You can't prevent death but you can prevent yourself from living....

In this third excerpt, Eric Bymel discusses life in Israel.
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I think who helped me out was Saddam Hussein.

When Desert Storm hit, we were here in Haifa, and the Scud missiles hit. There we were, sitting in Maayan’s room. She was a baby then, she was three or four. We were with gas masks that first night. I’ll never forget that. It was absolutely traumatic. Saddam Hussein, I always bless him, in a way. Because this situation of sitting in that room, we had to quickly set up all the windows so that no gas would come in. It was insulated. The kids were very, very serious, grave, about what’s going on. They put on their gas masks and they helped us with Maayan and I put a wet towel under the door so nothing will come in. We didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t have a TV at that moment, and all the phones broke down because everybody was calling. So it was absolutely scary. And so looking back on it, I said, “My God, we could have died.” Because a Scud missile hit not far from us, one of the shopping centers. So I think that made me change my whole way of looking at certain things. And it guides me all the time, you know. We can suddenly go and miss out on so many things because of being stern or being rigid or expecting things from your kids and not letting them be. So we let them be. I think they appreciate that. I’ve heard them, you have to somehow read between the lines in whatever is said, but there’s a lot of appreciation there about us accepting them how they are, letting them be and letting them develop whichever way they want to go.

Maayan is now sixteen. Last year, she was studying—majoring in high school——in math and computers, and in the middle of the year she said, “This is not for me.” Oh, and she was studying Arabic. Very serious and very good student, and she said, “This is not for me. I don’t like this. I want to do something else.” So I said, “What do you want to do?” She said, “I want to study art and drama. I’m fed up with Arabic. I don’t want to do this any more.” I said, “OK. Have you spoken to your teachers about it?” She said, “I’ll speak to them. I’ll do something about it.” So she did. She went and changed her whole thing, left math, left computers, the whole thing. And she couldn’t get over the fact that we had been so flexible. She thought she would come against a brick wall and we would say, “No way! You stay with what you’re doing! God forbid! Math is more important than art.” Or I don’t know what we could have said. And we could have said that. And I said to myself, “Saddam Hussein.” You know? “Remember that Scud missile. Remember the situation where suddenly your whole family can be wiped out.” Of course it’s happened. I mean, I lost so many of my family because of Hitler. So you have to somehow learn from that. You can’t prevent death, but you can prevent yourself from not living. You have to let them go, enjoy them, let them (pause) develop. It was a revelation. It haunts me and guides me at the same time….that experience.

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.