February 26, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-02-25

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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The house ahead and to the left of me is shorter than I thought it was. There's a taller apartment complex behind it, built in the past year or so. On dimmer nights, their images merged.

Tonight is the full moon. It's shining dead ahead, at the end of the pedestrian street. I guess that means that the street runs due east/west. Directions here confuse me, since so many streets curve.

In some years, it would be Purim now. It isn't today. Leap years are more extreme on the Jewish calendar.¹ We add an entire month in seven out of every nineteen years, so that the holidays line up correctly. For Passover to land on the first full moon in the spring, we drop in an extra month now.

Purim will be in another month. I'm already seeing announcements of Purim events on Facebook. Some shops already have hamantaschen.² Some will start selling costumes soon.

There will be some changes this year. Our mayor announced a month ago that we won't be having the big Adloyada parade.³ Large gatherings seem like too much of a target for attacks. There will be smaller events instead.

The Education Ministry has sent out a circular asking teachers to make sure that students don't wear "costumes that could incite fear, panic or harm to others."⁴ The news article doesn't get more specific, but this might not be the best year to cosplay as a terrorist.

The government is also considering cancelling the massive celebration of Lag Ba'omer on Mount Meron, which would happen in late May.⁵ It's about ten kilometers from the northern border, and some missiles have hit a base at the top of the mountain. They intend to make a decision about a month from now. After that, cancelling or shifting the event might not be feasible.

Hostilities seem to be heating up in the north. While neither side overtly wants a war right how, they and we are ramping up attacks on each other.

In one town that has been evacuated, the mayor sent a recorded message to everyone who is still there: "For anyone still in the city, this is the time to make a phone call and leave."⁶

Most of the residents are gone. (Some have moved into the House of a Hundred Grandmothers.) Others are stubbornly refusing to move.⁷

One resident, who is the only remaining employee at the city's only remaining liquor store, has gotten skilled at identifying rockets:

"If there’s a whistle before the thud, that’s usually a Hezbollah anti-tank missile. An echo and then a thud means our outbound artillery. And when a salvo hits, oh, man, you’ll know it, there’s no mistaking those noises."

YNet says that the government may extend the evacuation orders through July.⁸ The prime minister's office may want it extended even further.

Their main concern is for safety. Some evacuees and remaining residents are concerned that their emergency unemployment benefits will run out soon. They may have to find work and put down roots elsewhere in the country. If enough do that, the cities to the north may become permanent ghost towns.

To the south, a research farm is producing its first crop of a new form of cherry tomatoes.⁹ Rather than becoming plump and juicy, they dry themselves out when ripe, resembling raisins. This gives them a longer shelf life, and makes them more useful for some items, such as frozen pizzas. They were supposed to start shipping out now, but the war got in the way. I look forward to trying them.

(And now I have Laurie Anderson's voice looping in my head: "Ya know? They're growing mechanical trees. They grow to their full height. And then they chop themselves down."¹⁰)

Another report tells us that there's now a backup of much of our world's knowledge on the moon.¹¹ The rocket that just landed there safely (other than falling over when it hit the ground) contains nickel plates with the entire contents of Wikipedia, much of the Internet Archive, and other information, as well as materials that would hopefully help whoever finds them to decode our languages. Our country had sent a rocket to the moon with another set, but the landing failed. This one seems to have worked.

If I had made the plates, I would have wanted to make the Book of Mormon easily findable, just for fun.¹²

As I walk toward my house on the pedestrian street, the moon suddenly disappears. There are no clouds in the sky. I'm not sure where it has gone.

I back up to the beginning of the block I'm walking on. I can see the moon from there. I remember that there's also a new apartment building dead ahead. It isn't lit up yet. As I walk forward, the angles to the top of the building and to the moon change. The moon hides behind it.

I picture a diagram in my head, as if drawn by DaVinci. I try to figure out the math. I fail. I don't need to know the angle to the moon now.

Maybe when we get back to launching rockets peacefully, we'll send some more up there. I'll trust the people at what ever we call Mission Control to handle the math.

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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.