My readership is split into two main groups: those to whom this week’s title will seem intriguing, and those who knew as soon as they read the first figure in the equation above what I am writing about today. I am writing on Tuesday morning, a little after 11AM, which means that the 2-minute siren sounded throughout Israel has not long died away. This is not a rising and falling siren, the kind that sends us immediately to our safe rooms and shelters, but the one that quickly rises to a steady pitch, and stays there, unwavering, for 120 seconds, to mark the daytime observance of silence for Israel’s fallen, both military and security forces and civilian victims of terror, who have been killed defending Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel since 1860.

Today is not the day to point out that the start of the modern assault on Jews in the Land of Israel began not in 1967 but in 1860. Today is the day to reflect on the 30,961 members of the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement before the state was established in 1948) and Israelis (since 1948) who have made the ultimate sacrifice for the Zionist ideal. This year, for the first time, each second of the two-minute siren carries the weight of 250 lives, and each life, as Jewish tradition holds, carries the weight of an entire world.

Listening to the state radio broadcaster’s treatment of Memorial Day this morning, I found myself wondering how to characterise it in today’s blog post. The first thing that struck me was to test our national feeling of the disproportionate enormity of the numbers against the experience of the only other nation I know at all. Taking the yardstick of deaths due to conflict since 1860, Israel has lost the equivalent of 0.33% of its current population. Britain, over the same period, has lost 1.86% of its current population, over five times as large a proportion.

Again, on October 7, 2023, on the day of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, just over a quarter of one per cent of the population was killed. On July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme in World War 1, over two-fifths of a percent of the British population was killed. The Israelis were mostly civilians, massacred in their homes and at a dance party, while the Britons were conscripts, massacred in the Flanders mud. Nevertheless, as a proportion of the nation’s population, over one and a half times as many died on July 1, 1916 as on October 7, 2023.

Of course, the impact of that first day of the Battle of the Somme was not felt as immediately, as nationally, as graphically in 1916 as October 7 was felt in Israel. The world and its inter-connectivity are of course so different today from a century ago.

However, there is another difference. To illustrate it, I want to draw on the finest work of the finest of the poets forged in the furnace of the First World War: Wilfred Owen.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

By Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
 And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

What sings through Owen’s verse is the futility of the war and the meaninglessness of the loss. He views the dying soldiers as passive and powerless victims. Unsurprisingly, he does not for a moment see them as individuals.

None of this, I hasten to add, is intended as a criticism of the poem, or a suggestion that Owen was unfeeling. However, it is difficult to imagine a ‘treatment’ of soldiers’ deaths that is more different from what happens on Israel’s Memorial Day, in the public arena of newspaper features and radio interviews, just as much as in the private space of a mourning family. In Israel, every year, the unique path of each one of a host of individual soldiers is, with love and appreciation, traced by family and friends. This may seem like hagiography, but the hard evidence confirms that it is, rather, a celebration of an extraordinary group of individuals. 

Time after time after time, the stories illustrate the truth: a disproportionate number of the fallen are officers, leading their troops by personal example; a disproportionate number of those who volunteer or are selected for the kind of combat roles that bear the heaviest losses are the natural leaders, the idealists, the visionaries of their generation. So many of the fallen leave behind them diaries, journals, poems, songs, ethical wills that are inspiring. So many of them drank as fully as they could of the deepest joys that life holds: whether a closeness to nature, a tireless desire to help others, a deep love for another human being, a deep well of creativity: and, for so many of them, a simple, unbendable, recognition that they must serve their country.

Every year, Memorial Day uncovers more and more stories not only of bravery on the battlefield, of sacrifice for others, but also of lives, however brief, lived as fully and as well as they could be. Every year, we weep for the potential that has been lost, and wonder that there is so much potential and even, despite their youth, achievement, in the present generation of young soldiers. Every year, we wearily ask how long we need to ask our youth to make this sacrifice, and, at the same time, marvel at their readiness, if needed, to do so.

