This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

You’d think we’d be used to it all by now.

To fighting enemies that want to wipe us out and keep on trying to do so.

To a hypocritical world that denounces us and misrepresents us as we attempt to fend those enemies off.

To the practicalities of friends and relatives risking their lives at the front. To the abiding concern for our loved ones living anywhere near any of our borders, or anywhere else nowadays, in this again missile-battered little country of ours.

But it turns out you never get used to it. We’ll get through it, because we’re an amazing people. But it is not particularly pleasant to be briskly seeking cover multiple times a day from deadly missiles with colossal warheads. To be weighing how to advise elderly, not-so-mobile relatives about what they should do when the sirens wail in the small hours of the night.

To understand that it really is safer to stop the car by the side of the highway and find somewhere to lie face down, rather than keep driving, because the danger is less of a direct hit than of falling bits of missile and interceptors and the shockwave caused by a blast. To be endlessly worried for this child and that child, in this city and that moshav, when the alarms sound.

To internalize the anguish, amid the fierce resilience, of a colleague whose home in Beit Shemesh was battered by the blast of a half-ton missile that killed nine people hundreds of yards away — the walls cracked, the doors blown in, and chunks of glass smashing into the chair where she had been sitting and working seconds before.

To get professionally personal for a moment, most of us at The Times of Israel are not on the front lines. But as with everyone in Israel right now — and for much of the past two and a half years — the upsurged conflict colors all of our lives. Injury and death have been a constant backdrop, avoiding them a constant concern.

In the last few days, and not for the first time since October 7, 2023, we’re all reporting, writing and editing — informing, explaining, alerting — even as we’re finding cover, staying calm, and checking in on the people we are personally responsible for helping stay alive.

Our reporters are out and about amid the sirens. Our indefatigable military correspondent is sending the freshest material even as he and the editors who post it on the site are heading into bomb shelters and safe rooms and comforting their babies, and their toddlers, and their slightly older children for whom school is, unfortunately, not currently an option.

No, you don’t get used to it. But, again, like the rest of Israel’s people, we’ll get through it. Insistent, no-choice resilience trumps Israel’s bitter internal divides. And it certainly trumps Iranian multiple cluster-bomb-warheaded attempted attrition.

Searching for clarity in a rising sea of creative incoherence

Sticking atypically with a brief focus on ToI, our work seems to be getting more difficult — not only because of relentless ongoing conflict, but also because truth and clarity, those precious commodities crucial to understanding reality, seem to be becoming more elusive… and underappreciated.

Even basic facts........

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