Hello, hello.
There’s a rumor that sometime tomorrow, or maybe even later today, there’ll be a new round of war between Israel and Iran. I don’t know how these rumors start and I don’t know what they’re based on, but there’s this rumor. Of course, we’ve been through a few rounds of this. They were all tough and scary and stressful and with no sleep and lots of bad things. Lots of destruction on all sides. I think that when we’re in a war and running to shelters multiple times a day and hearing the bombs and the sadness of the injured, the dead, and destruction and so on, there’s a certain level of getting used to it. Not a lot of getting used to it, but a certain level. And then it stops. Let’s say there’s a wave of war that lasts a month. Every night we run to the shelter as well as during the day. It’s tough and we get used to it—to some degree. Then—at least in the center of Israel—there’s a couple of months without missiles. And suddenly, the idea of going back into war creates this unbelievable heaviness.
I think that once you’re in that period, you deal with it and then you get out. Now I’m with such a heavy heart of going back into that. A real cloud of depression, I would say, is coming on. Because when you’re in it, you kind of use all your resilience and then breathe. And then now I have to fight another wave of this. Let’s hope it won’t happen. But the feeling since yesterday is, “Here we go again. Do I have the resilience to deal with it?” I know I will. I know I’ll get used to it. But the need to get into it again is very tough. But I wanted to say something else. Not just talk about the waves of difficulty, how we deal with them, and the dread of the next wave.
In a previous round with Iran, I was sitting in this house, and a group of Iranian students asked me to talk to them about the psychology of money. Of course, I was very happy to do so. We talked over Zoom. My camera was on. Their cameras were not. I think mostly because of bandwidth. It was scheduled for an hour, and I finished about 10 minutes early. And I said, “Before you ask questions, I want to tell you I’m calling today from Israel. It’s true that I’m a professor in the U.S. at Duke University, but right now I’m in Israel. I know that you are bombing us and we’re bombing you. More correctly, our government is bombing you. Your government is bombing us. And how are you feeling?”
We all had a very, very shared experience of lack of control and fear. Not really understanding what the purpose is. It was a very sad and very beautiful human moment of people who are stuck, supposedly, on two sides of a war, really being on the same side. There were no negative emotions between me and them and them and me. There was no clarity on what was really going on, why it was going on, who has incentive. We all felt like pawns in a war, where the birth lottery decided where we were born, and some big forces were playing with us. It is depressing because we all felt that we really don’t have a say. And what’s going on in the name of our country does not really represent us. So that was the sad part. I’m part of this country. These things are happening to this country. This country is doing things. But I don’t feel connected. Nobody asked us. Nobody consulted us about this. That was the pessimistic side.
The optimistic side is that we felt a very, very strong connection to each other. Despite the war, despite the missiles flying on that day in both directions, we felt that we, as people, are highly connected—and could be more connected.
So, the waves of emotions come, and we need to gather energy for the next wave in case it comes. We’ll see. And then we, the people, must figure out what we do with our leaderships to create a better and saner world.
Bye for now.
