← The Promised Podcast
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- [00:01]
A
Hey, podcast people. I am so happy to be with you here for this soft Return of the Promise podcast. We have been away for about 10 weeks though. We flitted back into your feeds for two of those and it has been a thing. We took the break that we took when we took it because the war in Gaza had just ended, the last of the hostages were coming home, a Board of Peace was starting up and we figured this was the perfect time because frankly, until the country started gearing up for the summer or fall elections, it was obvious to me, with my preternatural grasp of all matters martial and political, that basically nothing newsworthy was going to happen for a while. I figured it would take weeks for that Board of Peace to bring actual peace, and everyone around us on all sides seemed pretty chill. They were all like little Fonzies. So it was the perfect lull for a perfect break. My point is, I stand by that judgment. Nothing newsworthy has happened. All that being true, maybe you're wondering why I say that this is a soft Return of the Promise podcast. Well, it turns out that that it is actually kind of hard to put together a podcast when you are running to a shelter 8 point something times a day on average. That is the number in Tel Aviv. And the back and forth of it can wreck the continuity of a day just before we started, right now, we ran to our shelters and came back. Plus there is the fact that we cannot all get together in a room even in the same city. Plus the fact that even while we are recording, there may well be missile attacks. Plus the fact that we used the break to line up great new people and great new things for the podcast. But it is tough to introduce them with all the uncertainty that the war brings. And then when I take into account how the university just got back from the semester break on Zoom and all of us municipal types are on high alert, I do not know for sure to tell you that we will in fact be back next week. Maybe we will, maybe we won't. It may be more in every other week kind of thing. That may be what's viable while this war goes on. We're still working out the kinks, we will let you know. But still, big picture, we are back, baby. We are back. Mostly sorta. Now onto the show. This is TLV1. This episode may contain explicit language. Welcome to the Promise Podcast, brought to you on TLV1, the voice of the city where every day since this war with Iran started up again at 9 in the morning and then again at 6 in the evening in a large and much fortified command and control center. It's called a hamal, an acronym in Hebrew for war room. Three floors underground in city hall there are all hands coordination meetings attended by maybe 50 people, one more important than the next. There is the mayor, Roland Roudai is his name. And there is the Director General of the city, Machumleibe, and the Deputy Director General for Operations, Robert Ruby's Loof. And there are various and sundry deputy mayors and there is the IDF liaison to the city. And there are the heads of all the branches and departments and units in the city organizational tree. And the mayor calls the meeting to order. And then the director of the Emergency Operations center gives a first report of the dry data of the past half day. This many missiles causing such and such damage to this many buildings and homes, relocating this many people to these hotels with this many shelters up and running. And it goes at the front of the room there is a CENTCOM sort of wall of screens and all the information is up there too. Plus live streams from dozens of places around the city, including every site where a missile or shrapnel hit last night right in front of our apartment in the event one of those cluster bombs fell thwack on the boulevard. By way of illustration, the very first time I went to the morning meeting there was also a live feed from Tehran. Explosions there. And the TV news stations are up on the cent con screens, muted pundits punditing mutedly. And there is a dashboard showing how many people are right now waiting on hold to get through to the city switchboard calling 1 06. The dashboard moves up and down from 2 or 3 to 12 or maybe 15. And it says how many call center people are on duty answering the calls at that moment. 18 or 20 usually. Of whom another screen says how many are on break. Three or four at any time. And there is a clock that says the average wait time. It's always shifting. It turns yellow from green when it tops one minute of wait time and it turns bright red when it goes over two minutes, which hardly ever happens higher than three minutes. It starts to flash, I am told, but I never saw it go that high. And after the dry down to business. Joe Friday recounting of the basic data, the heads of the various branches and departments and units one by one each give a report of how the things in their purview are going. And there is a fixed order to who speaks when it goes. First the community affairs unit, then the education unit, then the social Services unit, then the engineering unit, then the operations unit, then the administration unit, then the information and Communications unit, and then finally it's back to the director of the Emergency Operations center, who gives another Joe Friday summary of what we just heard. Turns out the problems and challenges that arise in a city like ours when it's under attack are exquisitely complicated. When the first missile landed in the city, making hundreds of families all at once homeless in the middle of the night, the city needed to set up a command center near the spot and get people to decent places to sleep right away while longer plans could be figured out. And it also needed in some cases to put money into people's pockets right away because their phones and wallets and IDs were lost in the wreckage. The missile came down