April 20, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-04-19

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...

---

Posters placed in a line on the wall of the bus stop all say the same thing: If everyone observes Shabbat correctly tonight and next week, we will win the war immediately. They list details as to what this particular observance might entail. One part of it seems to involve gift cards. The bus comes before I have a chance to decode the rest of it.

---

The city is planning a lot of events for Passover.

Next Thursday and Friday, a circus will fill one city square near the beach, with acrobats and workshops.¹ They'll also have a temporary skate park, plus food trucks and the like.

The beach itself will have sand sculptures and a kite-flying workshop.

At one entrance to the beach, the families of the hostages will have a stand selling shirts and CDs, to benefit their work.

---

The national railroad will be adding trains on the days before and after the holiday, and in the middle of it (though not on the first and last days, which are celebrated like the Sabbath).² That makes sense. There's a lot of travel, as families come together for the Seder, and many take vacations for the whole week.

---

They're also opening up new bus routes along what appears to be a series of fast lanes for transit only.³ At least I think that's what they're doing. I can't make much sense of the article, even through Google Translate. I'll have to take a ride on the bus lines that I think will use it to see what's changing.

There's also a new dedicated bike path, which will be part of a network of paths being built in the region.

---

My family has sent me information (though not an alternate history⁴) on the name of the turtledove.⁵

The Hebrew word, "tor," sounds like the call of the bird, especially if you hold and roll the "r." It may also have to do with the bird's mobility: the word "tyur" means a "tour."

The Hebrew word also means a queue or an appointment, leading to wacky translations when the word appears in any context. So Google Translate thinks the quote in the definition says, "the voice of the queue is heard in our country." Here, the voice mostly calls out, "Who is the end of the line?" In the States, I used to hear a different call, often more plaintive, wordless, or often unprintable, at the Division of Motor Vehicles.

---

The singing is strong at Kiddush at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers. My relative who leads it discovers when he gets to the dining hall that he doesn't have the texts at hand, as he usually does. Even though he's been doing this for decades, he's nervous. The rest of us pipe up a bit louder than usual to support him, though we, too, are working from memory.

The kitchen and dining hall at the House have already switched to Passover mode. They haven't set bread out for the hamotzi prayer, so we skip it this week. I see the staff bring some matzo out to one table, so they can say it. In many traditions, we don't eat matzo in the weeks before Passover. Other traditions do. The people for whom the staff brought it out are apparently among them. There are a lot of traditions at play in the House, from the most strictly religious, coming from a range of different countries and communities, to the wholly secular. They get it all to work together.

The sun hasn't completely set by the time that I head home. The cats are waiting expectantly by the trash heap for the people with the food to come by. I wonder if they get confused by the switch from Standard to Daylight time. The humans' schedules jump forward and back by an hour. For those who don't read clocks, nothing has changed. The shift may look even crazier for cats than for those humans who resent it.

I say "Good evening" to the cats as I head back into our yard. I see that the cat hotel on the landlords' porch is gone. Summer is coming. No need to run from the rain.

---

Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.

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.