December 19, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-12-18

Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. Here we go...

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The insurance agent is in a hurry. He'll have to head out immediately when the afternoon prayers are done.

He zooms down the aisle of our office as quickly as he can. That isn't all that fast. He hurt his back a while ago, which slows his walking down. Still, he's moving more quickly than usual.

He calls out our names: "Come, Ilan! Come, Sasha! Come, Moshe! Come, Joe!" I want to chime in with "On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!" But I don't think anyone here would get the reference.

I put on my baseball cap and head out to the hallway.

It appears that, seeing how the war is going, our prime minister wants to do what every small-time CEO would. He's blaming the branding.¹ Right now, the war is called "Swords of Iron." He's said to be thinking of "Genesis War," "Simchat Torah War," or "Gaza War." Maybe "Operation Keep Me Out of Jail" would work.

But "Swords of Iron" might not be the best name. It sounds like he could roll twelve-sided dice to determine how the battles would go.

Reports on the news sites show images and footage of a massive tunnel we've discovered, built by the terrorists on their side of a border crossing.² It's large enough that vehicles could drive inside it. A commenter on one site suggests that, if they can build tunnels that effectively and efficiently, we should just hire them to finally complete our regional Metro system.

Here in my city, a candidate for mayor made a fiery political speech a few nights ago while lighting Hanukkah candles. One problem: he was in his Reserves uniform at the time. You can't do politics in uniform. A reporter tweeted the speech.³

Now he says that he and his commanders have "jointly decided" that he's better off leaving the Reserves.⁴

A more somber tweet shows our Eurovision winner from a few years ago at the funeral of the third of the escaped hostages, singing Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters."⁵ The hostage's brother, who is also a drummer, plays in her band.

The hostage's mother spoke: "On the day of your freedom you left like a partisan, a partisan fighter from captivity, you didn’t agree to suffer any longer in the hands of murderers, you wouldn’t sit and wait."⁶

A TV news video⁷ shows an interview with the Reservist who, at the start of the war, had the task of contacting the families of the fallen. Close to three hundred soldiers died on the first day of the attack.

She says that she couldn't detach herself emotionally. At one funeral, she saw seventeen newly dug plots. The next day, she went into cardiac arrest. Cardiologists told her that her "heart literally broke from the psychological stress."⁸

She is now out of the hospital after a month and a half of recovery. She says that if she were called up again to do the same task, she absolutely would. "Whatever I am asked to do, I will do."

A Philippine news site fact checks several images and videos purportedly from the war.⁹ The lead item, supposedly showing bombs included in recent US aid to us, turns out to actually be from a South Korean air base in 2014.

A video on the same site shows a Philippine former hostage returning to his family, and speaks of support that they are receiving.¹⁰

A feature in The Quietus lists ten music projects whose proceeds go to charities providing humanitarian aid across the border.¹¹ The article also has direct links to the charities.

A pair¹² of compilations¹³ on Bandcamp are donating their proceeds to care for the survivors of the initial massacre at the Supernova rave and support toward bringing the hostages back.

In our hallway, after the Mourner's Kaddish, the insurance agent plows through the closing prayers. In Psalm 130, we echo each line.¹⁴ Since, unlike Americans, people here tend to swallow the beginnings of phrases rather than the ends, I mumble along with the phonemes that I catch, but can repeat the clear closing syllables of the lines.

In the Prayer for the Army,¹⁵ most of what he rapidly recites drowns in a tsunami of vowels. Occasional consonants pop out of the flow. I know to call out "Amen" whenever the flow drops in pitch.

He sings the final phrase with a melody often used to end prayers and Torah readings. Without a pause, he closes the Prayer app¹⁶ on his phone, spins around, and heads off to the elevator.

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Here’s an archive of past newsletters.

You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.

The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me there, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

L'hitraot.