at five minutes to 11 at night, before midnight. The municipality had a place up and running in the nearby School for the Arts where my girl and boy went in the event, so that less than an hour after the missile hit, the first shell shocked victims were already getting processed. It was not yet one in the morning when the first families were checked in to one of several hotels a few blocks away on Rothschild Boulevard, meaning that it was less than 2 hours from bomb to bed in a hotel. Of course, every one of the many hundreds of shelters in the city have to be checked and cleaned every day. WI fi goes on the fritz. A manager said that this morning in one of the shelters there was a need for a fancy water purifier. Sirens need maintenance. Among the refugees and asylum seekers, there is a need to have translators in situ on the spot. In some shelters in kindergartens, kids drawings hung up on the walls were being damaged. The report came in. Someone needed to help deal with that. Of course, alongside all that, all the normal day to day things have to go on. The trash has to be collected, the streets and sidewalks have to get cleaned, old folks in need of help need to be helped, phone calls from residents with problems need to be answered, and so on and so on and so on. We are now up to 45,000 calls that the city has made to residents. Everyone over the age of 75, I am told, has been phoned by someone in the city just to check how they're doing. What is most remarkable about these morning and evening meetings is how the scale shifts from big broad questions of policy to very, very specific particular questions about this or that specific resident of the city. A broad might be what needs to be done so that the paycheck to paycheck sorts of people who tend not to have a fortified room in their apartment and so they have to run to local shelters a dozen times a day. What needs to be done so that they do not feel second class compared to the richer folks in the newer buildings who have the fortified rooms? One very partial answer Send youth movement kids into the shelters to sing, to take care of the kids in the shelters, to clean up, to distribute ice cream, to partify the operation. Another broad question. What needs to be done to make sure that older folks who cannot run to a shelter are still safe? One very partial answer. Bring beds and box springs and tents and human aids to certain underground shelters. Make them old aged shelters and set them up as homes away from home for these people who cannot go back and forth every time there's a siren Alongside these big questions, the meeting brings to the surface all sorts of very particular questions, like I said, of this or that resident. Like what to do about that man on the first floor apartment in that building that got hit on Tejon street who refuses to leave his apartment while structural work is being done to fix things three floors up where the rocket fell? Who is going to go and meet with him and talk sense with him? Of course there is no way at a time like this to give everyone what they need and deserve. I posted an impressed post to Facebook about these twice daily meetings and a woman wrote in the comments, it's all very nice in theory, but our shelter in Hadar Yosef hasn't been cleaned in a week and I don't see anyone losing sleep over that. When one of the guys from the meeting who is in charge of cleaning the shelters got wind of that on my Facebook feed, he wrote me, I have got five shelter cleaning teams just waiting for this sort of thing. One hour later one of those teams arrived at the shelter in Hadaryosef with mops and brooms and rags and arguably nothing captures the rising to the occasion. And emergency brings out the best in US spirit of this city we love so well. Better than twice daily meetings, three floors underground, going over everything in great detail, all for the purpose of getting across to the folks who live here that most beautiful biblical one word sentence Hineni. I am here with us today in TLV1's newest satellite studio, presumably very well fortified in the Bitsaron neighborhood of the city is a woman who embodies, probably more than anyone I know, the spirit of Hineni of being there unbidden, unasked, un prodded with a kind word, a casserole, a song, whenever and wherever you need her whenever something bad happens, whenever something good happens, whether you are her best friend or someone she just met at the bus stop, always she is there. The paragon of heinenyism which some people pronounce he nennanism. Potato potato obviously, and I think you know this, that most he nennish woman could only be Miriam Herzlag. Miriam Herzlag is the OPS and blogs editor of the Times of Israel, creating and residing over the the biggest and most profound form of Jewish discourse and debate since the Talmud itself was codified. Which forum I register seems to be growing still bigger during wartime. Miriam was in the past the anchor of the Israel Broadcast Authority English Language Television News and an editor and anchor for the Israel Broadcast Authority English Language Radio News. Miriam, as I know I do not need to tell you this ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around, no time for dancing or lovey dovey. We ain't got time for that now. How you doing?
- [11:09]
B
I'm okay. I'm counting my blessings. We're going to be talking a lot about what our conditions are like and how we in fact are protected. And on the scale of my ability to complain, I have very, you know, my rights to complaint because you're only allowed to complain to someone who has fewer points than you do. And my points are not that high. I have to run to a shelter, but other than that I don't have to do reserve duty and I don't have little children and so I'm good. It's all relative, but I'm okay.
- [11:45]
A
And what is the blessing count up to? You said you're counting your blessings. 12, 14.
