Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-03-20
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...
Right before my Hebrew lesson is to end, the power in my apartment fails. I go out into the yard. When I'm far enough from the house, I get a phone signal. I send my teacher a WhatsApp apology.
I don't know how far the outage has spread. Relatives at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers, three blocks away, say that their power is OK. They think they're on a different circuit. They guess that the outage may be related to the construction next door to me.
I really need to install that UPS that I got a couple of weeks ago.1
I head out to work. When I'm about a kilometer away, I see a functioning traffic light. Power there is OK.
I listen to the rest of the podcast that I had started on my phone. It can't seem to load anything new. I switch to the app from which I stream music from my library. It can't reach the library. My power must still be out.
I try another app. I've been mirroring my music library to the cloud, so I can listen when my own power or net connection is out. I can't connect there either. When I get to work, their (pleasingly clear) status page2 says that their streaming is down, too. They appear to be located in Bellevue, WA, so I hope their outage isn't related. The service resumes sometime in the afternoon. So does my electricity.
Tuesday was designated "Good Deeds Day" around the country. I've seen reports of students making gifts and learning first aid in a mall in one city, and of them baking hamantaschen in another.
Relatives at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers got involved. They tell me via WhatsApp:
"The House has a long-running project with a local high school called 'the intergenerational project.' It runs with a class of all 3 years of high school, 10th through 12 grades. Last year, the first cycle graduated. I understand the project earned a national prize.
"Today, in honor of the day, a new group of students came. They were responsible for planning, preparing, and running a series of activities this morning. The residents were divided into groups which rotated among the activities. The kids played along with the residents. There were puzzles, a crossword puzzle of Israeli history, a fishing game.
"The high school students were completely in charge. They pulled it off well.
"I think it’s an excellent example of the Israeli emphasis on training young people in community responsibility."
The Association of Libraries has put out an urgent call.3 They're already underfunded, but the new national budget, which is about to pass, cuts their funding by another fourteen percent.
The budget proposal includes cutting a lot of library services and shutting down branches that can't cope with expenses themselves.
The Ministry of Culture says: "All sections of the Ministry of Culture and Sports were cut in light of the war, and the same will be done in the libraries' budget, with the aim of restoring the original budgetary base as soon as possible."
All over the world, people hear that cuts to the arts and social services are only temporary, and will be restored at the end of whatever the current crisis is. They rarely are. It's like how corporations raise prices for things, blaming external forces, but never seem to get around to dropping the prices again once their costs recede.
Similarly, the privatization of the postal service is a mess.4 The post offices themselves are run as franchises, rather like fast food joints. Owners are shutting them down if they're not profitable, resulting, in effect, in mail deserts.
The Ministry of Communications is looking to fine the service over a million shekels. That might be a challenge if their problems are actually being caused by running out of money. The Minister is blaming the High Court, because that's what ministers are doing nowadays.
There are further complications. It's making the US system seem coherent. Postal bureaucracies must look back fondly on when they might only have had to deal with rain or snow or gloom of night. Not that most of our country gets any snow.
The afternoon prayers are almost crowded today. Most of the usual group is there. The dentist from downstairs has brought up two additional people: a large man with a puffy white beard and a smaller man, stooped over with a cane, who looks like Philip Glass but with neater hair. Someone rolls a chair out from the office for him to use in the parts of the service during which we can sit.
Early in the service, a religious woman, with a long dress and her hair piled high in a scarf, emerges from the restroom. Her office is at the far end of where we are praying. She doesn't want to disrupt the service. She looks around to consider her options, takes a long breath, then sprints, surprisingly quickly, down the center of the hall and out of sight.
One of our bosses appears at the doorway of our office and waits until the other boss sees her. She apparently tells him telepathically that he needs to come back inside. (They've been married for some forty years. They can do that.) He counts to make sure that there will still be at least ten men praying, then heads in.
During a lull in the service, while some people complete the silent prayer more slowly than others, the dentist wanders over to the insurance agent. He tells him that the two visitors will be saying the Mourner's Kaddish.
The agent needs to know that. He usually leads Psalm 130 and the prayer for the soldiers right after the closing prayer of the regular service. The Mourner's Kaddish, when it is said, comes before the psalm. A few days ago, he didn't realize that another visitor needed to say the Kaddish, so the two of them started the different texts at the same time.
They heard each other and stopped. The visitor yielded, and said it was more important for the agent to complete the psalm. So we had the psalm, then the Kaddish, then the prayer for the soldiers. At least, I think that's what we did. It's been a few days.
This time, the agent knows ahead of time. He pauses after the closing prayers. The two guests say the Mourner's Kaddish, then he leads his two prayers.
Several people almost collide when we are done. The two visitors return their prayer books to our front desk, then emerge. Someone else rolls the chair back inside. One of the building's workers stands next to the prayer leader and recites a private prayer that at least one other person needs to hear. I'm still not sure what it is,
Eventually, we sort ourselves out. The dentist, insurance agent, and visitors head back to the elevator. The building worker heads down the hall. The rest of us reenter the office and get back to work.
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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.