A Good Day After All  

I’m newly widowed, and anyone who’s been through this knows that once you climb the massive mountain of details and paperwork and finally get to the other side, you’re still facing a wall of grief, uncertainty, and loneliness. It’s a sad journey to the top, and no matter all the wonderful and well-meaning friends, and the most incredible children and grandchildren, at the end of each day, you’re still doing it all alone.

So today I thought I’d take it easy on myself. Leave the computer and the paper mountain for another day, another time, and go get the car fixed! I’m not kidding, but it was a good distraction, and then there were also the errands that needed to be done in preparation for Shabbos.

I live in Israel.

Although most people where I live don’t feel the heaviness of the war on a daily basis, the tension is palpable. You can tell by how everyone walks and interacts — from the men who almost knocked me down by brushing past me in the grocery store, to the father-and-son team who pushed their grocery cart behind me and knocked me into a check-out conveyor belt, to the woman to whom I was apparently invisible as she cut in front of me so closely we would have had a collision had I not stopped short, to the many electric scooters whizzing by me so fast that one misstep would result in disaster.

Everyone is hurried, absorbed in their own worried thoughts.  Clearly, they had no malice aforethought, although evidently, they had no forethought at all.  But it was Erev Shabbos, parking was at a premium wherever it was to be found, and it was hot — oh, so hot — that if the looming Iran/Hezbollah threat wasn’t enough to make people edgy and impatient, the heat was a guaranteed boiler-maker.