There’s a particular kind of surreal clarity that comes when your phone buzzes at 4 AM with an alert that reads like the end of the world. In those seconds between alarm and action, between threat and shelter, ordinary life is almost hanging by a thread. For three Hebrew teachers at Citizen Café, continuing to teach during Iran’s recent attacks became an unexpected anchor. Each in their own way found small moments of meaning and connection that helped them navigate the uncertain days.

“We Keep Getting Up and Falling Down”

Yuval Heimann, who is pursuing her Master’s in clinical psychology while teaching Hebrew, found herself thinking about a concept called “beta paradox”, the psychological phenomenon where people cope better with intense trauma than with everyday stress.

“It’s hard to talk about the recent weeks as something separate from our daily reality here, which has been a reality of war and pain for almost two years,” Yuval reflects. “I feel that in some ways, as Israelis, our pain threshold keeps rising. All our lives, we’re used to hearing about attacks and bombings and bereavement, then October 7th, and we got used to that too, even to the fact that there are still hostages in Gaza – we got used even to that. Then Iran. And we keep going, because life is strong, because there’s no choice, because we’re already used to getting up and falling down.”

The paradox, she explains, is that extreme situations activate coping mechanisms, both psychological and social, while everyday difficulties don’t trigger the same protective responses. “But something about our current situation confuses this. The extreme, the traumatic, has become our daily routine.”

In this strange landscape, Yuval found herself “clinging to small things: people I love, teaching Hebrew, a green tree. My work, which I really love. I try very hard (and don’t always succeed) to keep doing things I know are good for me, like yoga and meditation, cooking and eating delicious food, meeting a close friend, and going to the beach. I also try to forgive myself when it doesn’t happen, and try again tomorrow.”

“The Highlight of My Week”

For Liri Landsberg, that first night brought a familiar choreography of crisis. The new alert sound, a brief moment of panic, then “almost indifference. ‘What’s new?’ passes through my head.” Minutes later, an actual siren sounds, and she drags herself to the stairwell, not even going downstairs. “We’ve gotten used to it here.”

But a phone call from her mother changes everything: “You need to come home now!” Within seconds, her brothers are calling, they’re leaving Tel Aviv immediately, and she needs to come with them. “In seconds, a new situation, emergency again, a need to escape again.”

She spent a week in Raanana with her parents, “a big family in one house with one small safe room, two small children – my nephews – whose mother is stuck abroad, and everything wrapped in a suffocating existential threat.” What helped her through those days was self-compassion: “I didn’t pretend to be productive, didn’t count calories, didn’t take advantage of ‘opportunities within crises’ and didn’t try to be strong. I was satisfied with being functional only.”

Amidst the chaos, one thing stood out: “I need to note here how much Citizen Cafe’s presence helped me and gave me a sense of stability. Beyond our functioning during emergencies, the lessons I taught were the highlight of my week.”

After a week, she decided to return to fragile Tel Aviv. “I was very angry that terror dictates my life. The thought that a siren once or twice a day uproots me from daily life frustrated me so much.” The drive back was terrifying, but she knew she wanted her own home: “to feel myself again.”

“A Strange Kind of Comfort”

Neta Alon was in the middle of an especially busy period: teaching at Citizen Café while preparing for two major presentations for her Master’s in brain sciences. Then Iran’s attack began, and “suddenly everything stopped. The presentations were canceled, and all plans were called off. The busy routine just waited on the side for two weeks, and we shut ourselves in our homes.”

Living in a Tel Aviv apartment without a safe room, Neta and her partner spent those first hours at 4 AM searching the streets for a public shelter. They found one at a nearby school and ended up there, “several times a day, for 12 days. With the whole neighborhood.”

A friend visiting from Germany got stuck in Israel and joined them, along with a close friend from a few buildings away who didn’t want to be alone. “That’s how we spent most evenings together, the four of us, talking, drinking, and occasionally going down to the neighborhood shelter together. We even made some friends there.”

The shelter became “really an anthropological experience. You meet everyone there: elderly grandmothers and families with babies. Those who came with mattresses and books, and those glued to the news. It’s this weird kind of microcosmos that somehow also evoked some comfort in me.”

“Honestly”, Neta admits, “I didn’t really manage to ground myself. I know that practicing yoga is good for me, something that can help in situations like these. But I couldn’t bring myself to do yoga during this entire period, at all.” Instead, her body ached with “this kind of fatigue that’s not even related to poor sleep. It’s exhaustion.”

What did help was being together, finding comfort in her partner, meeting friends, and getting outside. “And the truth – also working. Teaching at Citizen during this period wasn’t simple for me, I admit. Getting up early for a morning class after a sleepless night when I went to the neighborhood shelter twice… It’s not easy. But the fact that we continued teaching at Citizen during this time, the encounter with students, yes, it strengthened me and gave me energy. Maintaining some kind of routine within this madness feels a bit absurd, and maybe even disconnected, but I think it protected me.”

The Thread That Holds

In a time when the extraordinary has become routine, when missile alerts punctuate morning coffee and shelters become social spaces, Neta, Liri, and Yuval found something irreplaceable in the simple act of continuing to teach Hebrew. Not because it made the danger disappear or the fear subside, but because it offered a different kind of resistance. The insistence that language, connection, and learning matter even when, especially when, everything else feels uncertain.

Perhaps this is what resilience looks like: not the ability to bounce back quickly, but the wisdom to know what’s worth holding onto when everything else is falling apart. For three Hebrew teachers, it turned out to be the language itself, and the students who, despite everything, still wanted to learn it.