Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-03-02
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...
Making lunch, I discover a solution to bland cholent: mango chutney.
I got a jar of it yesterday at the international store when I couldn't get mole sauce. It works. I wonder if amba1 would also work well with it. I'll try it next Shabbat.
My package of tech stuff arrived on Thursday. I finally get around to opening the boxes this afternoon. Everything that I ordered is there.
I start deploying it with the easiest item: the DVD drive. The first test is dismaying. When I try to play DVDs using the standard Mac app, I hear the sound, but only see a gray screen. Fortunately, all the other programs that I intend to use with the drive appear to work fine.
Since my DVD collection is taking up a lot of shelf space, I'm planning to rip then get rid of a lot of it. I hope that my favorite music shop in the next town over will buy them. I'm not expecting to get a lot for them, since the market for DVDs has crashed, and since almost all of them are region-coded for the US. Fortunately, when I lived in Cleveland and was pretty broke, I limited myself to buying DVDs from dollar bins. So what I get, I get. I plan to hold on to those with significant packaging, such as accompanying books.
I test the drive with three DVDs. It works. I have a smooth process. I'm backing up my collection to another hard drive now, then will work on installing my NAS and my UPS, and switching to my new phone. Whee.
Over lunch, I listen to a podcast featuring my favorite news analyst.2 He talks mostly about the issues of getting Haredim (what US media call the "ultra-orthodox") involved in the war effort.
They have been exempted from the draft for a while. They had convinced the government at one point that their studies and prayers are as important for the country as more mundane (and dangerous) efforts would be.
There's been a big demographic shift since then. Since they tend toward large families, they have expanded from three percent of the population to thirteen percent. Since we're in a situation when we need more soldiers, that's a problem.
The big challenge in incorporating them is finding ways for them to participate while not giving up aspects of their religious life. This gets tricky. For example, there are a lot of different sects, many of whom have differing rules for what food is kosher. The Army wouldn't be able to keep up with having each kind of food available everywhere that they might be. Similarly, some have rules as to what music they can hear, which would be impossible to maintain where they would be mixing with other soldiers and the general population.
Of course, I hear people from outside the country saying that we should just draft them and ignore the religious issues. Nope. Practically and politically speaking, it wouldn't work. They have enough votes to collapse any attempt to do that.
The analyst's view, as I understand it, is that it would be possible to put them in self-contained units. For example, many of the volunteer ambulance corps in civilian life have large Haredi involvement. (New Yorkers may have encountered the Hatzoloh EMT squads. They're here, too, though pronounced a little differently.) That's also true of the teams who handle the dead.
So it might be possible to shift them into those posts in the Army, freeing up others who do that now to serve in other areas.
I discuss these things with my family when I visit the House of a Hundred Grandmothers for the Havdalah ceremony to end Shabbat. They have additional information and insight (partly from having worked for the government on statistical analysis of the country's demographics).
They pretty much agree with what I understood from the podcast. They also suggest that the existing ambulance corps and similar organizations be regularized and recognized as official alternate service. There are programs like that for people to choose rather than going into the Army. Most people, though, do join the Army at draft age.
After the ceremony, they help me figure out a form that I got from the government. It appears that I actually have a small sum of money coming to me, though I don't know why.
It's possible to either fill out the form online or mail it in. I try it online on my phone. I fail. After going through several layers of authentication, it turns out that I need some information about my bank account so that they can do the deposit. (And yes, we confirmed that this wasn't a phishing scam.) The information should be buried somewhere in my banking app, but I can't find it.
The mostly-easier way to do it will be to go home, get the information from my computer, and mail in the form. I'm wary of this. In my six years here, I have never mailed anything, and have received very little in the mail. How do I address an envelope? Does the mail system use stamps? Where do I get them? Would I have to make an appointment with the post office to get stamps, since everything else is by appointment?
They give me an envelope and a stamp and circle the return address on the form. Addressing the envelope works the same way as in the States. I happen to know that one odd object at the entrance to my office building is a mailbox. I can proceed with that.
I head out and go through the House to the exit. As I go through one door, the handle comes off in my hand. I manage to put it back on, but not to secure it.
I go to the front desk. I have to wait behind the House's most notorious complainer, who is in the midst of a harangue that I can't understand. She stomps off, to the extent that one can stomp while using a walker.
I speak to the worker in Hebrew. I first tell him that I have spotted a very small problem. He looks relieved when I say that it's small. I try to tell him that the handle of the door at the top of the staircase that he just saw me come down has detached. I discover that, having to speak in real-time, I can't recall how to say "handle," "top," or "detached." I end up doing a lot of gesturing. He understands enough, at least, to be able to go to where the problem is.
I leave and head home. The streetlamps in the park are still out. I go around the outside.
(As I type that, an earworm of Malcolm McLaren's "Buffalo Gals" launches in my inner ears.3 I hunt it down and watch the video. I get to wondering why I remembered Neneh Cherry singing on the track. She didn't. I hunt down her track "Buffalo Stance"4 from around the same time. It used some of the same samples.)
I get home, check my messages, and try to switch modes. Time for cooking, putting laundry together, and other necessary tasks. The mundane week begins.
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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.