[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt - 23 October 2023
Workers are tearing up the path into the park. A white van blocks much of it. Behind it, the paving bricks are piled to either side, with a strip of sand where they had been. I don't think it's related to security or the war. Our mayor is making sure to keep our many public spaces beautiful, including parks and traffic circles. It helps that it's an election year.
I step carefully, keeping to the bricks that are still in place. I bounce through the patch of sand on the toes of one foot. I have to squeeze between the van's mirror and the bush a few inches away. The leaves smear a faint green stripe on my blue shirt. No one else will notice.
I walk quickly through the park to my appointment. I'm going to be a few minutes late. A large dog, possibly a lab, trots over and sniffs my hand. Convinced that I'm neither interesting nor any trouble, it wanders off.
I take a shortcut through the loading zone of the small supermarket on the other side of the park. Part of the asphalt goes up a steep hill. If it were raining, it would be slippery. I walk around the empty forklift that lifts palettes of incoming products up one story from the ground to where the store unloads and sorts them.
During my appointment, my phone buzzes with incoming messages. I check them when I leave. My family has economic news.
Much of our produce comes from areas in the war zones: eggs from the north and vegetables to the south. Standard distribution has broken down. Informal economies are springing up.
A friend of the family has called them with an offer of eggs. Their family has farms that need to keep running. It turns out that it's hard to convince chickens that they need to pause laying eggs until further notice. My relatives get three dozen eggs, not sorted or stamped, but cheaper than retail.
Another friend of the family tells us that she's gotten close to twenty pounds of cherry tomatoes. A relative takes about half of it. She's going to make a lot of tomato sauce. I'm told that she makes excellent shakshuka, though I haven't had an opportunity to try it.
The Agriculture Ministry is trying to convince stores to carry more of the local produce. Even before the war, there was talk of a plan to put signs in the stores identifying and promoting what is grown in this country.
They're trying to get volunteers to handle some of the farming. Much of it is done by foreign workers (much as migrant workers do so much of it in the States). Many were among those slaughtered in the terrorist attack two weeks ago. Some two thousand more have flown back to Thailand.
I get a couple of handfuls of cherry tomatoes at the supermarket downstairs as part of lunch. I don't eat them all then, but keep popping them like candy through the rest of the day. Later, my digestion reminds me that that may have been too much.
An email goes out to everyone in the office: When people ring the bell at the front door, we're not to let them in until we find out who they are. I think this may have been the rule all along, but people haven't been strict with it. Things are different now, in wartime.
I see reports of panic in a large mall in the next town north of us, a few miles away. Someone spotted a suspicious object next to a trash can. They called the authorities. The mall was cleared out and shut down. Local police, the canine unit, and the Central District bomb squad were called. A helicopter flew overhead. Rumors zoomed about that the mall had been taken over by terrorists and that people were to shelter at home.
The police found nothing. They sent out a message, both in text and on Facebook, telling people to stop the panic and disinformation.
I'm reminded of earlier times. When my father and I were here in 1988, he told me that, while I was at work, the police had spotted an unattended towel at a bus stop near where he was. He said that the police had cleared out the area for a full block in every direction, then, out of caution, blown up the towel.
(Writing this, I have to get some help from my family to figure out the story about the mall. Google Translate thinks that the phrase "Central District bomb squad" means "Central District saboteurs." Not quite. Another one for my vocabulary list.)
After the afternoon prayers, two programmers circle the office handing out sweets. One has store-bought cookies, kind of like Oreos but with vanilla wafers and a sort of peanut butter crème inside. The other's are homemade: they look faintly like Rice Krispie Treats, but are made of sesame seeds and honey with what might be currants embedded in them. Both are delicious.
The newspapers report that thousands of Haredim (what US media call the "ultra-Orthodox") have been volunteering for military duty. In the demonstrations that had been happening for much of the year, protestors claimed that the Haredim, many of whom are exempted from the draft, have been shirking their duty to the country. When needed, they're showing up.
Similarly, many protestors had said that if this government were ever to call them up for reserve duty, they would refuse. Now, when we have been attacked and they have been called, they have shown up.
The Rabbinate has been busy figuring out how to handle the war in the framework of Jewish law (or, from another angle, how to deal with Jewish law in the context of the war). Saving lives overrides almost everything else, but there are clear definitions as to what that includes. For now, the rabbis are allowing limited use of cars, phones, and guns on the Sabbath.
Many people here (unsurprisingly, as we have the world's largest density of Jewish mothers) have been cooking food to bring to the troops. By Army rules, it has to be strictly kosher, but not every home has official kosher certification.
The Times of Israel (my primary news source) says that a key rabbi, who has written books on Jewish law and is in the Reserves himself, has written on Facebook that, "if a person attests that their food is kosher, even with just a handwritten note, the food should be considered kosher, so long as there is no reason to suspect that the person was saying so out of ignorance or disdain. All the more so, he wrote, 'out of sincere concern for observant soldiers.'"
Another rabbi has had to settle a dispute over whether husbands and wives, who are not supposed to touch at some times of the month, would be allowed to embrace anyway before one or both went off to war. His response: "Those who wanted gave a hug, and those who didn’t — did not. And that makes sense. Because when you are right there, at that very moment, you do not call the rabbi, but do what you think is right."
When I get home, I get an email about silent radio broadcasts throughout the country. The religious will be able to leave their radios on throughout Shabbat without being disturbed by what they might otherwise play. The only sound would be in case of emergencies, when Home Front Command would make announcements about rockets and other dangers.
I sit at my computer, check other messages, and try to get myself to stand up and make supper. I hear a loud grinding sound start and stop over my head. I figure out that my landlord is drilling wood for one of his projects. He usually only drills outside. The vibrations go down into my apartment. The water in the clear pitcher on my kitchen table shimmers.
After supper, I turn on the faucet to wash the dishes. A small trickle flows out and then stops. The bathroom sink does the same thing.
I go upstairs to ask my landlord if he knows what's happening. He does. He shows me where a pipe broke inside the house. The water blew out part of a wall. Late at night, someone is working with him on fixing it. That wasn't a drill.
They'll work on it as long as they need to. That's OK. I can sleep through anything.
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L'hitraot.