Facing a State of War

Gili stresses that the Creator is good and does good, and that the war is not a punishment He brought on us. She warns against dismissing your intuition and asks you to test every message: does it stir up love and unity, or hatred and division? Even in a time this hard, the thing to do is to draw strength from faith and not to question the Creator's ways.

Compulsively keeping up doesn't give you any real control over the situation. All it does is flood your consciousness with poison. Her recommendation: once or twice a day and no more. Beyond that, you're just taking in the same information over and over, and that feeds fear and dread.

Gili says the way to prevent post-traumatic stress is to let the feelings out: to talk, to share, to tell people what we're going through instead of locking it inside. Really listening to someone else, staying beside them and paying attention, is what the people around us need most right now, more than any other advice.

The division among us is the real enemy of the Jewish people, and unity is exactly the strongest weapon we have against it. The blessing comes from loving your fellow Jews, and that includes the ones who think differently, not only the ones who are like us.

Gili recommends putting your energy into helping other people: volunteering, collecting supplies and moving them. And for anyone who isn't doing something like that, simply to take your mind off it: watch Netflix, read books, download the series you've been meaning to see, even listen to earlier episodes of the podcast. The goal is a healthy distraction, because in the end this is also a war of consciousness.