Ups and downs

It is fascinating to watch people coping with this war. In addition to the cookers and the cleaners, there are the watchers (of the news) and the listeners (to the news) and the avoiders (of all news) and those, like me, who regulate the amount of news they can tolerate on an hour by hour basis. There are some days that I am with the news almost constantly and others that I spend very little time listening or watching. And I believe that each and every person has his or her own way of coping.

But, strangely enough, life goes on, albeit in a sadder tone.

Today I took my daughter to Raanana to make a shiva call at the home of a family whose son, a major in the Israeli Army, had been killed in the fierce battle with Hezbollah that took place north of Avivim. His story, like so many others, is tragic. He had married only three weeks ago. He and his wife had just begun to set up their home. The son of Anglo immigrants, he seems to have been someone who everyone loved. My daughter was visiting because she had been a coworker of his mother.

While in Raanana, we took a walk on the tree lined main street which was bustling with traffic and populated by stores filled with wares that spilled out onto the sidewalk. People were sitting in cafes and people were walking through the street as if it were just a normal day. I remarked to my daughter that had I taken a videotape of our walk today, no one would have believed that things here are so normal.

Of course in the North they are anything but normal. By this morning, before the day’s barrage of rockets, Nahariya, a lovely seaside town where we spent a weekend this past winter, had sustained damage to 500 buildings. And that is only in one town. Hezbollah has hit in or around every town in the North of Israel.

So there is simultaneously this sense of things being fine and of pain and loss and destruction. And this week we added into the mix one more factor.

On Friday July 14, our youngest son and his wife presented us with a darling new granddaughter. This past Thursday she was given the name “Shira”. We pray that she will grow up in a country that will be safe and secure and where none will make her afraid.