- [11:53]
B
Well, the absence of complaint points means so one blessing is that. But for all the horrible sad incidents that have happened, it hasn't been worse, which is not something we take for granted. And our early warning systems, while we just ran to the shelter just now and only got three minutes between the early and the actual siren, still give us enough time to get safe. And I appreciate that. Those are blessing points, I guess in this, in this dark time. Good to be here though. Missed you.
- [12:29]
A
It is good to see you on the screen. It's really, really great to be here. Now as for me, my name is Noah Ephron and I do not mean to boast, but Susan and I have for the past almost three weeks slept every night in the shelter under the Gordon's cool down the street on thin mattresses that we had stowed at home from when the kids Used to have sleepovers because we ain't got no stinking fortified room in our admittedly beautiful building built 90 years ago by one of the great international style architects, Aryeh Sharon. And when random people come into the shelter during the daytime alerts, people that don't sleep there at night, but they just happen to be in the neighborhood, so they pop in there when there's an alert. And when they see us sitting with Lucy the dog on our very basic bedrolls, they sometimes say with horror, but which they try but never really manage to hide, you don't sleep in this place, do you? And when we say, yeah, it's fun, some of our friends do too. It's like summer camp when we say this, you can see in their faces the horror turn into pity. And please believe me when I say that, I'm not bragging. God knows my parents taught me better than that. But I like to think that I make an impression on people. And I am pretty sure that at least some of those people who ask us if we really sleep in the shelter when they are home later that night eating their dinner near their fortified room, find themselves saying to their sweethearts, honey, you will not believe the guy that I saw today. Today we got several topics so profoundly important and importantly profound that you're probably going to hope that this war goes on for another week just so you'll have time in a shelter to properly process them. But first, we have this matter of millennial memoriam. Exactly 1,000 years ago last week, on Friday, March 11th in the year 1026, the Hebrew date was Yudtet of Adar Bet 4786, a young boy named Yoshiyahu Ben Harav Hadayan Yeshua Hechaver Baribi Nathan died in Gaza City. All of a sudden, no one saw it coming. He got sick and then he was gone. Hunekhtaf. He was snatched or kidnapped from us, is how it was described at the time. Yoshiyahu Ben Harav Hadayan Yeshua Hechaver Baribi Nathan was just six years old when he died. Yoshiyahu's father, Harav Hadayan Yeshua Hechaver Berabinatan. He was the rabbi of the Jewish community of Gaza City, and he was also its judge, its Dayan. The title Hechaver in his name indicates that he was also a member of the Sanhedrin or Yeshivat Eretis, or El, an institution much diminished since the Sanhedrin that ruled the land of Israel up to and during the second temple. Period, that council of 71 judges who set out the laws of the land and then interpreted them with authority. But still, centuries after its heyday, the Sanhedrin remained a sort of chief rabbinate, headquartered in Jerusalem, run in the days of Harav Yeshua by Haggaon Shlomo Ben Yuda, who took it on himself to show that the rabbis of the land of Israel were in no way inferior to the rabbis of Babylon. And Harav Yeshua was part of that. A scholar and a leader of authority and reputation in a community in an important port city, albeit a less important port city than Ashkelon and Yaffo up the coast, Gaza City was then a community that, located 1/5 away from Jerusalem in the northeast to Cairo in the southwest, saw itself in matters of Jewish law and culture as a sort of satellite of those two great centers of Jewish culture. Harav Hadayan Yeshua Hechaver Barabi Nathan was a man of first tier importance in a city of second tier importance when, exactly 1,000 years ago last week, Yoshiyahu died. When he was snatched at the age of six, Harav Adayan Yeshua Hechaver Beribinatan was bereft. He was wrecked, and for a long time he was inconsolable. Yoshiyahu was his only child, and now he was gone. Rav Yeshua tried to tamp his grief in the way that a man of his faith and his station would do, writing that he bade himself to reflect in his heart upon the fact that God is a God of faithfulness. He does not act with injustice or wrongdoing, but only with truth that is sure and steadfast. Which faith in God's goodness only led Rav Yeshua, how could it not, to the painful conclusion that it must be he himself who was the reason for his own tragedy? And when I stopped turning back to the Torah, the joy of my heart ceased. And when I forsook the religion of my Creator, I became liable. Indeed, when I rejected his words of precious worth, a decree was inscribed against us. End quote. All these things appear in a piyut, a liturgical or prayer poem that Rav Yeshua wrote. To try, one feels, to make sense of how his only boy had died, so young and so beautiful, to learn something from the tragedy, and maybe mostly just to put into words the grief that had seized him. The kind of peyut that Rav Yeshua chose is a rare one. It is called a kadushta. A kadushta is a poem of very specific