To my sisters, brothers, friends, teachers and students in Eretz Yisrael

I lived in Israel for around 8 years.

At first I lived in Shilo, for a summer when I was 14. I briefly lived in Safed/Tzfat, visited many many people in many many settlements throughout the country, but primarily I lived in Jerusalem.

1.

I was with my father and uncle today and, being the youngest person he knows, my father asked me what this tree symbol was on his phone...speedcut 20 minutes and my uncle is astonished to learn that he can listen to the radio via the internet.

That knowledge I shared with him from 1998 (thank you Russ Hanneman) reminded me that I could listen to the radio on the internet.

2

So I looked up Reshet Bet.

That's the channel I would occasionally listen to when I was actively involved in Israeli political life in those years.

Turns out it's now called Kan Bet, but other than the annoyingly slippery voice of the in-studio host (thanks to unnecessary improvement in studios) it was the same Reshet Bet.

I listened for 2 minutes. They were part of an ongoing interview with someone on the matter of the hostage negotiations and what we might be able to figure out by the manner in which Gaza returned the hostages and - derech agav (as part of the point he was making) - the person being interviewed mentioned a girl who told us that she was forcibly separated from her mother a few days ago. And the horror of that fact of that incident descended on us all of us at the same time.

3.

It's hard to know exactly what other people's lives are like, even less so the mental and emotional life of a whole nation and country, but it must be too horrible for words to live with the matzav being the primary matter of conversation.