January 13, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-01-12

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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Scanners Live in Vain

The lollipop won't scan. The little girl in front of me at the supermarket is only getting that one item, but it's taking a long time. The packagers wrapped a square label around a spherical pop, then sealed it in plastic. The barcode has crinkled and concealed itself in its folds. The scanner can't deal with it.

The cashier tries to type in the number below the barcode. Some of the digits are obscured, with only the bottom half of each visible. She tries to type the long number on the register's keyboard. It fails. She tries again. It fails again. On the fourth or fifth try, she guesses the right code.

The girl takes a tiny wallet, with an image from something like Hello Kitty on it, out of her pocket. She dumps its contents on the counter and carefully counts out the price. She has to figure some coins out. The sizes don't make sense. The largest coin, physically, is the half shekel. The five shekel coin is a similar size but a different color. The ten shekel coin is smaller. The smallest is a single shekel. It looks like an American dime, but is twice as thick.

The cashier waits, eating noodles from a foam cup and scrolling through something on her phone.

The girl figures out which coins add up to the right amount and hands them to the cashier. The cashier ceremoniously hands her the receipt and the lollipop. The girl says, "Thank you," and walks a couple of meters over to a woman who is standing by the wall. The woman hugs her. "Well done, my darling!"

Our ambiguous salad days

I go upstairs to get a salad for lunch. A place in the food court has a good antipasto salad. I order in Hebrew, only stumbling a little.

The cashier points to an English menu and asks, in English, "Like the menu?"

I pause. Is he asking me if I would like to check the menu? Is he asking if I would like the salad just like it's described in the menu?"

I want it just like it is in the menu. I tell him so, in Hebrew. That way, it's unambiguous.

He rings me up immediately, without asking if I would like anything to drink with it. Oh, well.

The pictures and songs are the news

I sit down with the salad, take out my phone, and flip through messages and news as I eat. My family has sent me a firehose of links, mostly about the situation with the Houthis. I don't really understand it, but I now have information to catch up on.

An article shows some drawings that a six-year-old made while she was a hostage. She wasn't allowed to bring them with her when she was freed. A woman who was held with her managed to sneak a few pages out later, when she was released.¹

The pictures are cheerful. The older woman told her a story that kept growing to include their new experiences while they were captive. When they were moved within the tunnels, she told the girl that they were moving to someplace safer from the "bad booms."

"I told her they gathered the most special children, and here we are kept safe until it stops. When it's safer, we'll go out... Another story and another story. That's how we built life there for 49 days."

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum has made an effective 30-second spot² that is being shown in theaters and on TV in the States,³ trying to bring the hostages home.

A local singer has done a gentle, beautiful song in English, "Bring You Home," sung for the hostages.⁴ At first, it doesn't look like anything is happening in the video, but letters gradually disappear and reappear in the title, evoking the feeling of the hostages' absence.

A group of musicians from around the world, including several children's choirs, have made a video of the official prayer for our Army.⁵ It has English subtitles, so I now know what the insurance agent has been rattling off like an auctioneer at the end of the afternoon prayers. A member of the War Cabinet, who is ahead in the polls to be our next prime minister if we ever get around to having elections, recites a section near the end. Perhaps fortunately, he doesn't try to sing.

Non-express espresso

When I'm done with the salad, I go over to McDonald's, on another side of the food court, and order a double espresso. My order number pops up on my phone.

I go to the counter and wait. It takes a long time. I finally show the order number to a worker and ask. He goes into the back. He returns. My espresso doesn't show up. I ask him again. Once again, he goes to the back. He returns, walks over to the espresso machine and makes it himself. The machine is between the main counter and the ice cream counter, and the people at each thought that the other was handling it.

The espresso is good. It's always good. The espresso at McDonald's, no matter where I've tried it, is consistent. It's one of the hidden wonders of the world, brought into existence just before the world's creation, that is better than it has any right to be. Blessed are the coffeemakers.

Phone games

The boy in the seat in front of me on the bus back from the mall is playing chess on his phone. The girl next to him plays something inscrutable, moving hearts into odd formations then writing Hebrew letters on them with her long fingernails. The letters don't appear to spell anything. They chatter continuously with the girl in front of them. She's also doing something tricky on her phone, but I can't see what.

Tunnel talk

There's a good crowd for Kiddush and shabbat supper at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers. The voices that I hear sing well.

We mostly talk about the mayhem concerning the tunnel at Chabad headquarters.⁶ New York City had given orders to vacate the building, as well as several others, through which the tunnel was dug, to see if it was damaged. Apparently the headquarters itself is OK.⁷

My family is shocked at the explosion of antisemitic misinformation online about this.⁸ I'm not, particularly. I have dealt with the internet in the States enough that I had figured that those prone to react like that would do so. I see that Rolling Stone has tagged their article "Jewish Pizzagate."

The New York Post has the most detailed article on the tunnel.⁹ It says that the other end was in an abandoned mikveh¹⁰ behind the headquarters.

The article also claims that the students behind it hired "migrants" to do the actual digging. Ron DeSantis will probably claim that he dodged a bullet by shipping so many out of Florida. But he may privately regret not having thought of it himself, so he could snoop around in Mar-a-Lago.

The other half of desire

When I get home, I relax before getting back to writing this, and watch the rest of Wings of Desire. It's as good and thought-provoking as I expected. I look forward to listening to the director's commentary in the next few days.

The subtitles were running a few seconds ahead of the dialog. I didn't mind. It meant that I could know what the characters were going to say before I heard them say it. Kind of like the angels.

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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.