And, of course, alongside the commitment of youth, every year we measure, in astonishment and gratitude, the untiring readiness to serve of the reservists from previous generations. Who can weigh in the scale the sacrifice of a twenty-year-old with their whole life before them against the sacrifice of a parent in their forties with a young family? As, indeed, who can weigh in the scale the grief of a parent burying a young adult child against the grief of a young child burying a parent?

Which brings me to my last observation. On Memorial Day, the vessel in which the memory of the fallen is offered to us is the bereft family. Two voices stood out for me this morning. The first was that of a woman in her nineties, retelling the story of her father’s heroism in one of the key battles of the War of Independence, and of his death in action in 1948, when she was 14. This same woman was packing emergency supplies for the people of the Gaza envelope on October 9, 2023, when she was almost 90, when she was told that her grandson had fallen in action in the Gaza envelope. She fought successfully to have him buried next to his great-grandfather in the military ceremony on Mount Herzl, and she now visits the graves of her father and grandson together.

At 10 this morning, Liat Regev, the presenter of a daily interview programme, began by saying, with no introduction: “I visited the military cemetery on Mount Herzl with my father the other day. He is now in his eighties, and he can’t cope with the crowds of bereft families on Memorial Day itself, so a couple of years ago I starting taking him a few days before.” It wasn’t initially clear to me whether she was reading an account by someone else, but it soon became clear that she was telling her own family’s story, of her father’s own father falling in the early years of the state, leaving a widow and two sons, the younger of whom, Liat’s father, had hardly any memories of his father. All Liat has is two black and white photographs, and her grandmother’s and uncle’s stories.

This is Israel’s Memorial Day, when, it seems, almost everyone has an individual, deeply personal, national story to tell, even the radio presenter, and everyone listens. By the time you read these words, we will have transitioned, not, as I wrote last week, jarringly, but, rather, naturally sand inevitably, into the celebrations of Independence Day. If their journals, last letters, and ethical wills are anything to go by, this is only what those who paid the ultimate sacrifice would want. They leave behind them a collective message, urging us to embrace life.

I leave you with the wish, even though I am not foolhardy enough to think for a moment that it is a realistic wish, that next year, as this year, we will mourn 30,963 again, and not one unique life more.

For some unaccountable reason, my thoughts have been turning recently to the question of continued Jewish existence. I know: bizarre, isn’t it? Don’t ask me what triggered it, but there you are.

What struck me very forcibly is that the Jewish view of time is that the path of Jewish history unfolds along a spiral staircase. The path that we take, viewed from above, is circular, and that circle is the Jewish year. Historically, we step onto the staircase at Pesach, with the Exodus from Egypt, when Jacob’s children became the Children of Israel, and move through Shavuot and the covenant at Sinai when the Torah was given and received. At Sukkot we celebrate the protection God afforded the desert generation on their long journey to the Land of Israel, while at Chanukah and Purim we recall the miracles of the Maccabees’ defeat of the Greeks, and Esther and Mordechai’s earlier thwarting of Haman’s plans to exterminate the Jews.

Parallel to these historical memories is our annual exploration of our personal and national relationship with God. As a celebration of the agricultural year, the three pilgrim festivals are also a celebration of God’s relationship with the people of the Land, as expressed in the bounty of the Land. They are also, of course, reminders of the mass ascent of the people from their homes throughout the Land, an ascent to the Temple at those three festivals. At Yom Kippur, also, we remind ourselves of the role of the High Priest in the Temple, asking God to forgive the sins of the people. Further along the staircase, we commemorate the Maccabees’ rededication of the Second Temple, and, a little later in the year, the courage, faith and resourcefulness required when God hides his face and the Jews live in exile, with no Temple.

As I said earlier, viewed from above our path is a circle through the cycle of the year. However, viewed from the side, we are made aware of the vertical dimension of the staircase. The fact is that if, at every Pesach, we find ourselves exactly where we were spiritually last Pesach, then we have expended energy on the staircase, but we haven’t used it for the purpose it was designed to serve, spiritual ascent. Indeed, for some of us the staircase sometimes seems to be designed by M C Escher: as we walk along it, we are sure we are ascending, and yet, a year later, we find ourselves in exactly the same place as we were the previous year.

