Hey listeners, it's Mishi.

So, as you know, during these incredibly difficult days,

we're trying to bring you voices we're hearing among and around us.

These aren't stories, they're just quick conversations,

or postcards, really, that try to capture slivers of life right now. You know, it's hard being here in

Israel. There's real violence, there's sirens, and most of all there's fear. But being far away

from Israel is often just as hard, sometimes even harder, or at least hard in different ways.

The war caught everyone by surprise, of course, and since it broke out at the tail end of the

Khagim, many Israelis were abroad. What do you do in that case? Do you rush home? Do you

continue your trip? Do you wait it out somewhere safe and far away?

As it happens, on October 7th, our producer Mitch Ginsberg was hiking across the Scottish

Highlands with his buddy, author, journalist and friend of the show, Matty Friedman.

Here they are.

Welcome, Monty Friedman.

Thanks for coming in for a chat today.

The two of us were very far away when the events of October 7th descended on Israel.

Could you maybe describe the scene of where we were?

Yeah, it's quite surreal to remember.

It was a small town in the Scottish Highlands called Tindrum,

and we were on the fifth day of a trek through the highlands.

And it's hard to imagine a place that's farther away from the Middle East or Gaza than this town, which is this

kind of bucolic Scottish outpost in the middle of nowhere where the idea that catastrophic

...