On the morning of October 7, 2023, waking to sirens warning of a missile attack, my wife and I grabbed a few basics and rushed our three girls—aged one, two, and four—to her parents’ apartment down the street. Their apartment building has a small bomb shelter on every floor whereas we live in an old two-story labor housing complex built in 1932, when the idea of missiles falling from the sky was far from being contemplated. For three days, we did not leave the apartment. When I finally did make my way back to our place to get some supplies—food, clothes, some books for the girls to read—I noticed that the dishes we left in the sink had begun to stink and fester.
I didn’t know when we would be back at our apartment and so despite the fear of staying—exposed to potential attacks—I decided to stay and do the dishes. If I didn’t, I thought, the scraps would continue to rot.
I thought a lot about this impulse after the direct threat of attack had subsided. What difference did it really make if the dishes stayed dirty and the food scraps rotted? Given the severity of what was happening, it seemed the least of our worries. People were being beheaded. And I was worried about rotten food. On some level, I realized, the very thought of what I would need to deal with once this was over revealed that I harbored some kind of faith—or illusion—that thiswould be over and that we would return to our home. The compulsion to clean was a reflection of the fact that I intended to come home.
But it was more than just the need to keep the place clean. Beneath the desire to come back to a clean home, I also considered that leaving the food scraps without any human presence would invite bugs, rodents, and maybe also neighborhood cats into the house. We don’t have any holes in our walls that we know about. But animals find ways. And with others also fleeing their homes in search of bomb shelters and no food left out for their cats—which all of the other animals in the neighborhood eat too—they would likely come into people’s homes looking for sustenance. Washing the dishes would rid our home’s of its biggest attraction to animals and insects.
So not only did I have faith that we’d be back. I feared that someone—or something—would come into our house while we weren’t there. It may seem like an irrational impulse to do the dishes while there’s a war going on in your country, but there it is.
We stayed with my wife’s parents for the rest of that week and then went to an apartment across town that happened to be available—the people who lived there were stuck in New York. This apartment had a reinforced room, where we let the girls sleep, and made us feel safer at a time when it was totally unclear where the war with Hamas was headed. Once we had a sense that our home was safe—this took about a month—we moved back. By then I’d been coming home for a few hours each day to do a little work and some sweeping and other basic maintenance. I needed to be home to keep a sense of sanity. The cognitive dissonance of displacement—living in an apartment with a reinforced room but without any of the things that made it home—was taking its psychological toll. I needed to balance physical safety with mental health.
In many ways, I was aware of the sense of privilege of this experience, which, as far as wartime goes, allowed for a lot of reflection as well as limited control of one’s environment. We could have moved back home at an earlier point had we felt it was safe. We had the choice. Obviously, our first priority was protecting our children, and so we stayed at the other apartment longer than we might have done had it been just the two of us. The family who lived there returned a week later, so we would have had to leave anyway, but we didn’t know that and, ultimately, the decision to return was our own.
The war expanded and the destruction in Gaza grew in direct proportion to a return to a semblance of normalcy on the home front. The government began to use a new phrase—“routine under war”—which, like all good propaganda, rhymes in the original Hebrew. Parents disappeared into reserve duty. Some didn’t come back. But society absorbed the losses and continued to chug along, making it seem as though normal life had returned despite there being no real prospect of the war coming to an end and no real normalcy on the horizon. This was no accident. It was planned by the country’s leaders, who wanted to forestall the reckoning that would inevitably come when the war in Gaza came to some end.
In the twenty odd months that this war has raged on, I have tried to write about historical and cultural precedents of what feel like unprecedented realities—coming to see the limits of our imagination to fully fathom this surreal moment in history. I’ve also acknowledged to myself that doing this is itself a privilege—one that’s in some ways symbolized by doing dishes. We are lucky to have running water with which to do the dishes. We are lucky to have pans on which to cook and dishes on which to eat. We are very lucky to have food to cook in the first place. Just an hour and a half away, in a godforsaken place that our army has destroyed—after Hamas set the stage for the destruction—I see people in the news who have no dishes to do because they have to food to eat. I think about this every single time I prepare a meal.