Within that annual cycle, there are smaller, self-contained, flights of stairs, that represent a historical ascent that we are invited to take inspiration from. The 10 Days of Awe, from the start of Rosh Hashana until the end of Yom Kippur, is one such brief and intense period of personal and communal repentance.

A longer period, the counting of the Omer, marks the seven weeks from the second day of Pesach until Shavuot, the period from the Exodus to the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. We learn how the Children of Israel, through their initial experiences before, during and immediately after the Exodus, were able to rise from slavery in Egypt to entering the covenant with God, and we strive to emulate that ascent.

There is another, flight of stairs, packed into the first part of the seven weeks of the Omer. I was going to call this Israeli, but the fact is that I don’t really see a distinction between Israeli and Jewish here, and the Jewish nature of this particular flight of stairs is completely undeniable.

We start with the first night of Pesach, the moment at which the Jewish people was formed. On the last day of Pesach, we remember the splitting of the Reed Sea and the drowning of the Egyptian army. A week later, we mark Yom Hashoah, the day of remembrance of the Holocaust and the Heroism. The survivors giving testimony are every year increasingly drawn from the millions of Jewish children swept up in the Holocaust (those survivors who were even as young as 16 in 1942 are now celebrating their 100^th birthday.) Naturally, most survivors were not old enough to be active in resisting the Nazis. And so, equally naturally, the stories that dominate the media in Israel throughout Yom Hashoah are stories of suffering, of hiding, of fleeing, of surviving, rather than of resisting. In the early years of the State, this view of the Shoah was at odds with the message of the Zionist endeavour. Modern Jewish military heroes wanted, and ‘needed’, to be provided with suitable models for imitation.

Thankfully, Israel matured, and became sufficiently confident in its military strength, to be able to relax the official line, and to give proportionate voice to the suffering and helplessness of the vast majority of victims of the Holocaust. The pejorative depiction of Jews going ‘like lambs to the slaughter’ was recognised as the factual distortion that it clearly is. On Yom Hashoah, and this has been true for many years, the nation mourns and honours all of those who were murdered in the Shoah, without distinguishing the helpless victims from the defiant resisters or the resourceful or fortunate survivors.

A week after Yom Hashoah, the nation again pauses, on Yom Hazikaron, to remember all those who fell in the years leading to the Declaration of Independence, and in all of the wars from the War of Independence until today, as well as all victims of terrorist attacks. As a friend observed on their Whats App status today: In Israel, we have two memorial days every year: the first to remind us of the cost of not having a state, and the second one to remind us of the cost of having a state. The timing of these two days, a week apart, has always hammered home that message very powerfully. However, since October 7, 2023, I have found it more and more difficult to contemplate that message without wondering, in a corner of my mind, whether there is not a dangerous smugness in the neatness of the message. ‘Never again’ sounds a little glib in the wake of the massacre at the Nova festival, and, after two and a half years of fighting, and despite some stirring tactical victories, to still have northern communities suffering daily bombardment from Lebanon, and troops still needing constant vigilance on the Gazan border, and heroes being killed and injured in Lebanon, and Iran with its nuclear threat still intact, is sometimes, in the cooler hours of a dark night, to wonder whether Israel does really offer every Jew in the world the promise of security.

Is the Jewish world in a better place now than during the Shoah? Without a shadow of a doubt! Is that difference qualitative or only quantitative? On October 6, 2023, I would have answered, without a moment’s hesitation: ‘Qualitative!’ And now, in the world after October 7? And in the world after October 8, by the end of which day it was clear that antisemitism had come out of the closet worldwide? I would still answer: ‘Qualitative,’ but only after thinking about it for a little while.

From Yom Hazikaron, we move instantly into Yom Ha’atzma’ut, and celebrate Israel’s independence. Some find that transition jarring. However, I think it makes perfect sense. You cannot in any way live with the terrible price the Jews and other citizens of Israel have paid to ensure the establishment and the continued existence of the Jewish state unless you celebrate the miracle that is that state. And, of course, Israel is not a perfect state. What country is? For some reason, many other nations demand that Israel, uniquely among the family of nations, be a perfect state, or forfeit its right to exist. They can demand, but we are not obliged to accede to their demand.

