July 12

We were reminded in in church  today to pray for those in Gaza. It can be easy to talk about taking care of the situation just by wiping the Gaza strip off the map, but this is in fact vengeance, and God said in Deuteronomy 32:35 that vengeance is His and he would repay people for there deeds.  There are Christians in the Gaza Strip who are as much victims of the situation as Israel is.  Instead we need to pray for the salvation of the Muslims and the dismantling of Hamas. 

So far today over 50 rockets have been fired into Israel from the Gaza strip.  Most did not cause injury or damage but one rocket did injure two men in Netivot.  Yesterday two people (including an 80 year old woman) were injured in Be'er Sheva.  It would also be good two remember these people in your prayers, and the children in southern Israel who have their nights and school days disrupted by alarms.  

A few minutes ago, the sirens once again went off here in Jerusalem.  I heard the two impacts, but am not sure yet where they landed and if anything important was hit.  Fortunately for us, this is the evening, so Shabbat services were not interrupted.  Because we knew it was possible that such an interruption would happen, Meno Kalisher gave instructions for us at the start of the service this morning as to what we should do in the event the siren went off.  A couple of his instructions were quite humorous, so I recorded them here for you.  I'm afraid I could not do as good a job as Meno did (he is a very animated, very funny guy), but for those of you who have heard Meno speak I'm sure you can imagine him saying this:

Rule #1: Be happy. If you panic you will cause problems for the people around you. God has set the number of our days so we will not die until God means for it to happen so BE HAPPY. (When Meno repeated this to a group of American students who arrived late he added at the end of "be happy""or we will kill you."  This might have been shocking to the students except for the roar of laughter that immediately erupted from the rest of the congregation.)
Rule #2: Use the stairs not the elevator. If you use the elevator you might get stuck in there until the end of the war.