I was trying to focus on the historian Michael Oren, who was talking to me not about the war raging around us but about Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman general who walked the world 500 years before Jesus was born, some 200 kilometers from the spot we were standing.

“Cincinnatus was a farmer. All he wanted was to be at his plow,” Oren told me as the winter rain poured down. “But every time he went back to his farm the Roman Republic came to him and said, ‘We need you to come back. We need you to lead an army.’ ”

“The Cincinnatus myth was the foundational myth for the American Revolution, specifically for Washington himself,” Oren said. “It is also the most foundational Israeli myth. It is David Ben-Gurion. It is Moshe Dayan. It is Ariel Sharon. These people just wanted to farm. But they were called to pick up arms and defend their country. Israel is the Cincinnatus nation.”

Many have never heard the name Cincinnatus in Israel, where the Romans are remembered more as the empire that destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, slaughtered and sold its inhabitants, and renamed the land Syria Palestina. But the Jewish people—who long outlived that empire and reconstituted the Jewish national home in the land the Romans had once conquered—are also democratic heirs to Cincinnatus. //

There was not a single conversation that I had in the week I spent in Israel where the person did not say a version of the following: There was an October 6 version of me and an October 7 version of me. I am forever changed. I am a different person.

And that is another sense in which the story of the ancient Roman requires modification. The binary of war and peace, the pastoral and the military, is a retrospective luxury of powerful nations or empires. A small democracy, whose very existence is contested by populous autocracies, does not have the privilege, as Cincinnatus did, of going from the field of battle to the field to till. Israel’s citizen-soldiers are scientists, artists, and farmers, just as they are mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. Israeli citizens, whether they serve or not, are not—as one Hamas leader said of Gazans—someone else’s problem. //

Israel’s founding fathers and mothers, having known a period when Jews didn’t have a state—a period in which six million Jews were murdered—understood the difference between statelessness and sovereignty in their bones. The paradox of their extraordinary achievement is that modern Israelis, who might appreciate the distinction intellectually, could dismiss the dread alternative even when presented with visible evidence of a fragility they consigned to the past. Or at least they could until October 7. On that day, the thought exercise became real.

If Israel, in other words, is currently fighting a second war of independence—an existential war necessary for the survival of the state, as everyone here believes—then the young men and women of this country are more than soldiers. They are latter-day Ben-Gurions. They are a new generation of founders. Indeed, as Gadi Taub told me in Tel Aviv, one of the slogans of this war is lo noflim midor tachach! Which loosely translates to do not fall short of the ’48 generation. //

And yet before October 7, despite the country’s universal draft, many Israelis say they, too, believed that history and heroism were things that belonged to the past. Theirs was a nation, like ours, that was addicted to likes and to TikTok, hopelessly unserious, run by an elite with all of the noblesse but none of the oblige.