December 30, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-12-29

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. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...

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The Woman with the Walker

A tiny woman with a walker, older than me, tries to get the attention of a soldier who is walking past her inside the café. She calls out quietly, several times, before he hears her.

She is sitting at a table in the bright sun, trying to read her phone. She wants to move to another table with more shade nearby, but can't handle both her walker and her tray. Once the soldier understands, he picks up the tray and walks with her to the other table. She moves around to the chair she wants. He puts the tray on the table. She sits down. On the wall behind her, a poster of our city's remaining hostage gazes over her shoulder.

I should have understood what she needed. I had also moved from that table a few minutes before because of the glare. But the soldier understood, and helped her first.

A little while later, the workers call a name over the loudspeaker. She looks up. They have something ready for her. A young woman on the other side of me stands and gestures for her to stay where she is. The young woman goes to the counter, retrieves a bowl of something, and brings it to the older woman.

I get the sense that she is well-known at the café. I'm there often, but don't recall encountering her. I make a note of her name but later, as I sit and write this, realize that I have forgotten it.

A Steady Drip of News

There isn't much news today.

Details accumulate on what's happened and what's happening. No one knows what's going to happen.

Yesterday, our war cabinet was going to have its first solid meeting on the issue of what might happen across the border when this all ends. Our Finance Minister, who seems to believe that his job is keeping anything from happening, did so again, and the meeting was canceled.¹

The Army has released its final report on the shooting of the three hostages.² In the chaos of urban warfare, people didn't see or hear things that they ideally should have. Things that became clear long after the event weren't known in the moment. No one who was there is being reprimanded or charged with anything. The Army spokesperson said, “This is an operational investigation to draw lessons, nothing further.”³

A lot more information keeps coming out on what happened on October 7th, at the border,⁴ at the Army outposts,⁵ in the kibbutzim and villages,⁶ and at the rave.⁷ It's scattered across the media in hundreds of small stories that keep coming out.

Several projects are accumulating archives.⁸ Someday there will, no doubt, be a big book like the Warren Commission Report combining and detailing everything, with an accompanying video project and website. The book will be a bestseller. A lot of people will buy it, put it on their shelves, and then not be able to bring themselves to actually read what's inside.

In South Korea, uproar erupted over a video spot supporting us, made with well-known actors. It showed a family at Christmas being interrupted by a sudden attack. The video was pulled after a day. YNET News captured the video and presents it in a story that explains more.⁹

Reservists found an ancient oil lamp near the border. Unfortunately, the top was open, so any helpful genie that might have been inside was long gone.¹⁰

Home, from Caesarea

A new video shows a performance event filmed in the amphitheater in Caesarea.¹¹ A thousand musicians gather to perform a song about wanting people to come home. It's a tribute to the hostages. Orchestral and rock musicians, plus a group of what I think are Taiko drummers, perform with a large chorus. The additional singers who come in toward the end and stand in front are from the families of the hostages. It's all well done and quite effective.

The video sends my memory into time travel mode. I visited the amphitheater in 1986, to see a performance by Meredith Monk.

Digging around for more information on the location, I see significant confusion over who owns it now. And apparently it's not an actual amphitheater.¹² But we do know that it's big, it's old, and it can hold a lot of musicians.

Blessing the Hydroponics

More people than I have ever seen there before gather for Kiddush at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers. Those who can sing, sing well.

My family gets into a discussion with a resident who recently arrived from an evacuated town. He is wondering what kind of blessing one says over hydroponically grown fruit or vegetables. Each of the types that they're discussing normally grows on vines or directly from the ground.

The general sense is that we say the blessing over "the fruit of the earth," just as if they grew in the ground. After all, I don't think it's possible to tell if something was hydroponically grown by looking at or tasting it.

These are the kinds of things that my family avidly discusses. I follow as I can.

And now I have an Eno lyric stuck in my head: "Her sense of taste is such that she'll distinguish with her tongue / the subtleties a spectrograph would miss."¹³ Earworms don't care what kind of earth they're grown in.

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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 at that Las Vegas address, 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.)

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L'hitraot.