Yesterday, my kid was standing behind someone she used to work with in the supermarket.

He used to be a construction supervisor.

Then, his son, a soldier in the IDF, was killed on October 7th.

He got so discombobulated emotionally, a month later he was let go from his job, because he just couldn’t do it any more.

Now, he hangs around the building site he used to manage, and people try to give him odd jobs to do.

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The man himself – dati leumi – walks around smiling all the time.

And telling people how important it is to have emuna when hard things strike you.

He starts up conversations with total strangers in supermarket lines, so he can tell them that his son died on October 7th, and how important it is to be happy.

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That’s where my daughter saw him again yesterday, striking up a conversation in the super with the guy in front of him waiting to pay.

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She told me this story, and my heart ached.

My heart literally aches for this man, and for the many hundreds like him, all over Israel.

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In all the ra-ra talk of ‘war’ and ‘conquering Rafah’, and all the rest of the ‘Psyops’ currently happening here in our failed State about how great it is that so many charedim are also signing up to get killed and maimed in the name of the IDF, let’s not forget that each person killed is mamash a whole world destroyed.

But that’s only the beginning.

That ‘world’ has parents, siblings, spouses, children…

Who have to try and carry on having emuna and living life, when they lose a whole world.

It’s such a hard test.

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Maybe it’s just me, but right now, I would say that my patience for a lot of people is at rock-bottom.

Apparently, my kids are feeling the same ‘anti-social’ way right now.

Dealing with most people, and all their ongoing fantasies, assumptions and lies they tell themselves is just too exhausting.

My soul is so tired.

All it wants is the ‘real Hungarian Wine’, and not all these fake brands of yiddishkeit and Torah that is pretty much all you find being pushed out there, in the super-fake, super-fantasy, online world.

Where people happily cheer for more war.

And happily waste so much precious time debating pointless fantasies, and wild speculations, that have no basis in reality or Torah.

And happily demean even our most precious ideas and hopes and beliefs, to keep propping up that oh-so-fragile world of lies they inhabit.

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Tov.

I woke up today, and my heart is still aching from the story of the man who lost his son on October 7th.

I don’t know his name, there’s nothing much I can do for him, except to pray, that the light will return to his life, and he will be able to pull himself back together again very soon, and return to functioning properly in this lonely and lowly world of ours.

Sometimes, the ‘pain’ in the air here in Israel is palpable.

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So no, I’m not cheering on more war in Rafah.

Or more ‘war’ at all.

I’m praying that the real Moshiach is revealed openly, so the evil can finally be eradicated from its roots, and the world can be conquered for God and good, without even another shot being fired.

Exactly as Rabbenu said.

But that depends on us – you and me – coming out of world of lies, and starting to sober up from all the mind-numbing, soul-destroying rubbish we’re currently immersed in.

It’s going to be an uphill battle.

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Usually, I would stop writing here, on that powerful but ‘down’ note.

But in my own dalet amot, the birds are chirping, the sun is shining, the garden is blooming, the Shabbos food is cooking.

Life is good.

Even, very good.

For me and those in my close dalet amot, BH.

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I have absolutely no doubt that my life is this good only and solely because of all the tzedaka we pay to Shuvu Banim, in various ways.

And all the teshuva the Rav continually encourages us to make, about working on our bad middot, and especially, our arrogance and ideas that ‘we know stuff’.

And all the prayers and the Tikkun HaKlalis he asks us to do every day, and all the dancing and clapping we do down on Ido HaNavi, at the evening prayers.

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And, all the advice we try to follow from Rabbenu, Rebbe Nachman, about going to Uman.

And doing an hour a day of hitbodedut a day.

And most of all, understanding that God owes us nothing at all, and that God is only and ever good to us.

Even when it doesn’t look like that, or feel like that.

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But the heart still aches for the man who lost his son.

And I’m still praying that Moshiach is revealed very, very soon, so that the ‘revealed good’ can be experienced by all of us now.

And that man can finally get the ‘comfort’ his soul so badly needs.