January 3, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-01-02

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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From Traffic to the Trifecta

The traffic jams are back. They had paused earlier in the war, but now people are driving more than ever. Too many people don't trust public transportation. They want to be in their own little bubbles of safety, even if the bubbles are stuck on the freeway, bumper-to-bumper.

If the local news hadn't told me,¹ I wouldn't have known. I walk to work. I see the usual number of people there, depending on whether I'm out there at dog-walking time.

When I reach the office today, I get in an elevator heading up. A harried-looking woman dashes in after me. She bends down and points a finger toward the button panel, then stands and points at the button that I had already pushed. She says "Exactly!" I smile. She smiles.

On my way to the office kitchen, I pass another worker. He shakes a finger at me. "Don't breathe near anyone!" One worker, who has been sneezing continually, is out sick. Several others have been sneezing just as much. Another worker is rumored to have COVID. Yet another worker is out, visiting a member of our afternoon prayer group who is in the hospital with COVID. A new variant is going around.² I'm getting my shot on Thursday.

I hit the trifecta with the coffee machine today: I have to fill the tank, fill the beans, and empty the grounds. I think it's like the neighborhood cats, who seem to know when a person who gives them food is approaching. They may all have a telepathic link.

Should we just leave them alone?

A lot of interviews with returned hostages have been appearing in the media, including a recent one with the brother and sister from my city.³

My family has forwarded to me a piece from Tzohar,⁴ a journal which seeks to connect religious and non-religious Jews. In it (according to Google Translate), a reader asks whether the abductees have "become 'everyone's property,' or do they deserve the right to privacy, and should we stop publishing information about them?"

Rabbi Yuval Sharlo, the head of their ethics center, replies:

"This is not sensitive and gentle behavior, and it is contrary to the virtues that people should behave towards each other... A person's personal life is his... When it comes to low moments of his life, the prohibition is much more severe... I wish we would all avoid this, and allow a private life for the victims within us, without intruding on their privacy, and only when there is a real need will we deviate from this rule. The obligation to do so is first and foremost on the media, and it is a call to them to greatly reduce these publications, but also on us as human beings..."

The psychologists and therapists among us (I know you're out there) may have insight on this issue.

(I had collected a lot more links to the interviews to include here, but then figured that I might become part of the problem.)

I'm told that the word translated here as "privacy" is not privacy in a legalistic sense, but in a personal sense, akin to "modesty" in styles of dress, revealing only what one chooses to reveal of oneself without external coercion.

You say you want a Constitution...

The High Court has gone ahead and announced its decision on the "reasonableness" law, as was leaked a few days ago.⁵ To recap, instead of the constitution that our Declaration of Independence in 1948⁶ promised that we would be getting a few months later, we have a pile of what are called Basic Laws. Our parliament can create them. The High Court has never ruled against them, until now.

The High Court has, until now, had the right to negate government appointments based on whether they are "reasonable." (We're not the only country that has this. The New York Times says that it's the law in Australia, Britain, Canada, and, I suppose, other countries further down in the alphabet.)⁷) The parliament passed a law last year negating the High Court's ability to negate things. And now the High Court has negated the parliament's ability to negate the law allowing the High Court to negate the parliament's appointments. Got that?

Had this happened a few months ago, it might have further cracked open the divisions that had sparked the protest. Some had wished that it had been delayed. (And, of course, many people wish that the parliament hadn't started this ruckus in the first place.⁸) But once it started, the clock was ticking. A couple of the justices in the High Court are leaving their posts this month, and they wanted to get this out of the way before the membership of the court would change,

I suppose that the text of the decision will eventually appear online, should you care to read it for yourself. It runs about 250,000 words. Have fun.

Another Boom in Beirut

As I walk home, my phone starts buzzing with notifications from news sites, as well as WhatsApp messages from family telling me that there's breaking news. I wait to check the news until I'm sitting at my computer.

It appears that an airstrike in the capital of the country to the north killed several high level leaders of the terrorists we're fighting across the border to the south.⁹ The top target was the leader of the branch of the terrorists operating to our west.

We're not officially saying we did it, and we're saying we're not at war with our northern neighbors, just fighting the terrorists along their border.¹⁰ But we're told to expect more rockets from the north, as well as possible incursions.¹¹ The people who need to be at a "heightened state of readiness" are.¹² The terrorists to the north say that there will be a "response."¹³

So noted. No one ever starts anything. Everyone in our regional kindergarten wails, "But he hit me first!" If you track it far enough back, you'll probably find Cain saying that he was defending himself from Abel.

Meanwhile, the US Secretary of State was supposed to be coming this week. He has pushed it off until next week. He says that the delay isn't related. He might have remembered a jam session in Alexandria that he just couldn't miss.¹⁴

We carry on. If anything gets into our bubble of a town, I'm a few steps away from our bomb shelter. If I don't hear the sirens, I'll hear my landlords bursting though my kitchen on their way to it. But I'll probably just wake up as usual, have my weekly online Hebrew lesson, and head to work.

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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.