While the women who are waiting at home slowly get reports that their husbands or sons have been seen and are well there are others whose waiting becomes, with each news for another, more difficult to bear. Those who hear indirectly cannot wait until "I see him with my own eyes" and those who must mourn, mourn broken-heartedly.

Still, human as such reactions are, the fierce fighting has stopped so much sooner with so many fewer casualties than we could have hoped for and with such unexpected and undreamt of victories that in spite of the inevitable personal tragedies, we each were aware of the "Hand" that watched over us and had performed miracles for us.

Being wives and the "waiting ones", we doubly feel the emotional stress and strain between anxiety and relief, between anger at the necessity of war and elation at the "victory", between fear of the private loss and awe at the historical religious connotations of the reincarnation, as it were, of the "Old City" and its mystic and real temple wall, between mourning at the deaths of the living and rejoicing at the rebirth of the spiritual past.

We are sensitive in a unique way to a third piece of
life that we are living through as women with its special
color and feeling tone.
Our hands did not point a gun at the enemy, steady with the eye.
Our hands tremble holding the spoon feeding the baby,
Our eyes fill with tears too early shed
Our hearts are not hardened

by the compulsion of the moment,

To kill
or be killed

Our hearts are softened by mental images

of our children orphaned
of ourselves widowed.

Our portion not

The brass
The blare
The blaze

The muscle of the fighting.

Ours only

The banality
of babies
of baking
of brooding

And in seeking our own strength

We turn our souls
To the past of our people

Our soul's sinew knitted with Rachel

because she was a mother who wept

Our soul's sinew knitted with Devorah's

because she was a woman who warred

Our soul's sinew knitted with Hanna's

because she was a woman who prayed

Our soul's sinew knitted with Ester's

because she was a woman who dared

We sit With the unnamed women who sat

at the "waters of Babylon"

And sit with the unnamed women who lifted the cymbals
and had danced with Miriam.

Today, we again give expression to those feelings of

gratitude to the Almighty, that these mixed

emotions have evoked in our hearts as women in

the long line of our people.