Family First Inbox: Issue 921

Reading Is the Way to Relaxation [War Diaries / Issue 920]

Thank you, Esther Mandel, for making me belly laugh over Shabbos, something we all need to relieve anxiety!

I wouldn’t necessarily use “kitchen avoidance” for my avoidance of the war, but I was in stitches when I read your line about how reading a frum book about a woman saying Tehillim for a missing child or a hero chased by a Nazi/Arab isn’t relaxing, and that sometimes reading a random story that takes place in Japan is helpful since it isn’t remotely similar to one’s life.

I feel so similar in this regard! I have a lot of the “saying heartfelt Tehillim and worrying about everything and everyone” in my life, and reading a cookbook about marinating your tuna steaks while you drink a cup of wine sounds very enjoyable.

When your life looks like this: You just attended a brachos party for a chayal in your community who is in the hospital and going through many surgeries, while sitting across the table from a woman whose soldier son was killed on October 7 and she is wearing a necklace with his face engraved on it; a while later you sat in that same room again to hear a brother of a hostage speak while your husband went to the shloshim of a chayal from your community who was killed; a couple of weeks earlier you made food for and went to shivah for another chayal in your community and cried as you hugged his mother; you davened Kabbalas Shabbos in a shul your community built in honor of a chayal who was killed and left behind four small kids, while you keep your ears tuned to any noises in case they are sirens…. Then sometimes you just need to sit down with a book not remotely related to your life at all and fall into the pages, then come out and say more Tehillim for Am Yisrael.