that got through.
Who of us hasn’t frozen for a few seconds at the sound of a motorcycle, jumped at a ringtone that mimicked the phone alarm, or – when a siren sounds – looked for a safe space? I discovered that one of the songs on my swimming headphones has background music similar to an alarm. No matter where I’m swimming when that song comes on, I become alert.
Of course, none of these sounds compares to the actual cacophony of weapons firing in the field or the continuous sounds of war for those who live near the borders. On a midmorning visit to Kibbutz Magen a few weeks ago, the cannon sounds were relentless. “It’s much worse at 2 a.m.,” my friend veteran kibbutznik Mina Cohen told me.
Her husband, Baruch Cohen, was the head of the civilian defense squad on the kibbutz, which kept the terrorists out on Oct. 7. He survived the loss of a leg hit by an RPG and three additional bullets. I first met them on October 8, 2023, in the intensive care unit of Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem.
“There is no such thing as getting used to the sounds,” Mina says.
Belliphony and the soundscape of war
The official term for the sounds of war is “belliphony,” and, yes, it’s a subject of academic inquiry. Ironically, the week before Oct. 7, 2023, a pioneering conference was held in Germany to debate the soundscape of war – how it’s experienced and how it fixes itself in our memories.
The conference took place in Freie Universität Berlin’s Department of History and Cultural Studies, organized by the Arbeitskreis Militärgeschichte e.V., a working group dedicated to the academic research of military history and war from social sciences and cultural studies perspectives.
Most of the papers dealt with the sound of war in distant history, and issues like battle trumpets and military art, but there were also papers on sound (and silence) in trauma. We all know that sounds can elicit deep memories and flashbacks – pleasant and horrifying both.
Speaking of sounds, a few weeks ago I was filming a grateful patient at Hadassah Hospital for a program to be shown on October 9 to Hadassah members abroad, marking the second anniversary of Oct. 7.
Yehonatan Ben-Tzur, 23, is a tank gunner who used a break in lengthy reserve service to travel to the US with an army buddy. They visited a relative’s ranch in Nebraska, spent time in California, and from there went to Texas. They were making their way to Florida via New Orleans on December 31. They’d heard that the Crescent City was a great place to be on New Year’s Eve. Advertisements mentioned free concerts and free cocktails, fireworks along the Mississippi River, and a football game.
They joined the crowds of young persons on Bourbon Street and were heading back to their hotel rooms at 3:15 a.m. when terrorist Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, drove his pickup truck into the New Orleans crowd. Jabbar got out of his truck and engaged in a shootout with police before being killed. He murdered 14 persons and wounded 57 others, including our two reserve soldiers.
“The terrorist who ran us over and the one who attacked Jews in Boulder were the same as those I fought in Gaza and Lebanon,” said Ben-Tzur.
He mentioned that six months later, in Boulder, Colorado, a Hadassah member, Karen Diamond, 82, was murdered and others wounded while rallying for the hostages. Terrorist Mohamed Sabry Soliman had brought homemade flamethrowers and Molotov cocktails “to kill all Zionists.”
The New Orleans members of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, were quick to visit and support the soldiers, and helped make the connection to the Gandel Rehabilitation Center on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, where Ben-Tzur has undergone surgery and physical and psychological rehab.
To film the interview in quiet, we sequestered a room in the rehab center and set up the cameras. But as the cameras rolled, suddenly there was such loud noise in an adjacent physical therapy room that we couldn’t continue. When I offered to politely approach the person shouting to speak more quietly, Ben-Tzur stopped me.
“I know who that is,” he said. “He’s a combat soldier who was shot in the head on Oct. 7. The injury was so great that it was unlikely that he would ever walk or talk again. But now he’s walking and he’s talking. His speech is still too loud, but to me it’s the most beautiful sound in the world.”
A soldier's wordless cry
That soldier’s loud voice has stayed with me.
I heard it in the sound of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah. The plaintive tekiah and the broken notes of shvarim and teruah.
I heard it in the beseeching words of the final prayers of Yom Kippur.
Ptah lanu sha’ar. “Open a gate!” We beg God to open a gate for us exactly when a gate is closing.
That soldier’s shouts are the sound of a gate opening. They’re the wordless cry of the first hug as the returned hostages are embraced by their loved ones. They echo in jingling in the washing machine of forgotten bullets in army uniform pockets as the uniforms are washed one more time to go back into storage.
The glorious sound of recovery. Never instant. Never perfect.
The most beautiful sound in the world. ■
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers.