We’ve said it before, now we’ll say it again

Our plans are meaningless. We plan weddings, trips, even little things like meals and haircuts. We hope they will happen, but sometimes they don’t.

We planned for two major events this week.

Nope! The second is not going to work!

Here was our plan: We would wait for the brit milah and then immediately arrange a trip to Israel.

The brit was perfect. The mohel, the boy’s grandfather, did an exemplary job, and the baby barely acknowledged it. He squeaked once or twice and then went back to sleep, not understanding what all the fuss was about. We all agreed that he acquired a handsome name, a Jewish name he could grow up with, Gabriel Chaim. There were hundreds of people assembled at Lincoln Square Synagogue and the seudat mitzvah, the festive meal, was sumptuous and delicious. The boy’s father spoke with great love about his new son and the name that had been chosen for him. It was all flawless and magnificent.

As we had planned, when we arrived back home in New Jersey we booked our trip to Israel. Gabriel’s father’s brother, our grandson, the second in an amazing band of five sons, was awaiting his own new baby, another sabra. His wife, from a family of five daughters, was pregnant with their second child, due within a very few days.

The trip arranged and the brit over, we started to pack. We would be leaving in three days. We stopped the newspapers, arranged for our mail and did the routine organizational stuff that we had done literally hundreds of times before.

But this time it was not to be!

Although there had been lots of saber-rattling about Iran, we simply did not acknowledge the possibility of an imminent war breaking out. As you know, that’s exactly what happened. Our flight was canceled before even a toothbrush was tossed into our suitcase.

Our grandson, the expectant father, was, nonetheless, called into the Miluim, far from home. As of this writing he serves his country.

It’s not for me to determine whether this war had to be fought at this time. I know that Iran has been an implacable enemy, but I recall many other wars that seemed easy until they weren’t, in places like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan. We call such events quagmires, and we can only pray that this war does not become one.

Our family chayalim have only recently finished their battles in Gaza, and now here they are in uniform yet again. May they and all their sisters and brothers in the Israeli and American military all return quickly, safely, and unscathed.

And may God bless the new baby, soon expected to be among us, with a life of peace and joy, a life free of skirmishes, quagmires, rockets, bombs, guns, tanks and hate.

Dear world, I’ve been waiting for an end to war throughout my life. And so have the generations who followed me. It’s time!

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of 10. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com