Nevertheless, there is so much to celebrate in Israel’s continued existence. Its unequalled absorption of refugees; its thriving economy; its incredible advances in agriculture, water purification, technology, medical science; its recreation of Hebrew as a vibrant living language; its thriving religious and cultural life. I could go on and on.

And so, at the end of a period of three weeks that began with the Exodus, we reach our modern world. Almost 3000 years brought us to the depths of the Shoah. Three more years brought us to the Declaration of the State of Israel. A further 78 years have brought us to where we are now: achieving miracles on a regular basis, partnering with a world superpower in a struggle to save Western civilisation from an existential threat, Is everything rosy? Far from it. Is the future secure? No. Would the State’s achievements to date have been imaginable in 1948? I think not.

Driving home from Zichron last night, still basking in the sunlight of Raphael’s energy and Adam’s chattering away in fluent rubbish, Bernice and I listened to a couple of instalments of Daniel Gordis’s essential listening: Israel from the Inside. After we listened to the second, I turned to Bernice and said: ‘There’s one word that leapt out at me from that discussion.’ ‘What word?’, she asked me. ‘Yet,’ I replied, and, from my mention of that one word, Bernice knew exactly the sentence of the 63-minute podcast I was referring to. Discussing how the current resurgence of antisemitism makes the Zionist idea as relevant now as it was to Herzl and Jabotinsky, Gordis said: ‘I don’t think Jews are going to get rounded up by train in America. I just don’t think that America has the capacity to do that…yet, but I don’t know what’s down the road.’

I simply cannot imagine anyone with Gordis’s intellectual stature and intimate understanding of Jewish American life making a statement like that at any time before 2023. I was even shocked to hear it now in 2026, after all that has happened in the last three years. However, if that’s what Gordis feels, then I’m certainly not in a position to question his judgement.

There may be moments when I have my doubts about the future of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state. However, when weighed against the prospects of future viable Jewish communities in the Diaspora, Israel still looks like the only genuine game in town. So, I shall be raising my glass next Wednesday, and drinking a toast to her second 78 years.

Blogger’s Note: Because the second Chag of Pesach begins this evening, I am posting 19 hours early this week. Next week should see normal service resumed. Meanwhile, Chag Sameach.

Earlier this week, I made a phone call to England, to speak to my cousin Marilyn, whom I love dearly. It’s a call I had been putting off making, as, it transpired, she had as well, because we were both afraid that if we spoke, in these very difficult days, we would find it impossible to avoid talking about ‘the situation’, and we both knew that would probably be a very difficult conversation, which we both feared might sour our relationship.

We bravely broached the subject of whether we should broach the subject early in our conversation, and, having more or less decided that we would avoid the issue, we then, briefly, didn’t avoid it. During this short exchange, Marilyn expressed her disappointment that in my blog posts, I, whom she knows as a person of some sensibility, have not, among all my references to the tragedy of the Israeli deaths since October 7, 2023, felt the need to mention even once the deaths of innocent Palestinians.

I want, today, to explore that observation, which is, objectively, undeniably true, and to ask myself whether that is something I should be ashamed of, and something I need to rectify. I will, as always in my blog, be thinking aloud. I have never seriously revised a first draft of a blog post, and I don’t intend to do so with this one. So, if it seems as though I am feeling my way, it is because I am.

My initial reaction was to consider the factors that contribute to the chasm that yawns between Marilyn and myself. Sixty years ago, we were probably pretty closely aligned as fairly typical children of the Britain of the sixties, although I was always (as anyone who knows either of us will not be surprised to hear) considerably more conventional – a Morris Minor to Marilyn’s Mini Cooper. Since then, a combination of factors has contributed to our views diverging. I became more religious, in the Orthodox Jewish stream; Marilyn’s Jewishness remained more a question of peoplehood. I came on aliya; Marilyn stayed in Britain. Marilyn continued to embrace left-wing, feminist, multi-cultural, pacifist values; I embraced increasingly mainstream Israeli nationalist values. I suspect Marilyn supports the idea of a Jewish state (although that’s part of the conversation I haven’t dared have in the last few decades), but not at the expense of any other people’s right to self-determination. 

