March 19, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-03-18

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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Metal walls now enclose three sides of the official trash heap on my street. Green, about as tall as I am, with attractive thin cut-outs that let light through, they block the trash from view in most directions. The slab is still open on the side where people fling most of the junk.

Next door to me, where workers are building a ground-level bomb shelter, they have also dug up the driveway and lawn, and put down neat gray tiles. That makes sense. The guy on the seated scooter will now be able to move around his yard and roll down past the automated gates to the street. Large bags of construction materials still sit outside the house's exterior walls. At the rate that the builders are going, they'll be gone before long.

On the elevator up to work, the three other passengers, two men and a woman, are all taller than I am. That doesn't happen often. I look up at them and then down. None are wearing high heels.

On the elevator down to get my lunch, I ride with a woman in a police uniform. She looks far too young to be a cop. I wonder if she is dressing up for Purim.

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The government has approved a national remembrance day for the October 7th massacre.¹

The timing is a little tricky. Normally, they would want to do it exactly on the same date on the Jewish calendar, the 22nd day of the month of Tevet. The problem is that the 22nd here is the date of two combined holidays, Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. That makes it a Shabbat-like holiday, on which lots of the events that you would want for a remembrance couldn't happen.

The next day isn't a holiday here, but it is in the rest of the Jewish world. Outside this country, Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah occur on separate days. (It's related to why the rest of the world has two Passover Seders, but we only have one. Wikipedia says it's based on this text,² but you would have to either have a lot of background knowledge or be tripping to follow it. It makes Deleuze and Guattari seem straightforward. It's also probably related to the slippery dating of Ramadan, as both come from predicting or seeing the phases of the moon.)

(And actually, reading that English translation of the Talmudic text slowly, I see that I can kinda follow it, though my background knowledge is rusty.)

(I really need four-dimensional footnotes.)

So the rest of the world can't join in on the 23rd. It's pushed back yet another day, to the 24th.

Except for this first occurrence. This year, the 24th of Tevet lands on Shabbat, so it wouldn't work. So it has been decided that this year, they'll follow the secular calendar, and actually have the Day of Remembrance on October 7th.

I think I got that right.

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The news site Local Conversation (related to the English-language +972 magazine) goes deep on the emergence of the new self-proclaimed "liberal" parties in the local elections.³

Much of their support came from media that they put out, painting everyone to their right as interchangeable extremists. Looking particularly at our town, they managed to sketch a connection between the incumbent mayor and a convicted criminal who was also to the right of them. The mayor only reacted to this and loudly denounced the extremist on the day before the election.⁴ That was probably too late. He lost by 300 votes, in a city of 100,000 people.

The writer also notes that this supposedly liberal camp completely ignores some of the issues that have defined the Left before now. They appear to be paying no attention to the issues of minorities and of people across the borders.

But the article points out the biggest change in how they're working, connected to the local activity that I mentioned yesterday:

"A social activist, involved in local government, sees this connection between the national and the local as the most important innovation. The right knows how to rule, she says, knows the importance of local government, knows how to flow budgets to the local level in order to create a base of support for it at the national level as well. The left has forgotten what it means to be local, to paraphrase Netanyahu's famous statement. The formation of the 'liberal camp' ... is a first step on the way to recognizing the importance of local organization."

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The large Museum of Art next to Hostage Square has been working hard on developing responses to the attack and to the war, helping people respond to the experience in a variety of ways.⁵

In addition to supporting the volunteers on Hostage Square (and keeping their restrooms available to the visitors), they have created "My Gallery" activity kits that children can use when cooped up in their shelters. They have been presenting enormously popular Zoom lectures. Existing exhibitions have been repurposed and new ones created to help channel visitors' feelings and energy.

The museum director says:

"I like to see the museum as multiple spaces where visitors can feel safe to express themselves and find comfort and respite... But we didn’t think of the museum before as a healing space. We understood now that we can provide that.”

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Somewhat relatedly, a free, online course, “Is anything okay? The history of Jews and comedy in America,” will be starting in a few days.⁶ They were going to launch it in November, but it didn't seem right to do it so soon after those traumatic events. Purim is coming, and several months have passed, so they're launching it now.

As one expert says:

“There’s this notion that humor is a way of understanding. It’s also a way of fighting back... In that sense, I don’t know about it being too soon. When I teach humor, I use it as a form of protest, a way of keeping your dignity.”

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As I head out of the office building from work, a tall blonde woman skips past me, across the street. It's been a while since I've seen anybody skipping, let alone a grownup.

At a traffic circle along the way, two dogs meet. Humans at the other ends of their leashes chat. The dogs sniff each other and play, dodging back and forth. If they weren't on leashes, they might be zooming in wide circles around a space.

When I walk toward them, one of the dogs stops and trots over to sniff me. The other dog barks until he returns. I think he's saying, "This is a dog moment. Ignore the humans for now."

Rain starts as I head down the pedestrian street. It's just a light drizzle. After I get inside, it starts in earnest. I think I hear a few claps of thunder. It lightens, then falls heavily, then lightens again. It may continue through the night. If I'm lucky, I'll get to see snails in the morning.

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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.