I do not subscribe to the ethos of martyrdom—particularly since the people directing this war on both sides depend on this ethos and exploit people’s impulse for self-sacrifice. But in dark moments, I do sometimes imagine fasting out of solidarity with the people who have neither food nor a home where they can eat a meal, as though doing so might save me from the guilt of being privileged enough to have food, a home, a sink with running water where I can do dishes. But then I think I would also have to stop thinking and writing. Because this is a privilege too—one that may not be attractive to everyone but that is nevertheless a luxury few can afford in wartime.
As I was writing this, reflecting on the essay’s title, I had a thought: At the moment, even a sense of humor feels like a privilege. I went onto my social media account and typed out this message. After posting it, I saw a post by a friend quoting the opening paragraph of Abraham Flexner’s The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939), published on the eve of World War II, in which the author considers the irrationality of intellectual inquiry during periods of global upheaval: “From a practical point of view, intellectual and spiritual life is, on the surface, a useless form of activity, in which men indulge because they procure for themselves greater satisfactions than are otherwise obtainable.” The very fact of reflecting on what it means to do dishes during war, I thought, is a privilege that stirred feelings of guilt. Yet I couldn’t think of anything I would do instead. Not only because I “procured satisfaction” in the process, but also because I know the other side of intellectual inquiry too well.
I grew up surrounded by violence of different types. My family had left the Soviet Union where they had spent three generations navigating and outmaneuvering state violence. Being born and raised first in Israel, I knew the violence of war before I was even conscious, and the violence of ethnic conflict once I was. Later, moving to the ethnic and cultural margins of Los Angeles, I experienced street and gang violence that was fundamental in shaping my dedication to the spirit and intellect—not as a form of indulgence but as a protest against brute power. Both in Israel and America, I grew up in neighborhoods that have never let me forget a simple fact: Intellectual inquiry is a privilege that not everyone gets to enjoy. That doesn’t make it dispensable, like income. It makes it special, like love.
There is something else I realized while reflecting on doing dishes in times of war. When the October 7 attacks unfolded, everyone was trying to figure out whether, given the chance, they should flee the country. I had the choice, as an American citizen, to take my family on a ship that would sail to Cyprus, and to continue from there to safety. I seriously considered the possibility—and the decision had to be made quickly because the evacuation was announced on the afternoon of October 15 and the ship left on the morning of October 16. In discussing this with my wife, she said she could not leave, because her youngest sister was 39 weeks pregnant, and she wanted to stay with her for the birth. We stayed—and she gave birth the next day.
It took me some time to realize that this decision came with a cost. As someone who had spent his entire life guided by his survival instinct, I was forced to plug into other coping mechanisms to maintain mental and emotional confidence. I had to prioritize principles other than survival. These included family, community, and a sense of collective responsibility. But I was also bolstered by a touch of fatalism. I realized that once you have repressed your survival instinct at a moment of clear and present danger, it is not necessarily easy to reactivate it later. The next time you find yourself in a situation of extreme danger, you might ignore the survival instinct altogether and go with the principles that you have chosen over it. You might decide that dying at home is more important to you than living in a strange land.
In the pre-morning hours of June 13, 2025, we were all awakened by a siren that led us straight to our phones. It was not yet another missile from Yemen—the kind to which we’d grown accustomed if not immune over the past twenty months. It was an announcement of Israel’s attack on Iran. We gathered the kids, now almost two years older, and ran to my wife’s parents’ apartment down the street. I was acutely aware of the differences between this moment and the one on October 7. This was in the dark of night rather than the light of day. This was happening amid the heat of summer rather than in the cool of autumn. Yet one thing was the same: We were running for shelter.
In the morning, not knowing what awaited us, I returned to our apartment to get some supplies, which I gathered in bags. Looking over at the sink, I saw a pile of dishes. This time, though I was still afraid, I didn’t hesitate. I put the bags down and did the dishes. At that moment, I realized I was no longer the person I had been when I woke up to sirens on October 7. That person wasn’t completely gone, but he no longer placed survival above everything else.