March 18, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-03-17

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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A parade of muddy trucks rolls slowly up the street where I work. Where they're coming from used to be an apartment building. Now it's a hole in the ground. Soon, it will be an apartment house again, taller, earthquake resistant, and probably much more expensive.

Up the road a bit, a man walks his silent motorcycle a few car-lengths down, then up onto the sidewalk. Another small truck backs up to him. The man opens the back, lets a ramp down, and rolls the motorcycle into the truck. He raises the ramp and shuts the doors. They drive off.

From a kindergarten behind a stone wall closer to the office, I hear two children screaming and crying. A third is yelling, possibly at them. The voices of two women try to calm them down. They could use backup.

In the office kitchen, a coworker tells me that it will be colder and rainy tomorrow. The weather site doesn't expect rain until the next day. It does say that swimming from the beach will be dangerous tonight due to high seas. That's OK. I won't be getting to the beach, and rarely swim. I do have family near there, but they keep track of these things better than I do.

A bottle of arak¹ sits on the kitchen counter. Two or three shots are left in it. I don't know why it's there. Maybe I missed an early morning celebration. I'm not tempted to pour any of it for myself. I have a hard enough time staying awake at my desk.

The best news analyst that I follow, Haviv Rettig Gur, gives a two-hour talk on YouTube on the history of our country and the decades that led up to it, and how misinterpretations became so widespread.² He's a really engaging speaker. I've only watched the first half hour or so, but I'm eager to watch the rest of it in the next few days.

We're having an olive oil shortage. On a Mediterranean diet, that's a big problem.³

Most of the world's olive oil comes from Europe. They have had severe weather and wildfires in recent years, and that's cut back on their exports. Even though we have what should be a thriving olive oil industry, it's having its own problems.

In what they claimed to be an effort to lower prices, our government lowered tariffs on imported olive oil. That was supposed to help the cost of living. They promised money to local farmers, but it doesn't appear to have reached them. The harvesting season started in October, and the government has been even more distracted than usual.

Our system should be robust. Unlike the European countries, which depend on rain, we have effective irrigation. But many of the groves are near the borders and inaccessible.

Little olive oil is available in stores. Even worse, much of the imported oil is fake, with other oils bottled as the real thing. (I'm told that this is a problem in the States, too.)

The prices have gone way up. Boutique local brands are available online, but the prices are reported to be exorbitant.

Archaeologists tell us that we've been producing and using olive oil for well over seven thousand years. Hopefully, we won't screw that up now.

In a concert Saturday night, one of our top rock stars, Beri Sakharof, sang one of my favorite patriotic songs, Ein Li Eretz Akheret.⁴

It isn't just a flag-waving hurray-for-our-side song. It had a revival a year ago, sung at many of the protests:

"I have no other country / Even if my land is burning ...

"I will not stay silent / because my country has changed her face / I will not give up on her / I will remind her / And I will sing right into her ears / until she will open her eyes."

A page by the Israel Forever Foundation⁵ has a full transcription and translation, and another video, in which multiple singers perform it along with images referring to the October 7th massacre. From what I can tell (and my family will certainly correct me), it was written during a war in the 1980s. The words, remaining constant, keep developing new meanings and new relevance in all the changing situations that we encounter as a country.

When I come downstairs to the supermarket to harvest lunch, my favorite cashier is sitting at her station, leafing through a sales circular. I say "Hi. For once, it looks like you're not busy."

She responds in English. "Yes, thank you. This is one of many things for which we get to say 'Thank you.'"

She looks up at me. "You, you have a good job. You say 'Thank you' for that. But you are lonely. I see that. I pray for you, that you may find something right."

I can only think of one thing to say: "Thank you."

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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.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

L'hitraot.