It feels like when a yoga instructor tells you to unclench your toes and only then do you notice how tightly you’ve been gripping. For two years, we’ve carried the weight of a stone on our hearts, grown used to its heaviness, to the way it changed our posture.

Today, it lifted and we have to relearn ourselves without it.

That night, we lit a yahrzeit candle on Simchat Torah, the Hebrew date of October 7.

At Jewish weddings, we break a glass just before we shout mazal tov. In our most joyous moment, it becomes intertwined with memory. The words we recall “If I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy” are a promise to hold grief and happiness in the same breath.

Lighting that candle on this day felt like that.

So yes, today, hope returned.

But it’s not the naïve kind that forgets. It’s the kind that of hope from our anthem Hatikvah, that knows loss, walks hand in hand with memory, and can disappear again if we don’t learn from how we got here.

Hello hope, my old friend. Stay a while.

Hummus? Eggplant? Something spicy?

I just couldn’t choose.

And then I found myself walking the aisles picking out the most random items, tossing things into the cart like a woman told they have hours left to live. Heck, how have I gone 33 years and never had this… weird biscuit thing?

Blinking into the sunlight as we emerge from twelve days of war with the Iranian regime, everyone is feeling the whiplash in different ways.

It’s the aching legs.

The argument about nothing.

The unproductive hours of ‘work’.

Still waking up at night.

Should I shower or will there be a siren? Oh wait…

The gravitational pull away from the news and onto Ginny and Georgia.

There’s a unique kind of whiplash for parents. We spent those twelve days shielding our kids from the scary and bad things outside.

We absorbed it all and smiled through bedtime stories, quickly turning down the phone alerts before they heard it. We hid tears behind kitchen counters and checked the news while they were busy playing.

And now, as the dust settles just enough to see, our nervous systems are catching up and letting out the stress and fear we absorbed for them, and didn’t let ourselves feel in real time.

As I unpack the items from the shopping bags (and wonder what I was thinking), I wonder if this is part of the resilience everyone talks about.

Is this just the part of ‘bouncing back’ that’s closer to the floor than the sky? Maybe that famous Start Up Nation spirit takes a minute to unwind and eat weird biscuits.

As I place the challah on the table, I’m reminded that while the twelve days ended with a ceasefire, it’s far from over. For some families, this is the first Shabbat with a chair left heartbreakingly empty, their son or husband killed in battle this week. The number of families with someone missing at the Shabbat table continues to grow. And for those whose loved one is still held hostage in Gaza, every Shabbat is another unbearable wait.

So if you ask me, what is the real essence of our resilience? It’s knowing that we would run back into the shelters again and again (and again, and again) to bring them home.

We would do it all over again, in a heartbeat.

My five-year-old sat up, blinking in confusion.

“I thought I slept all night in my own bed,” she said. Her face fell. “Now I won’t get a sticker.”

My middle daughter asked why she wasn’t having her third birthday party. I promised her she would still get a purple Tinker Bell cake.

Each evening begins the same surreal routine, soundtracked by alerts on our phones:

Stay near shelter.
Iran has launched a barrage.
GET TO SHELTER NOW.
It’s over for now, but don’t go far.

We watch the news on mute and text our friends throughout the night, checking that this round of Iranian roulette didn’t land on their homes.

My oldest lies on a mattress on the floor, clutching her pink lion. My middle daughter sprawls across our bed, arms around her Dumbo. How much of this will they remember? I wonder. The baby sleeps in her bassinet, chest rising and falling, blissfully unaware.

I lie under the steel window shield with the white noise machine on full blast, hoping to keep the sound of the explosions at bay. Will they remember the weird night they still got a sticker, even though they woke up in our bed? Will they remember that their third birthday party got canceled?

When these thoughts began to spiral, I am comforted by the thought of the bag in the cupboard of the mamad. I packed it after October 7, when the threats began to pile on top of each other: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis. And, always in the background, Iran. We didn’t know if we would be sent to the shelter for an hour, or a night, or a week—only that we had to be ready.

The cupboard door jams because the bag is so big—stuffed with supplies and memories. This war, like every war, pulls memories to the surface. Not just our own, but the ones we’ve inherited. Some are passed down like unwanted heirlooms. Others are sewn into our minds before we even understand what we’ve lived through.

