“Yeah, yeah,” a close friend writes. “You’re posting a lot, but what’s happening with you? How are you reacting to this mess?”  So I’m going to bore you.

In the effort to maintain a full time job of taking care of an aged woman (me), I have not been volunteering to help out the hundreds of thousands of internal refugees in Israel.  Apart from money, clothing and good will, I have done pretty much nothing.  And they are so needy, so traumatized and so helpless in this confusing situation, it is pretty awful.

i try to help out my friends, who have become crazier by the minute from all the stress, and buy as much as I can from any shop that has managed to stay open, but that’s it.

And I haven’t helped my family much either, except to shield them from my fears and anxieties as much as possible.  In the last month I did share my expectations of a war, but they shut me up, and I was wrong about the exact date.  

All I can do is offer to share my apartment and my erratic cooking.  And hope they don’t need to take me up on it.  

I’m hoping that at least some of the supplies sent yesterday and today got through to the people of Gaza, and didn’t get grabbed first by Hamas, but I doubt it.

And I try very hard not to let the bestiality of the raid on October 7, the brutal murders and the dreadful kidnappings, affect my attitude to the Gazan people. 

All this is very exhausting,  So basically, I’m pretty sedentary, try not to watch news, and cheer up my friends as much as possible.  

And pray people don’t get swayed by the false propaganda going around…