All that is implied by that last paragraph is also, obviously, heightened by each of us inhabiting the echo-chamber of our life choices. I might note the wide range of political viewpoints represented in the Jerusalem Post, and the anti-Bibi sentiment expressed by many presenters on the state radio and TV network, but I only need to glance at Haaretz’s online headlines to see that there is a slew of stories and alternative opinions that I do not follow daily.

All of which leads me to two conclusions that pull in opposite directions.  Marilyn may not understand the reality of life in the Middle East, both because she does not live here and because she gains only partial and distorted insight from the media she accesses. At the same time, I may lack the emotional and physical distance to judge the situation here objectively, and the media I access are equally partial and distorted.

Events since October 7, 2023 have only heightened this media distance between us, in a way that is very relevant to this discussion. I understand from family in Britain that, during the war in Gaza, pictures of Gazan children, injured, killed, made homeless, in the aftermath of Israeli attacks, were a constant presence on British mainstream media. At the same time, these images were almost completely absent from Israeli mainstream media.

It appears that there is a lot of truth in the adage: Out of sight, out of mind. It is a lot easier not to think of suffering Palestinian children when they are not visible.

There are additional factors at play here. Throughout the war, the only figures provided of deaths and injuries suffered by Palestinians in Gaza were the figures provided by the Hamas-operated Gazan Health Service. Given the climate of vocal public opinion in the Arab world and in the West, Hamas were only too aware that any figures they issued would be accepted by large swathes of the West’s liberal population. There was certainly nothing stopping them exaggerating those figures: no independent body was in a position to authoritatively challenge them, and, as became apparent in the immediate aftermath of October 7, even before Israel counter-attacked Gaza, the world was very ready to accept Hamas’s version of the truth.

In the figures of casualties published by Hamas, no distinction was made between combatants and civilians. Indeed, as is very well documented, Hamas makes no distinction between civilian and military at any level. Rocket launchers were hidden in residential homes’ sheds. Hostages were hidden in residential homes. Hamas control centres were integrated into the buildings and communication systems of hospitals. Tunnel entrances were located in mosques and schools. Arms caches were hidden under children’s beds.

Faced with an enemy that fights this way, it is incredibly difficult not to accept the enemy’s own definition, and, instead, to make no distinction between Hamas and Gaza. In any war between nation states, not only the enemy’s armed forces, but all the enemy’s nationals, are the enemy. To be expected to play by different rules when the enemy is a terrorist group is a very big ask. It is, in addition, true that Hamas was elected in 2006, winning 74 of the 132 seats, Fatah winning 45. Hamas was democratically elected by the people of Gaza. They must take responsibility for that.

In addition, while it is not easy to gauge the truth in Gaza, it is undeniable that after the first wave of Hamas terrorists drove through the breached security fence on October 7, they were followed by thousands of ‘civilian’ Gazans, who behaved with a bestial savagery that matched that of Hamas. Similarly, the successful concealing of the hostages for months and months points to a high level of collaboration from the Gazan in the street.

Going back to the official Hamas fatality figures, they did make a distinction between the sexes and between adults and minors. The reported figures are as follows:
Men: 39,606; Women: 12,500; Children (under 18): 20,179

I turned to Country Reports, a website that provides facts and figures for the countries of the world, and extracted the following figures for the Gaza Strip:

Median age: 18.1; Sex Ratio at birth (male/female): 1.06

Applying that data to the official Hamas figures, if Gazans were killed entirely indiscriminately by Israel, we would expect the breakdown of deaths in the war to be as follows:

Men: 19,052; Women: 17,973; Children (under 18): 35,260.

It seems reasonable to assume that the ‘extra’ 20,000 men (and, sadly, some of the 20,179 under 18-year-olds) were Hamas military.

