December 31, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-12-30

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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Maestro

I come home last night after Shabbat dinner at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers and stare at the computer screens. My eyes and mind won't focus. I'm tired. I sit down in the big chair, flip on the TV and choose a movie.

Maestro¹ is quite good. Leonard Bernstein (along with Isaac Asimov and Pete Seeger) was one of the people that I wanted to grow up to be when I was a kid, though I might have reconsidered that if this movie had existed back then. Seeing the TV broadcast of the premiere of his Mass in 1971² convinced me to become a composer.

We corresponded briefly. I sent him letters with questions about his music. He (or probably his assistant) sent back postcards. I never met him or saw him live.

The movie is well-made, telling the story effectively. The cinematography is also classic, though at points it seems to be crying out to be noticed. And the performances are great. (But, yes, the characters do indeed smoke an awful lot.)

Once the movie is over, I get back to the computer and pull together the rest of last night's post. Eventually, I go to bed. I sleep. Then I get up, make my Saturday morning shakshuka, and sit down at the computer again.

The Hard News

The lead story on the New York Times site today is titled "Where Was the Israeli Military on Oct. 7?"³ (I subscribe to the NYTimes, so I can share a limited number of articles, as I am now, without a paywall. Some of the videos in the article contain graphic violence, but they are labeled as such and don't play automatically.)

It goes into detail after a ton of research. In brief, we didn't see the attack coming and were unprepared. The civilian guards in the kibbutzim and villages, to the extent that they had been trained, were set up to expect 24 hours notice before fighting. Many in the Army were home for the holidays. Those who were supposed to be coordinating things were busy fighting off attacks where they were. A lot of the information flow came through one guy, sitting in his bedroom at his parents' house, funneling information from social media to the commandos.

To quote one source:

"One general, a reservist who fought that day, said there were many heroes on Oct. 7. But an army only needs heroes, he said, when things have gone wrong."

There has been a huge increase in requests for handgun licenses here.⁴ The rules for getting licenses are strict, but, even before the attacks, they've been getting looser. Our National Security Minister, an extremist and erstwhile Kahane supporter who has been behind a lot of what's been going awry in the country this year, has been working on making it easier to get guns.

As in the States, many people are concerned. Among other things, with guns in the home, the odds of deadly domestic violence and suicide go way up. But one gun proponent pooh-poohs the worry: “If someone wants to kill his sister, he doesn’t need a gun, not a handgun, not a rifle, not a LAU missile launcher, not a MAG machine gun. He can grab a schnitzel tenderizing hammer and exterminate her.” Charming.

In the evening, our Prime Minister holds a press conference. He doesn't say much that's new. Despite polls showing that seventy percent of us want him to resign, he says that he won't. ⁵

He agrees with others that the High Court should hold off on releasing a decision on the "reasonableness" clause, as leaked earlier in the week, until after the war.⁶ "Let’s stay out of that minefield while we’re fighting for the home." He is expecting the war to go on for months.

That's Entertainment?

Other news, such as it is, comes from the world of entertainment.

An article in YNET News calls out Jews in Hollywood for how silent many have been about the war and the current rise in anti-semitism.⁷ For example, Barbra Streisand posted to Instagram right after the October 7th massacre, but then deleted the post. The article suggests that she was "overwhelmed by the backlash" to it, and worried that it might affect sales of her autobiography.

The Daily Mail reports that Kanye West's recent vague apology for his antisemitism came after pressure from his wife.⁸ (So he isn't married to a Kardashian anymore? Who can keep track...)

Should you care to see them, the article has clips of his more egregious recent raps and rants.

Dua Lipa has canceled a video that she was set to release.⁹ Made with a huge budget, it contains hundreds of extras and scenes of chaos and violence. She said it would be "insensitive" with our war going on. One image looks very much like recent footage of explosions across the border, though it was made before the start of the war.

And in proof that the Person of the Year is everywhere, Al-Jazeera, of all places, has a big article on Taylor Swift's impact on the world.¹⁰ Of course, they probably like her even more now, since her nemesis, Scooter Braun, has appeared at a rally for the hostages here.¹¹

The Birth of Blessings

My family and I talk more about the blessings over food. The question about hydroponics is less critical than some other questions.

The Jewish blessings over food fall pretty much into five (I think) categories: bread, stuff that grows in vines, stuff that grows on trees, stuff that grows on the ground, and everything else. Why these? Why not specific blessings over meat or fish or dairy products?

One possibility is that it covers what people in a mostly agrarian economy would eat. Even if they raised goats, cows, sheep, and birds (did we have chickens in ancient times?), they wouldn't have eaten them often.

I also have a hunch that it may be related to how they raised the foods. They probably had a pretty good idea of how animals, and the products that animals provided, such as milk and eggs, came about.

Plants, however, may have looked more magical. You put seeds in the ground. They grow, except when they don't. It rains, except when it doesn't. The sun, clouds, and winds do what they want.

If you're going to pray to a powerful, inscrutable entity to help with things, you'd probably focus on those. After all, a whole lot of ceremonies in communities around the world were fertility rites, focused on agricultural issues and the cycle of seasons.

After the Havdalah ceremony, when we can use our phones, we discuss some of the links that they have been sending me to use in these posts. There's a lot that I don't understand. Much of what goes on in local medicine and economics escapes me.

They also nudge me into making appointments for flu and COVID shots in the coming week. Our health plan has updated its app. It probably would be pretty usable if I understood more of the text in it.

I pass through the playground next to the House on the way home. I see a large person on a bench, wearing a scruffy blanket, keeled over. I send a Whats App message to a relative that I know is still down in the dining hall. Hopefully, he either checks on the person or gets someone in charge to do so.

Several hours later, I haven't heard back from him. I assume that that means that the person either wasn't a problem or was a big problem. I suppose I'll hear more eventually.

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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.