A full alarm is sounding by the time that I get to the elevator. Several other people from my hall are waiting for it.

One resident wanders past us to her apartment and looks in her handbag for her keys. Several people shout, "Come with us!"

She doesn't notice. We realize that she is wearing noise-canceling headphones. People shout louder. "There's an alarm!" She doesn't react.

I step around and squeeze in front of her. I bend down so she can see my face. I bellow in my most stentorian baritone, "There's an alarm!"

She lifts the headphones from one ear. "What?"

"There's an alarm!"

"What? Where?"

"Here! Right now!"

She squints and listens. The first blasts of the alarm are just starting to fade. "Right. OK." She shuts her handbag and ambles onto the elevator.

The shelter is almost full when I get there. I find a chair near where I usually sit. The other people from the elevator scatter around to seats elsewhere in the room.

People blast the news from their TV apps. Due to varying internet lag and whatever other factors affect their phones, the signal reaches different places in the room with different delays. The voices echo around the space, like Steve Reich's worst nightmare.

I can barely hear the phones, though, over the chatter of a gaggle of neighborhood girls who, interrupted at supper, have come in with their plates and are continuing their party right behind me.

A caregiver wheels in a woman who is crumpled in her wheelchair. She looks familiar, but I can't place her at first. I say "Hello." She mouths "Hello" back at me, inaudibly. I recognize her from the odd way that her face moves when she speaks. The last time that I had seen her, before the war, she had walked briskly through the dining hall, and we had nodded at each other.

A man from my floor gradually comes in. He usually doesn't show up. He is a quite tall, but hunched over his walker and moving more slowly than anyone else. Several young neighbors stand and offer him their chairs. He sits next to me, in the kind of light plastic chair that is mostly used outside. I reach over and anchor the chair so that he can't knock it out of place as he slowly sits down.

A neighbor sitting next to me on the other side, also taller than me, with gray hair past his shoulders and basketball shorts, tries to engage in an argument about Jewish law with a religious woman across the room. She can't speak loudly enough for him to hear her. He eventually walks across the room and stands next to her, continuing to talk just as loud.

They're arguing about whether a religious person can use an elevator on the Sabbath to go down to the shelter. There's a rule that "to save a life, you can even break the Sabbath," such as by pressing an electronic control to summon an elevator. He says that that counts.

From what I can tell, she's saying that that's not that simple. (As in so many circumstances, any problem can appear to have a simple and obvious answer, as long as the person claiming it hasn't considered its complications or earlier discussions of the issue.) As I understand it, the rule only kicks in if someone is in mortal danger unless the Sabbath is broken. In this case, since the hallways can protect people from almost all attacks, staying there is adequate.

There are special Shabbat modes for many elevators, in which they stop at each floor and wait for a predetermined amount of time before moving on. That's OK, because no one is specifically summoning the elevator or signalling the floor on which they want to exit. We have one in our building, but it's at the far end, near the new nurses' office, and many people from our end wouldn't be able to get to it in time during an alert. One near us is supposed to do that, but the Shabbat mode doesn't work. The House has plans to replace the old elevators at our end, I believe. But not while there's a war on.

We get the all-clear, mercifully, before the guy's confused arguments completely tie him in knots and drive the woman crazy.

As usual, I get back to the elevator first, followed by several other residents. We shuffle onto it in the order of the floors on which we live, so the people from the first floor can get off first, then the ones from the second floor, then the rest of us from the third.

The other passengers are all quite short. None come up to my shoulders. The woman with the headphones has put them back on. The religious woman and I nod at other, with resigned looks. We know that she could never have won the argument. Nor could I, but I think my relatives here, who are far more knowledgeable about Jewish law than I am, might have.

We all go back to our apartments, to try to rest or get things done before the next alarm. This has only been the fourth one today. There will be more.