Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-03-08
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...
My usual café is out of chairs. Large groups of people are camped out at either end of the seating area. Round tables stand alone on the tile floor, like solitary mushrooms, abandoned in the desert.
I have ordered the Orange Breakfast. Eating it standing up or taking it to go would be impossible. I need a chair.
I realize that each of the people in the large groups have as much right to their chairs as I do. Still, I entertain fantasies of pulling their chairs out from under them, ranked by how slapstick the reaction might be.
Finally, one person from the group in the back of the space gets up and leaves. I dart over, ask permission of the group, and swing the lone chair over to the nearest empty table.
I put my shopping bag on the table, laying claim to it, and plop myself down in the chair. When they call my name, I take my hat off and place it on the chair, improving the odds that it won't be taken. I'm right. I get to sit while eating my breakfast. Yay.
I flip through relevant news on my phone. It all seems bad. It's not that much new is happening. Everyone is stuck in a sort of stasis. We had been hoping that there would be some kind of breakthrough as we approach the start of Ramadan this weekend. Each side, as usual, says that the other is rejecting its own eminently reasonable requirements and insisting on their offensively unworkable demands.
Think pieces declare what we, they, the US, or other people should do or should have been doing. People are worrying about the rise of antisemitism elsewhere, and speaking of either the weakening or strengthening of Jewish life here and abroad.
A pundit on a podcast speaks of our brilliant hack of social systems: when other people attack and pressure us, we get stronger. Of course, every society or subculture thinks that that's its own secret hack and that no one else can do it.
There are a few relatively hopeful bits. The US is going to build an artificial pier off the coast, to get humanitarian aid to people across the border.1 No one seems quite sure how the aid will get on land from there, but they must have figured out something. They also need to figure out how the aid will get to the right people, without either being hijacked by the supposed government or raided by desperate locals.
It has to work better than the airdrops that the US tried recently. They were expensive, inefficient token efforts. A lot of packages got blown out to sea. Several people were killed when packages whose parachutes didn't open landed on them.2
All told, it seems like the least effective aerial food delivery since the WKRP Turkey Drop. Hopefully they'll learn and do better.
When I get to my relatives' apartment at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers in the evening, the whole family is there. It's crowded. The other three members were just about to leave after visiting in the afternoon.
Everyone seems to be talking at once. The young girl is running around, demanding attention. She is zooming a wooden airplane that her grandfather had made for her. A wheel breaks off. No problem. He can nail it back on after Shabbat.
The crowd in the dining hall for Kiddush is even larger than before. After we say goodbye to the departing relatives, we get in a little late. Rather than being right up front, we're down the aisle toward the back.
As we head out after eating, we get to talking with another resident. She's quite sharp. Conversations with her often shift among several languages.
She asks one of my relatives if she had seen an online item that the resident had sent. My relative doesn't think so.
When did you send it? "I sent it by WhatsApp."
But when did you send it? "It was a video."
What time did you send it? "It was a congressman. An American congressman."
But at what time did you send it? "It was about antisemitism."
But when? "I had forwarded it from a message someone sent me."
When? "It was about five o'clock."
Oh. My relative had already turned her phone off for Shabbat.
I head home. Several dogs greet me in the park. Several cats ignore me on my street.
I plan to relax and watch last night's State of the Union address. First, I have to put away my groceries, make coffee for the morning, and write some of this down. I put my hat on the hook, look at what's around me, and hurry toward relaxation.
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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.
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.