I’ll be honest: it’s hard to write at the moment.

I have a lot of conflicting stuff going on inside myself at the moment, plus the enormous uncertainty of where is all this going, and how does it turn around, tachlis – I have started a few posts today, but deleted them.

But then, a friend I hadn’t seen for a very long time popped into Jerusalem with a book she wanted to give me, by R Doron Peretz.

This is what she wrote me:

As you may have heard –  Rav Doron Perez (Chairman of World Mizrachi Organization, and who lives in [a yishuv] with his family since making aliya 9 years ago from South Africa) published a book about 8 months ago called THE JEWISH STATE.

Having read it recently, during this tkufa, my husband was blown away by it’s relevance to the current wave of antisemitism that we are experiencing right now.

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My husband was inspired to purchase many copies, dedicating the book to the safe return of Rabbi Perez’s son – Daniel Shimon ben Sharon – and to all the other hostages. We want to gift them to people we think will appreciate and benefit from it’s rich, well-referenced – biblical, spiritual and modern – content.

Attached is a picture of the book and one of the inside cover.

All of them have the dedication to Daniel on the left side .  Each individual book has a different picture of one of the other hostages on the right.

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I don’t know Rabbi Perez personally.

My friend told me that the Perez family married another son 10 days after October 7th occurred – when the son pictured above was kidnapped from his tank and taken into Gaza.

Here’s R Perez talking about that decision, and the strange reality where you can marry one son while the other son is taken into Gaza by ‘terrorists’.

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Tov.

Also this morning, I suddenly started wondering about all the dead terrorists that croaked on Israeli soil from Simchat Torah.

Why aren’t we hearing about those dead Palestinians?!

Why aren’t they also part of this discussion about ‘Bringing them Home’ etc etc etc?!

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Just now, Daniel Amram answered that question, here’s a Google translated screenshot:

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This speaks for itself.

Doesn’t it?

Do you still want to tell me that the people running our country and ‘leading this war’ are working for the Jewish people’s best interests?

Really?!

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But the cognitive dissonance – the gap between what we see happening with our own two eyes, and what we believe – is getting so strong, that unless people start jumping over into ‘the world of truth’ very soon, I simply don’t know how their psyches are going to come through this in one piece.

Our country is run by gaslighting narcissists who lie as easily as they breathe.

When enough of us really just start to acknowledge what is staring us right in the face, so blatantly, and so repeatedly  – that’s when this will finally start to change.

Of course…. that’s not an easy proposition.

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We were all raised with stories of ‘Moshiach ben David Gurion’, and the rest of it.

The brainwashing is very, very hard to erase – especially for those in the dati leumi camp, who were (and still are) being taught to revere the State as the holiest of holy.

You can tear up the whole Torah, if the State tells you to do that – and it’s dafka a big mitzvah to do that, even!

According to the ‘dati leumi’ rabbis who learned their craft very well from people like David Sinzheim and Avraham Kook.

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Me personally?

I am zig-zagging between mostly just trying to ignore ‘the war’ and everything to do with it, as much as I can, as much as possible, and then having half an hour a day of feeling like I’m going totally nuts from the mad, crazy, insane, unfair, and just plain ‘evil’ stuff being done by our dear leaders.

And I’m also playing this song by Omer Adam and Yasmin Muallem (not shmirat eynayim friendly, but really great to listen to) on repeat:

In the end, it will be good.

The flowers will still bloom, it will be good.

In the middle of the darkness, that’s where the light is ignited.

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BH, may that happen very soon.