• Mirrored.

    Mirrored.

    If you keep watchful enough you’ll see it. The people… have become posters. Glazed, 2d, the way a memory alters the view; an extra height to that building, a wider hall than it was. An embrace that was just a hug.  The realness slips away… like what death does… it distorts. Grief is the journey…

  • Sons

    Sons

    What Israeli mother at some point doesn’t silent cry while watching her sleeping teenage son breathe in and out, the way she did when he was just under 3 kilo and ignorant of everything but wanting to live? Who doesn’t softly weep after pulling herself into bed next to her boy, now taller, now stronger,…

  • Horse pills

    Horse pills

    “Together we’ll win” (יחד ננצח) is lovely wartime morale propaganda but we’re so far from together and the fact is getting more true and more painful and I have my own 2-part prescription for the country after we volunteered on a horse farm today for a woman whose been managing on her own since Oct…

  • Strawberries

    Strawberries

    Every week you miss the strawberries; the strawberry guy’s truck is still there by the time you haphazardly show up after two, but there’s only apples, small melons, maybe some citrus left. Oh well next time, you smile at your teen who you’ve once again asked/requested/implored to jump out the car to inquire about longshot…

  • 100 days into hell

    100 days into hell

    It’s an ugly time. A time of nightmares coming true, a time of mourning and imagining and planning for the worst, constantly. A time when things you couldn’t bring yourself to say out loud a few months ago are now regular topics. I’ve learned a lot about us. I’ve learned that the ugliest things are…

  • Better to have loved and forgotten

    Better to have loved and forgotten

    There’s a glitch in my programming, or maybe it’s a bug-by-design. I’m a good reader – good in that, I can read anywhere (hours of car rides on family trips were no problem), and good in that, I enjoy reading so very much. Good in that I read with open ears and open mind. The…

  • Uncomfortable

    Uncomfortable

    Before the ceasefire, I had a thing that on days I had to leave my town for the merkaz, I’d wear comfortable shoes. You know… just in case. That faded as the explosions quieted, the sirens halted, the Hostage Release Reality Show stole our attention. Today was a day I should have worn comfortable shoes,…

  • Drowning in despair

    Drowning in despair

    Last week was the lowest. Last week was when one conserved mental energy, as one didn’t have to use their morbid imagination to consider what the 30s were like. Instead, one’s mental energy was called up to battle the despair that has descended to darken the world I grew up in. When the blood dried,…

  • How are you?

    How are you?

    Floating. Don’t you feel that way too? Just giving in to the atmosphere, letting the butterfly effect nudge you, push you on your lower back. A gentle shove, a passive direction. You didn’t climb something to get there, you stood, passively, you wake, passively, you forgot to eat, passively, you forget the day of the…

  • Where is…

    Where is…

    Ventured into Tel Aviv today. Kaplan has had quite a year. These days, it’s displaying something far more horrific and tragic… a walking nightmare, experienced by 220, shared by 9,000,000: At least here, in Israel, no one ruthlessly tears down posters of the Kidnapped, the Held, the Captive. Kaplan – the 2023 temporary home for…

  • Dispatch after 11 days into whatever comes next

    Dispatch after 11 days into whatever comes next

    I checked a few places to make sure this was actually day 11 since the Hamas massacre. The days bleed into one another, I don’t even know half the time what day of the week it is, and when I posted my first dispatch, I was off by an entire day. And so much has…

  • Our prayer.

    Our prayer.

    There’s something about our prayer in Judaism – it’s timeless. That’s out of necessity, out of an evergreen survival mode; but some periods of survival are more… necessity than others. I think that’s what fueled the magnet that drew me, compelled me, to shul this past shabbat. I had to be among those communal words,…

Questions? Comments? Advice?