Throwing tins of fruit and chocolate biscuits in the bag, I think of my grandmother. She grew up in London during the Blitz, sleeping in underground tube stations as bombs fell overhead. She used to tell me about the whistling of the Doodlebug just before it hit. Even into her nineties, living in Australia, she kept a laundry cupboard stocked for the next Blitz: tinned fruit and chocolate biscuits, just in case.

My husband adds to the bag a spare light and a battery-powered generator. He was five years old, in Israel, during the Gulf War. He remembers the gas masks, the sealed rooms, the rolled-up towels pressed under the door. He remembers his baby brother, too small for a mask, being placed inside a plastic box with holes punched for air. He remembers long hours of darkness when the power went out. He packs all of that into the bag.

I feel triumphant as we pack diapers, wipes and formula. In April 2024, during another Iranian attack, I sat in the mamad, preparing for an embryo transfer. We survived, and so did the embryo. In October, Iran attacked again. This time, I was pregnant, and could feel the baby kicking. Now, in June 2025, that baby is here, sleeping peacefully in a bassinet. Despite everything, we have brought new Jewish life into the world.

I don’t know if this war will last days, weeks, or months. But I do know this: there’s a bag in the cupboard, packed with reminders that we have been here before and have made it through. If my kids remember anything from these terrifying nights, I hope they remember this too.

Am Yisrael Chai.

The flat head of a hammerhead shark is a peculiar shape. Some scientists believe it serves as an organic metal detector that allows the shark to sweep large swathes of ocean floor with electricity detection. Most strange is the positioning of the hammerhead shark’s eyes on the sides of its flattened head. Hammerhead eyes, though far apart, have the greatest overlap in their fields of view and 360-degree vision. The hammerhead can always see above and below, even if the shark were to swim straight ahead with its head completely still. A hammerhead can improve its stereoscopic vision even further by rotating its eyes and sweeping its head from side to side. However, no matter how far or fast they turn their head, the hammerhead shark will always have a huge blind spot directly in front of them.

Many underwater animals use camouflage to avoid predators, by instantaneously changing color and shape to imitate seaweed, reef, and other animals. When danger has passed, true colors are revealed, and life continues. And then there is the stonefish. The Australian brown or grey native looks like an encrusted rock or lump of coral, sitting perfectly still on the sea floor. The stonefish is patient. They do not actively pursue prey. Their true colors are always unabashedly on display. We just choose not to look close enough. The stonefish wait, knowing that a foolish dinner will inevitably be delivered. Its venom kills quickly before swallowing the unsuspecting prey whole.

In the name of love, seahorses engage in a spectacular display of romance. The male spends days courting his truly beloved as the two swim tail in tail. This harmonious and majestic ritual helps the seahorses synchronize their movements and the couple may even change shift color between lighter and darker shades. The phenomenon of male dedication to his other half is not seen anywhere else in the animal kingdom, whereupon each morning the seahorses dance alongside one another, reaffirming their bond. Following the next new moon, some seahorses renew their courtship and stay for life. For others, it is a short affair.

Stingrays must move their whole bodies to propel through the water. Generally speaking, a stingray is content to float along and only reacts if provoked. With wide and flat bodies that flutter with the rhythm of the ocean even at a standstill, stingrays do not have a skeleton made of bones. Instead, their bodies are supported by cartilage. This makes the stingray particularly flexible but without the defenses to withstand a piercing blow. Don’t be fooled, the stingray is tough enough to be used on the cord of Japanese swords, with a tail venom that can kill humans. But without bones, the stingray ultimately disappears leaving only the faintest trail behind.

Comparative thanology. This is the fancy name for the study of animal grief. It is a young field, largely because attributing human-like behaviour to animals was largely ignored throughout the twentieth century. Wisdom of the time dictated that animals were reactive, lacking thoughts and emotions. Animals were considered to respond to stimuli as would an unthinking, unfeeling robot. Science cautioned against anthropomorphism, the naïve consideration of animals as humans dressed up in fur or feathers. Researchers who detected uniquely human emotions among animals, such as love, joy, or grief, were condescendingly typecast as anecdotal sentimentalists. But I have watched orcas travel miles balancing a dead newborn calf at the water’s surface. In some cases, the whole pod joined in, forming a protective circle around a grieving and the grieved. One need only witness such an event to understand that there is grief in the animal kingdom as certainly as there is a circle of life.

I wrote because my grandma had passed away, and it was my (unhealthy) way of keeping her alive. But the character soon took on a life of her own. Rose started making choices that weren’t my Grandma’s… and I let her. That’s how writing helped me let Grandma go.

