“Nothing’s going to make the horror of war to go away; cheering for the Phillies isn’t going to save anyone’s life,” said Nadine Bonner."But this is good for my mental health."
“Nothing’s going to make the horror of war to go away; cheering for the Phillies isn’t going to save anyone’s life,” said Bonner, a native Philadelphian who moved to Israel in 2020 to be closer to her 11 grandchildren. “But this is good for my mental health. Even in wartime, baseball must go on.” “That day, we had rockets all day, the war had just started,” said Bonner. “There were planes going over my apartment building all the time.”
It doesn’t feel frivolous or wrong, she said, to celebrate the joy of people who are paid millions of dollars to play a game. It’s the Phillies, her lifelong team, and it makes her happy — a measure of joy in an eerie reality where schools are closed and no children play on playgrounds because of the threat of attack.