Ignoring the under-18 combatants, the ratio of combatants to civilians killed is, by this calculation, very slightly worse than 1:2.5. This is, as experts in urban combat have stated, an incredibly low ratio of civilian casualties. (In fact, there is some evidence that the Gazan authorities included all deaths from all causes in the above statistics, and that the true ratio is close to 1:1, which would be astonishing.)

Does any of the above make any less tragic each individual death of a child under the rubble of a collapsed home under aerial bombardment, or the death of a young woman mistakenly identified as a terrorist by automatic rifle fire? Categorically, no. Am I proud of not having acknowledged that earlier? No. Am I ashamed of not having acknowledged that earlier? I think not. We are at war, and the people of Gaza have done nothing to indicate that they do not support all of the actions of Hamas on and since October 7, 2023.

I end by reflecting on the words of a woman who was both considerably tougher than I am and considerably more compassionate, and so wise. Golda Meir is quoted as saying: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” I thank my cousin Marilyn for provoking/inspiring/triggering this post; I mourn the insensitivity to human suffering that living in the reality of the Middle East has tempted me into. I mourn the death of innocents in Gaza, at the same time as I defend Israel’s right to risk inflicting those deaths as an inevitable consequence of its justified decision to engage in an existential war. I weep for a world in which war is necessary, while also recognising that that is the world we live in, whatever Pope Leo might prefer to think. War is necessary, because to have liberal, democratic pacifists on one side of a conflict is not enough. It takes two to tango. I weep for the way the world is, but wishing it otherwise does not make it so, and Israel cannot afford the luxury of ignoring reality.

Dateline Tuesday afternoon. That this week’s blog post comes to you at all is little short of miraculous. Under normal circumstances, I can, most days, give a passing imitation of a functioning human being. However, the last four weeks of war have taken their toll on me. Not that we have had a tough time in Maale Adumim. On the contrary: our 54 sirens, and our total time of 14 hours 36 minutes in the shelter, place us in 361st place in the national ranking. Kiryat Shmone, in first place, has had 171 sirens and has spent over 44 hours in shelters. Add to that the fact that residents of Kiryat Shmone, being fired on at very close range from Lebanon, have, typically, no heads-up warning, and, effectively, no time to reach a shelter after the siren sounds, whereas we usually have five minutes or so between heads-up and siren, and, after the siren starts, 90 precious seconds to reach the shelter.

Effectively, this means that at night, we have time to add a layer of clothing, go downstairs, put shoes on, pick up coats and keys, and then sit and wait for the siren that may or may not come. We are not in the best place in the country: Mitzpe Ramon, down south in the middle of nowhere, shares 701st and last place (or should that be first place), having had its first and so far only siren on Shabbat, courtesy of the late-to-the-party Houthis.

Incidentally, you may remember me mentioning that we recently adopted the habit of wearing slippers rather than shoes in the house. This is out of deference to our new lounge suite with the reclining seats, whose footrests we are determined not to sully. One consequence of the war is that we now seem to spend a significant part of our day (and, sometimes, night) putting on shoes in anticipation of a siren and taking them off again when the heads-up fails to convert. It would be an exaggeration to say that it is a disappointment, after ten minutes sitting downstairs in tracksuit and shoes, clutching a coat, at 2AM, for the siren to fail to materialise, but a little of the edge of relief is taken off by all that retrospectively unnecessary effort.

Not that we are getting complacent. We diligently follow Home Front guidelines for every incident. Even when we were driving to Esther last week, and a siren caught us on the motorway, we moved into the nearside lane as soon as the heads-up sounded, and then, when the siren started, we stopped the car, got out, moved into the field by the side of the road, lay down, and 50% of us kept our heads down with our hands over our head for the full 15 minutes until the all-clear sounded, For much of that 15 minutes, 50% of us were occupied with saying: “Will you please keep your head down and covered by your hands!”, while the other 50% countered with: “A fat lot of good that will do if a half-tonne missile lands on me!”