I work in tech, so I come with a wholesome readiness to embrace AI. Which is why I look at this moment with AI stepping into the creative writing process with both curiosity and caution and wonder what it would have been like - for better or for worse - to write The Spoon and the Sea today.

What happens to that raw, therapeutic kind of writing when the machine is in the room? Would I have been able to dive into and process my grief the same way if AI had been sitting there, all shiny and smart?

And what about the joyful kind of writing that comes not from grief or pressure, but from the sheer pleasure of lighting up a creative part of your brain? Do we still get that same feeling? Does it matter?

These are my thoughts on writing and AI. Part 2 will be about publishing and AI.

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Part I: Writing in the Age of AI

1. Have we seen this movie before?
Authorship has always evolved. Once, it was revolutionary to revise your work. Then to research from books instead of the field. Then to Google instead of libraries. We didn’t stop being writers when we switched from ink to keyboards or through any of the monumental shifts along the way. AI is just the next frontier (maybe the biggest in our lifetime), but it’s part of a long continuum.

2. How does AI fit into a collaborative creative process without replacing the heart of storytelling?
Sometimes I sit down knowing the emotional point of a scene and that I want to start with a flashback. But I don’t know what the flashback is. I use AI to brainstorm. It’s like a lightning-fast very eager intern who doesn’t mind being rejected. But deciding to start with a flashback, then linking it to a tiny visual detail from the chapter before… that’s still magic from little old humans.

3. What happens to voice when AI starts suggesting the next sentence?
AI still struggles with voice. It often hands over something correct but hollow. It’s brilliant for breaking a blank page, fixing clunky phrases, or summarizing obscure history. But to make a reader feel something? Not quite yet. (Yet is the operative word here because the pace of innovation is mind-blowing, and emotive storytelling may not be out of reach for long.)

4. What’s an idea worth when AI can generate thousands (plus)?
We live in an era of infinite ideas. But I come from Israeli startup culture, where ideas are cheap because everyone has one, including your taxi driver. What matters isn’t the idea; it’s what you do with it. As The Social Network puts it: “If you were the inventor of Facebook, you would have invented Facebook.” J.K. Rowling wasn’t the only one with a story about a boy wizard but she wrote it first, wrote it well, and put it out there.

5. When it comes to research, where does speed cut depth?
Fast research can feel like having a tireless assistant riding the high of an all-nighter and a million Red Bulls. Want a legal case summarized in seconds? No problem. But the danger isn’t shallow research on the subject matter. It's a shallow connection for the writer. When shortcuts become too easy, we risk skipping the long, winding paths that build emotional investment. That’s the part the reader actually feels, even if they only see the tip of the iceberg. The depth isn’t just in the facts you gather, but in how much you care.

6. How can AI help busy people find time to write?
This may be the most personal reason I’ve come to value AI. I’m a mother of three under six, with a full-time job as a tech exec. I hate not finishing things I start. Writing, in that context, can feel like a project that haunts me at night. AI helps me move faster when I need momentum. It doesn’t write for me, but it helps me believe it’s worth starting because it increases my chance of finishing. This sometimes plays at odds with point 5 but I think it’s a balance worth pursuing.

Check it out here:

Lavender takes me straight back to the garden of the house I lived in when I was five. I remember the clothesline I used to swing on more vividly than I remember the house itself. I couldn’t tell you the street name or describe the furniture inside, but the scent of lavender brings the whole place rushing back, intact.

That idea lingered with me while writing The Spoon and the Sea: how scent survives long after names fade. In the novel, smell becomes the thread of a fragile but persistent way to hold the past together.

My husbnd Eitan inspired the habit of one of the main characters, who smells everything before he eats it, even a glass of water. At first, it seems like a quirk, something idiosyncratic or childlike. But for Eitan (and the character), smell is how he anchors himself. Because scent shapes taste, and taste shapes memory, and memory is how he orients to the world.

When my grandmother died, the only thing I took from her bedside table was a small blue tin of Nivea cream. The smell of it is her: her face, her hands, her cheek when she rested in the afternoon sun. Even now, opening the tin brings tears to my eyes. Once, during a fire in our building, we had to evacuate in a hurry. I didn’t take documents or valuables. I took the Nivea. My husband still jokes that if the building had burned down, that would’ve been our sole possession to start over with, and in a strange way, maybe that would’ve been enough.

Scent is more than memory. It’s the echo of presence and the proof that someone was here, and that we were loved.