Where is there space for what I want to say? What do I want to say? Who am I to say anything?

I

spend my days running PR for an incredible nonprofit, where I wax poetic that our important mission serving Klal Yisrael in “challenging, unprecedented times like these’” is “more important than ever.”

And my heart hurts, because Klal Yisrael is going through challenging, though unfortunately not unprecedented times.

But I’m a writer, and sentences and paragraph structures invade my thoughts all day. But by the time I collapse into bed, I’m too tired to write.

Besides, everything is taken. There are the political pontificators, the rabbis with tremendous daas Torah; the angry commentators on social media; the ones who spread hysteria, and the ones who dismiss it with a wave of their Shaar Bitachon (leather-bound, ArtScroll edition).

There are the news outlets that get paid to keep you checking, the “analysts,” and the IDF releasing statements that neither confirm nor deny.

Where is there space for what I want to say? What do I want to say? Who am I to say anything? I’m just a kollel wife living in Israel.

I was there. But not there, there. So I can’t speak for them. You know who they are.

But I’m also not in the US; there, reading the news, and seeing my non-Jewish neighbors become not-so-neighborly.

I’m in this strange space in the middle.

I’m just a kollel wife trying to navigate this insanity that began that fateful Shabbos/Simchas Torah morning.