Precious ordinary

I'm functioning on coffee and adrenalin this today after a mostly sleepless night following the 3am wake up call from Israel's emergency alert system broadcast on all frequencies.

The war has gone on so long that what's known here as "emergency routine", ie trying to keep as "normal" a routine as possible in the shadow of a most abnormal wartime situation, has become the new normal. Loads of people drafted to the reserves, hostages still suffering in the Hamas tunnels under Gaza, constant air raid sirens due to missiles fired by the Houthis in Yemen... But I've been wanting to be able to write something simple and genuinely normal for so long, just something normal, because in between the abnormal we fit in the ordinary and even the special, but with so much going on around us the ordinary becomes all the more precious and we are grateful for it.

And now we're being instructed to stay close to shelter and to wait for something even more abnormal, a new emergency on top of the existing wartime crisis. The country has been told to shut down, everyone is to stay home close to shelter. So we wait and we pray and we hope it will blow over.

I wanted to be able to write about something normal but at least I can write about food.

We're lucky that our shelter is near the kitchen, so we are staying close and cooking for Shabbat. It's a cliche, but we do have a lot of ripe bananas so my husband is making banana bread. My son made a cheese and vegetable quiche Thursday evening, before he went to bed.

We have hallah and lots of other things in the freezer: bean barley soup, moussaka, various smoked fishes, a few fillets of hake and Nile perch, a whole chicken, cakes and blintzes leftover from the recent Shavuot holiday, some bags of frozen vegetables. The cupboard in our shelter is well stocked with tins and packaged foods, water.

Food preparation is a good way to keep busy, try not to think too much, hope we'll be able to do a supply run to my elderly uncle round the corner because he'd been planning to shop Friday morning. We always make extra portions so we can stock his freezer too.

It turns out that what you do while wondering if Iran is going to fire (nuclear?) missiles and maybe armageddon is cook for Shabbat while staying close to the shelter and praying and hoping for a miracle of peace.