“the resilience of getting up to begin a new day”

August 20, 2006 - 9:58 PM by Sarah

Rock of Galilee, whose wartime trials (he’s a resident of northern Israel) we’ve been chronicling for a while, is back home, both distressed and relieved:

Been back since Thursday and morphed back into a private person. Its nice to be home and its nice to daven in your own shul. Its nice to see friends. Its amazing to see how much your friends’ kids
have grown in one month. Its amazing to find your own grapes matured, sweet and ready to eat before the bees get them. Its distressing to find out about all the things that went wrong and its distressing to note that the only real consensus is the hope we will all be home for a while. Its distressing that the real cost of corruption is something like the national budget without even factoring in the human loss, agony and despair it causes directly or indirectly or the future cost of renewal. Its encouraging the good will of people who care and its encouraging the resilience of getting up to begin a new day.

He says everything is “back to normal,” but the end of yesterday’s post makes one wonder whether he means the “old normal” or a “new normal”:

Everything is getting back to normal. My parents were with us for shabbos and they are leaving Israel tomorrow morning. Yesterday, we got together with a bunch of friends who we haven’t seen in a while. A couple of them had been called up in the reserves, both of them paratroopers, so there was a lot of army talk going on. It seems like everyone agrees that the war wasn’t run very well. I try to stay out of army talk because I was never in. We are thinking about going camping this coming weekend with a couple friends, though some people think it’s too early for that.

I figure if its quiet now then we can consider it quiet until it gets noisy at which point we should consider it noisy until it gets quiet. Deep thoughts, but that way we don’t let the uncertainty run our lives.

My daughter went out to a youth activity yesterday and my wife asked if I told her what to do if the sirens went off. I laughed and said, no but I know exactly what she’ll do. She’ll start shrieking. The truth is there really isn’t anything you can do, but I will make a point to let them know to lie on the ground next to a building.

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