Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-12-31
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...
Influency
I must look confused. Another patient in the waiting room comes over to me. "Are you waiting for a flu shot?"
I take a little too long to process the question. "I..."
She switches to English. "You are here for shofa'at? That is what we call the inoculation for influenza."
"I am."
"Good." She looks at the slip of paper that I am holding, along with my card for the health plan. "You have a number. They will call it. When they call it, I will tell you." She sits back down.
I had known all that. What gets me is the numbers that they are calling. I have "S1". So far, I have heard them call 609, A2, 28, M1, A7, and 13, all to go to the same room.
They eventually call for S1. The other patient doesn't notice. I see the room number on a wall between two doors. I go to it and start to open the one to the left. Several voices from the waiting room call out, "No, no, the other door."
Thanks. I go in.
A nurse sits at a desk surrounded by equipment. I hand her my health plan card. She scans it and hands it back.
She says something to me in Hebrew, with a strong Russian accent. I only understand a couple of words. I don't reply as quickly as she would like. She glares. "Do you speak Hebrew?"
I say, in Hebrew, "A bit. English?"
She replies in English. "Little bit."
I nod. "OK."
She continues in English with something like, "I need you ... wait ..."
I wait.
She repeats. "I need you wait." She points to my left.
Her hand is near a scanner. I touch it. I don't know what to do with it.
She comes around the desk and points at the floor. There's a scale there. Oh. She hadn't been saying "wait," but rather "weight."
I stand on the scale. She announces a number and sits back down. She says something in Hebrew again. When I don't respond, she repeats it. "When did you start to gain weight?"
I shrug, pat my belly, and respond in Hebrew. "In my whole life, I have been fat."
"I will give you a referral to a dietician." OK.
Other parts of the exam go quickly. I rest my left arm on a table. She takes my blood pressure, then, taking a syringe from a drawer, gives me the flu shot. It doesn't hurt at all.
She sits back down and does a lot of typing. Several pages emerge from the printer. She staples them together. I'm pleased that I now know the word for "stapler," after a coworker asked to borrow mine last week. I think of a Mr. Rogers song.1
She hands me the form. She says in English, "That is all. Have a nice day."
I head out and off to work.
The Dogs of War
Some of today's news seems to have gone to the dogs.
The Army has released video of its canine unit operating across the border.2 They have been quite effective, getting into spaces that humans can't. Some have subdued terrorist gunmen, preventing ambushes.
Unfortunately, not all have survived. I mentioned a few days ago that a dog with a camera had recorded the voices of hostages, but was killed before it could deliver the footage.3
On the other hand, packs of stray dogs have crossed the border and are roaming in our villages and kibbutzim. They have been filmed in evacuated communities there.4
The head of our Nature and Parks Authority is concerned about diseases that they can spread, and insists that they must be dealt with. That doesn't necessarily mean killing them, though. The Agriculture Ministry says that they have allocated half a million dollars to address the problem, including "funding for the capture of hundreds of dogs, their maintenance in quarantine, vaccination with two rabies shots, microchipping and spaying and neutering surgeries."
Round and Round
The chairman of a large party is demanding that there be a new law to prevent the publication of a decision by the High Court on the issue of "reasonableness." That's right, he wants to pass a law preventing the court from ruling on a law that affects the parliament's passing of laws.5
It looks like our local elections will now be on February 27th, unless they're moved again.6 The reason: over six hundred people in the Reserves are running for office, and they wouldn't be able to get home to serve if the election would be earlier.
In only vaguely related news, the prime minister's office has announced that he is in good health. They say that they'll discuss his July "cardiac incident" and his new pacemaker later. That incident surprised many of us in revealing that he actually has a heart.7
There are official prayers for the health of the government, but in his case, I'm reminded of one fictional rabbi's blessing for the Czar.8
Our Year of Living Dangerously
I'm seeing lots of posts celebrating that today's date is 123123. But here, as in much of the read of the world, 1t's 311223.
That's one of those things, like numbering floors of buildings, stating the temperature, measuring most things, and dealing with whatever it is that "Hz" measures in power sources, in which the American Way now seems a bit peculiar. But I had to step outside of the US to see how unusual it is.
MMDDYY is a totally odd way to do things, anyway. Why put the smallest measure between the two larger ones?
Whenever possible, I stick with the ISO standard YYYYMMDD format, with or without dashes.9 The big advantage is that dates in that format sort properly. Thus, for example, the archives of this newsletter sort by name appropriately (at least for entries since I settled on a standard way of naming them).
For those reading on Facebook, who don't see the post title, this post is "Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-12-31]".
I see that our president (a much better person that our prime minister) has tweeted New Year's messages in a whole lot of languages.10 It doesn't look like he used Google Translate. He's cannier than Kanye.
Whatever the date number, many here (and elsewhere) will be glad to see the year end. We began with an incoherent government, which sparked massive civil unrest. We started to get used to the forty straight weeks of Saturday night protests and to the fear that the country could fall apart. Many shrugged and said, "It could be worse."
Oy, were they right.
New Year's Eve isn't as big a thing here as in the States. Maybe it's that we already had a big New Year's a few months ago.
Following the tradition in some European countries, people here usually call this evening "Sylvester." Despite what the name might suggest, it doesn't involve chasing animated birds11 or singing "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)."12
It's named for the Saint's Day of an ancient pope, called by some the most antisemitic pope ever.13 So some people get grumpy when you call it that. One day last week, I heard a woman in the office building's lobby yelling on her phone, "Sylvester is not our holiday! Not! Our! Holiday! You will stay at home!"
People from Russia and thereabouts celebrate it as "Novy God,"14 which just means "New Year." It tends to be much bigger for them. Many of them take off work today or tomorrow.
Wikipedia, writing about Novy God in this country, claims that "It is common to allow soldiers of Russian-speaking heritage serving in noncombat facilities to go on leave on the night of the 31st to allow them to celebrate the holiday; however, this is not enforced by official order." However, the page to which it links now tells of a particular effort, a dozen years ago, to locate and detain soldiers who were driving drunk. The IDF blog said, "If the driver is a soldier in the IDF, then the details of the case are passed on to his commanding officer, in addition to notifying his parents."15
I doubt that they will be focusing on that very much this year. Wars get in the way of things.
Feliz Novy God, all.
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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.
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L'hitraot.
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Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian on X: "The IDF releases new footage of the Oketz canine unit operating in the Gaza Strip. The military says the unit “in a large number of cases” have sent its dogs to scan buildings before troops raid the site. The dogs have located threats, mapped out buildings, and discovered… https://t.co/2tgICwJAPb" / X ↩
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IDF dog recorded escaped hostage yelling for help before erroneous slayings -- probe | The Times of Israel ↩
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Packs of stray dogs from Gaza Strip roaming around Israeli border communities ↩
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Arye Deri calls for law to delay contentious High Court verdict - The Jerusalem Post ↩
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Until next time: the local elections have been postponed to 27.2 • Sharon Online ↩
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Israel's Netanyahu 'in good health,' Prime Minister's Office says - Israel Politics - The Jerusalem Post ↩
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May God bless and keep the Tsar far away from us! Fiddler On The Roof - YouTube ↩
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Looney Tuesdays | Tweety and Sylvester's Adventures | Looney Tunes | WB Kids - YouTube ↩
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Celebrating an anti-Semitic pope on Sylvester - The Jerusalem Post ↩
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IDF website - Israel Defense Forces: On New Year's Eve: the military police conducted an enforcement operation from Yoh ↩