It is not entirely clear to me which of us is Eeyore and which Piglet, in this scenario. Bernice firmly believes that if the missile has her number on it (she, who doesn’t even have an army number), then she might as well stay in the car in comfort and wait for it. I, on the other hand, am eager to take whatever meagre steps I can to mitigate the impact of a single small piece of shrapnel travelling eight inches above the ground.

I have to report that, apart from us, only one other driver, as far as we could see, stopped his car, and even he, after ten minutes of lying down, got up and resumed his journey. During the 15 minutes, upwards of 100 vehicles must have driven past us heading north.

At least everyone seemed to be driving sensibly. On other occasions, after a heads-up and before a siren that never came, we have seen drivers travelling 30 or 40 kph above the 120 kph speed limit, weaving in and out of traffic, in what was, presumably, an attempt to outrun the missile. Conversely, we have seen other drivers swerve into the nearside line and skid to a stop on the hard shoulder, narrowly avoiding causing an accident. There have, in fact, been several accidents caused by drivers reacting unsafely to a siren.

I see it is now 750 words since I mentioned that the war has taken its toll on me mentally: me and many others, I think it is fair to say. Let me pluck just a couple of examples from the many available. Bernice and I have whiled away a couple of afternoons trying to work out whether today was Tuesday or Wednesday. Last night, having changed over the kitchen for Pesach but not having time to cook, we decided to try out an Asian restaurant in our local mall. We spent the five-minute drive to the mall trying to remember whether the restaurant was called Oshi-Koshi (Wasn’t Oshen-Koshen a children’s clothing manufacturer?). It is, in fact, Oshi-Oshi (I think – let me check with Bernice – yes, it is) and surprisingly good, if, unlike me, you find the idea of eating in a mall attractive. In the end, I sat with my back to the passing pedestrian traffic, and the food was easily good enough for me to block out the background noise.

One last example. After our meal, we went to a cheap homeware store to buy something we needed, and then spent a couple of minutes in front of the store trying to remember what it was we wanted. We did eventually remember, although they did not have it in stock. Nevertheless, we chalked that up as a win, having remembered what we were there for.

Today, we had an early morning siren, around 5:30, and when we returned home at 5:50 we went back to bed. Bernice, thankfully, managed to go back to sleep, whereas I eventually gave up trying and got up to make what should have been an early start on my Pesach cake and biscuit baking. These days, I find I need hours just to get going in the morning, so it was actually 10:00 when I started.

I have a set routine that I follow every year. On paper, once I have prepared the mixture for the chocolate cake, the oven should be in constant use. If I work efficiently, I should be able to prepare the next item within the time the previous item is baking. The key words in that previous sentence are, of course, the first four: If I work efficiently.

If, on the other hand, when I am separating, the eggs a piece of shell falls in the bowl containing the whites, it takes time to fish it out. Bags of sugar in Israel are designed so that the glue bond on the top of the bag is slightly stronger than the paper, so that the bag, if you are not very careful, will split and require you to pause for clean-up and transfer to a plastic bag. The mock Tupperware I store the biscuits in is packed away very tightly after Pesach, and it can take a precious minute or two to prise apart two boxes that are wedged tightly together, and another full minute to get the lid to close once the biscuits are packed in. The pack of baking paper sometimes decides to play hide and seek in the kitchen. The baking powder and icing sugar sachets are almost indistinguishable from each other.

In a perfect world, I would have taken the last item, the cinnamon balls, out of the oven at 1:30. That I did so at 2:30 I regard as a definite win. Of course, the other thing my beautiful timetable fails to take into account is that, once the cooled and double-tossed-in-icing-sugar cinnamon balls are packed away, the countertops (or rather the polygal plastic that we tape down over the countertops for Pesach) looks like the scene, in Spielberg’s wonderful Peter Pan film Hook, where the lost boys have a food fight. Clean-up took another hour. Still, we now have a cupboard full of dessert to see us through chag.

Which seems like a good lead-in to wishing you all Chag Sameach. Wherever you are going to be, however you plan to celebrate the chag, and even if the war has changed your plans, as it certainly has changed ours, we hope that you will find meaning and joy in the holiday. My head isn’t there yet, but maybe next week I will reflect on some of that meaning in Israel in 2026.