February 10, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-02-09

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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I'm running late, as usual on Fridays. I plan to get an early start and to go to the mall, but time gets away from me. As I'm reading my messages, I see a notification that someone is livestreaming today's Taylor Swift concert from Tokyo. I intend to watch for just a moment. I lose most of an hour. I go downtown instead, and get lunch at the usual café.

I have no idea what names are being called as I wait inside for my Orange Breakfast. It's dry today. Rain isn't obscuring the sound. The heaters and fans aren't all that loud. Still, all we hear are blasts of fuzz. All we can recognize is the number of syllables being spoken.

I leave my shopping bag and hat on my table to mark it as taken, and go to wait outside. When a worker calls the next name, I see the problem. He is wrapping one hand around most of the microphone, putting his mouth up against it, and bellowing. That doesn't work.

I think of telling him about the problem, but can't dredge up enough Hebrew words to describe it. Customers are backed up around the corner. He won't have the time or patience for me to try to route my way through detours of language to explain it. Grabbing the mic myself to demonstrate would be a bad idea.

I wait until my name is called, and take my tray back to my table. A woman a few steps ahead of me suddenly backs up. I don't know why. Fortunately, I see her, and back up as she does. She doesn't crash into my tray. I don't crash into anyone behind me.

After lunch, I get groceries at the small supermarket across the street. There's a much larger one a block away, with slightly lower prices. I like this place, though. The people are friendly. It has just about everything I need.

At home, I go through WhatsApp messages and news reports.

There's been an ongoing court case over a handmade home in the caves near the beach. A man started construction there fifty years ago and has been living in it the whole time.

Our mayor appeared in court yesterday.¹ He told the court that the city will help to ensure that the man and the home are safe. Inspectors will keep an eye on the place to make sure that it's up to standards.

If the man becomes too old or ill to continue to live there, the city will find an appropriate living situation for him. (Since the city runs the House of a Hundred Grandmothers, I have a hunch where he might end up.) They hope to include the man's home in a conservation site:

"Our request to UNESCO to recognize the shell house as a world heritage site is currently being examined, and is part of our vision to establish a unique coastal heritage site, connecting Eco-Park Apollonia and the unique archeology site of the coast, the British police station in Nof Yam, along with Beit Hadzaf and the Sidna Ali mosque and the water tower."

The court hasn't decided yet, but odds are looking good.

An article in a religious journal looks at how the government and the emergent civic leadership has functioned in the past year.² Each has reacted to the crises coming from the overhaul of the courts that the government leaders want to do, and in the reaction to the war, which immediately gained a higher priority.

(I'll note that this article is particularly cryptic via Google Translate. For one thing, it uses dates and years from the Hebrew calendar, which freaks Google Translate out.)

The article traces some of the roots of the civic engagement, which has happened here and elsewhere, to the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, which reworked ideas of leadership. It says that the status of being a leader comes not from what a person is, but from what the person does.

This ties in interestingly with something I read a few months ago (I forget where) about differences in views of religion. In traditional Judaism, who a person is, by external status or other qualifications, including what a person claims to believe, is far less important than what a person does. You can be a king or a beggar, and say what you want about belief, but what matters is whether you live by the commandments (not just the Ten, but the large, complex, but integrated range of activity involved in the other mitzvot).

This also reminds me of what we tried to do in our branch of Occupy. Taking some ideas from anarchism (but getting much of it jumbled as we tried), we spoke of ourselves as a leaderless movement. In my role as media spokesperson, I tried to speak of us as a "leaderful" movement. The idea was that when leadership was needed, whoever could do what was needed most effectively would rise to do it. It kinda worked, but complications arose, as they always do.

The article asserts, though, from how I understand it, that the emergent civil leadership isn't enough, especially, for long-term problems. Solid structures need to be in place to deal with these. We tend to call them governments.

I can understand this, drawing again, from our small-scale efforts in Occupy. While various people were popping up into position to deal with quick-rising issues, it fell to a small, ad-hoc group of us to sit down and deal with paperwork, accounting, logistics, infrastructure, and the other boring stuff that doesn't appear exciting or valorous. We took to calling ourselves "the grownups."

The ideas in the article also rhyme with the issues in the articles that I linked to yesterday, about the "binary crisis." Here, as elsewhere, social media and other forces are driving us into a wide split without much of a center. People looking for support are finding it more effective to rile up and energize the fringes already on their side than to push and pull on the moderates. Thus, in the roar of media and politics, the people in the center and the undecided drop out of sight and often give up. The extremists get more extreme, and you get the world that we're in now.

I see from another article that, ever since the massacres and the start of the war, more people here find themselves to be "closer to God."³ The statistical breakdowns are interesting.

I guess it all ties in to the saying that "there are no atheists in foxholes." (Wikipedia points to some interesting statements about that.⁴)

The news site that I follow most has an article on a lovely song that became a radio hit after its singer was killed at the dance festival on October 7th. There's a link to the song itself.⁵

In the evening, I head up to the House of a Hundred Grandmothers. As I walk through the park just outside of it, a voice calls out to me from the shadows. A resident to whom I always say "Shabbat shalom" had seen me walk past and realized that I hadn't seen here there.

As I come down in the elevator from my family's apartment to the dining hall, the doors open on the second floor. Once again, several people try to get on. Once again, the small, lithe woman whom I had seen dancing down the hall last week gets on then gets off. She takes the stairs, and gets to the dining hall almost as quickly as we do.

Kiddush goes well. I see some new faces at supper. My family tells me a story about some people at a shiva call having children that all went to school here together. They didn't know they were connected. In this city, everybody is.

Heading out, we get into a traffic jam in the hallway. Several people on foot, with walkers, and in wheelchairs arrive at an intersection at the same time. Everyone gets through it OK, but a crossing guard would have helped.

I get home, read more messages, and start writing. A friend, commenting on last night's post in which I mentioned Taylor Swift's boyfriend, tells me that he went to high school in the town in which I lived for most of my time in Ohio.⁶

It's a small world, after 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.

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.