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.