There is no question that times are currently quite challenging, in all parts of the world.

A part – a small part, even – of the evil of our modern media lifestyle is that we are fed 24/7 ‘drama’ and ‘danger’ and ‘worry’ prompts all the time.

These prompts keep us in a constant state of stress and agitation, impact our state of mind in a very negative way and also, influences a whole bunch of physical issues and problems, as we keep gnawing away at the worry bone.

If someone like Shimon Peres was so keen on dissing history, and trying to put people off from studying the lessons of the past, I can think of no better guarantee that studying history must be a very good, beneficial thing.

That’s pretty much what I’m spending most of my spare, and not so spare, time doing at the moment – getting to grips with the historical context that led up to what is going on right now, in May 2025.

As part of that process, I am learning something amazing:

Bad as things currently look, and feel – in no small part thanks to they lying masonic media – really?

We are currently in one of the very best times of Jewish history, ever.

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A few weeks ago, I shared with you the ‘first pogrom’ that occurred in Alexandria in 38 CE – nearly 2,000 years ago!

The Temple was still standing then. Even then, there was so much horrible stuff going on to Jews all over the world – including in Eretz Yisrael, even before the Temple was destroyed.

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So today, let’s bust another bit of romantic wishful thinking, about what was going on for immigrants to Eretz Yisrael around 200 years ago.

Long story short: the mortality rates for olim (and everyone else….) in places like Jerusalem was so high, families with 10 kids would be happy to have one or two stay alive until adulthood – and the parents themselves were also croaking, typically within five years of moving to Israel.

Let me quote you some stuff from a paper called ‘The Demography of Jerusalem Jews’, by Usiel Schmelz, published in a really interesting book called ‘Studies on Palestine During the Ottoman Period’, which is looking at the high rate of mortality in Jerusalem around the 1850s.

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Here is what it was like to live in our holiest city, back then:

• People lived overcrowded and cramped together (3-4 families per room) in ancient buildings with no light, fresh air or sewage facilities.
• There was no garbage collection – rubbish was dumped in the street, and whatever animals died in the street were left there to rot.
• The only water available was from cisterns – and even when there was a good rain, by the hot summer a lot of those cisterns were growing killer bacteria.
• People didn’t have clothes to wear; couldn’t buy new ones for a lot of reasons, and not just lack of money, Jerusalem simply didn’t have ‘shops’ in the way we understand it today, and very little trade was going on, except via the Arabs.
• They also didn’t have enough food, and were often totally dependent on the local Arabs to  bring food and water in to the city.
• Jerusalem, and the Holy Land generally, was hit by wave after wave after wave of killer epidemics – people died of malaria, they died of dysentery, they died of cholera – even the black plague.

Of course, much of this wasn’t ‘unique’ to Jerusalem and Eretz Yisrael – people were dying from lack of food and unsanitary conditions all over the world still, in the 1850s.

But, that kind of just adds more emphasis to the point of writing this, namely to encourage us all that in so many ways, we’ve never had it so good!

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That’s health-wise and materialism-wise.

But even ‘spirituality’-wise  – we are being constantly fed a crock, that in the old days, there was no divorce, no bad middot, no immorality, all male Jews just spent all day long studying the holy books while their angelic wives stayed at home, ran a store, and also managed to pump out 12 kids back-to-back and make delicious kreplach every day from scratch, whilst reciting three whole books of tehillim….

For sure, there were some remarkable, holy people doing at least some of that, much of the time.

In our days, there also are a few rare people like this – and I know a few of them personally, via Shuvu Banim.

But, it was always a very small minority who was doing this, even back in the ‘good old days’, even back in Jerusalem.

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One of the Jewish ‘enlightened’ medical doctors who was working to try and alleviate the mortality in Tsfat wrote this in his journal, from 1889:

“Early marriage and its consequences – divorce – are here even more common than in Jerusalem. One often finds 25 year old women that have already been divorced from 2-3 husbands.”

(He was blaming early marriage, i.e. marriage at 12 for girls or 13 for boys, and in many cases, even younger – they were marrying them at 8-9 years old. I have no idea how all that was meant to work, halachically. At the same time, Rabbenu and Rav Natan married at 13, so if that was good enough for them, katonti…)

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Childlessness was also rife all over the Jewish community in Israel.

The highest rate of children for ‘Ashkenazi and Maghrabi’ families in 1839 was just 1.3 children, in Jerusalem.

People married young… They could be expected to have on average 6-8 children… And yet, 34% of the Ashkenazi Jewish families living in Jerusalem had no children at all. Which means both, that conditions were so bad that women were not falling pregnant, and also, conditions were so bad that many people saw all of their children die at very young ages.

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And as we mentioned, the grown ups were also dying at a rapid rate.

Almost a third of all the Jewish children in Jerusalem in 1839 were orphans, either they had no parents, or their father had died, leaving the widow to try and struggle on alone.

By 1866, things had started to improve, a little, there were a few more children on average – up to 1.6 children a family – and the number of orphans went from 29% to 24%.

But the point is – life was so very difficult, so very hard, so very crushing.

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I was reading this article on my sunny balcony, surrounded by plants, eating a goat’s yogurt with maple syrup, blueberries and my favourite cruncy granola.

What on earth am I moaning about?!?!?

I suddenly realised.

Baruch Hashem, life is fantastic!!!!

War, no war. Peace, no peace. Geula, no geula (God forbid….), ‘Houthis’, no ‘Houthis’ – life is currently fantastic!

If all I can say is that Baruch Hashem, I have indoor plumbing and potable water coming out of the tap – dayenu, just from that.

If all I can say, is that I can go buy a pint of milk, a loaf of bread, at any point, that there aren’t rotting cats, dogs and camels lying in the streets, that I don’t know anyone who died from malaria, cholera, typhus – dayenu, just from that.

But of course, the list of things to be grateful for actually stretches on and on….

For every single one of us.

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We are in the middle of a spiritual war right now, and most of that is being fought via ‘the screen’.

The more I turn off the news and all the ‘scare story’ crud, the happier and better I feel about my real life, which is still so good.

I’m sure, whatever circumstance we find ourselves in, the same could be said for every single one of us.

God is good.

Life in Israel, even with all the craziness going on all the time, has still never been better.

And there has been no better, or easier time, to live a fully Jewish life (with a fridge and a shower….) in the Holy Land.

So, chin-up, dear reader!

Don’t let the evils steal your peace of mind, your emuna, your health, with all their masonic ‘bad news’.

Life is still good, BH.

And with God’s help, the best is still yet to come.