structure, meant to be recited in A very specific part of a very specific prayer, specifically near the start of the Amidah, or standing prayer on Shabbat or on a holiday, the part leading up to what is called the Kedusha. The kedusha, which is Aramaic for holiness or sanctity, is the third part of the Amidah, a silent benediction said during each of the three daily prayer services. The precise nature of the kedusha has varied in different times and places, but it always has at least two things. A passage from Isaiah 6:3 that goes, Holy, holy, holy, the Lord of hosts, all the world is filled with his glory. And also a passage from Ezekiel 3:12, Blessed be the Lord's glory. From its place. The kedusha is said both by the congregation and by the cantor or leader of the prayers. And you could see it, if you want, as the most important passage of the most important prayer. Though who needs in the end to rank order prayers? A kadushta is a long poem that a prayer leader or cantor might swap in for the passages in the Amidah leading up to the Kedusha. Back in the 6th century, when the first kadushta we know about today was written, and long after that, in the 11th century, when Rav Yeshua wrote his kadushta on the death of his boy, prayer books were hard to come by. They were copied by hand, of course, onto parchment and stitched together and bound with leather. A lot of work. And they were expensive. So worshipers often learned their prayers by heart. And also they relied on the prayer leader or cantor to, well, lead them through the thing. And this meant that a prayer leader or cantor could, when the occasion called for it, bring in some new text for some special purpose. This is what a kadushta is, a special prayer poem for a special purpose. Almost always, a kadushta was meant to memorialize some huge, usually tragic, historic event. In 1937, a towering scholar of pewt and medieval Hebrew poetry, Menachem Zulay, wrote an article called Piyutim in memory of various historical events, in which he laid out how kadushta were a genre meant usually for matters of historical significance. In Rav Yeshua's own time, a kadushtha was written about the great earthquake that destroyed Tiberius in 1033, and one was composed about the riots in Cairo and Fustat in 1012 and 1013 that probably left hundreds of Jews dead. These were events of theological and political importance. They were the stuff about which kaddushtaot were written. Almost never was so small and private a tragedy as a six year old boy snatched by illness from a grieving father. The subject of Kadushta, which after all, was meant to be chanted before whole congregations. What would a congregation learn about heaven or earth from a poem by one father mourning one boy? It may be that Rav Yeshua's poem for Yoshiyahu is the only Kadushta of its kind. Menachem Zullay found in the 1930s just four pages of RAV Yeshua's Kadushta in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where it had been transferred from the geniza of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, a geniza being a repository of old and damaged holy texts. The great Judaic scholar Solomon Schechter, at the end of the 19th century, had overseen the transfer of the vast number of documents. The Bodleian got 25,000 folios in Cambridge, where Solomon Schechter himself worked, got almost 200,000 pages and fragments, and many other fragments and folios ended up spread around the world. The four pages Menachem Zullay found were from an autograph manuscript of the text, a copy written by rav Yeshua himself. 36 years after Menachem Zullay published those four pages, the great philologist, poet and scholar of medieval pewt, Ezra fleischer, discovered in 1973 two more pages of the autographed text in the Geniza collection in Cambridge and brought those pages to print. 36 years after that, in the spring of 2006, a great Hebrew University Talmudist named David Rosenthal discovered in Geneva still more pages of the original manuscript. By this time, Ezra Fleischer, who was recognized as the world's leading expert on the Kadushta, was fighting the illness that later that year would take his life. So Professor Rosenthal sent photo stats of the new pages he found to Professor Shlomit Eli Zoro, also at the Hebrew University, a scholar of early Pew team and medieval Hebrew poetry, who had then in 2006, just turned 50 and was at the height of her powers and reputation, though her powers and reputation have really only grown since then. Shlomit Elitur brought the Geneva pages to Ezra Fleischer in bed terminal, and Ezra Fleischer told her that he too had discovered still another page of the manuscript. Though it was badly damaged in his illness, he had not published this finding and he gave the additional page to Shlomit Elizur, who by now had almost all of the Kadushta. Only the very beginning was still missing, and she set to work reconstructing it. 20 years passed. Finally, just now, a beautiful book has come out in time for the 1000th yurtzite of Yoshiyahu's sudden death, published by the World Union of Jewish Studies and distributed by Magnus Press of the Hebrew University. It is called, quote On a Son's the Poetry of Rabbi Yeshua Hechaver, the son of Rabbi Nathan of Gaza, in memory of his son Yoshiyahu, Shulamit Elitor edited and added an introduction and explications, end quote. What comes through most when you read the poem that Shulamit Elitor has brought back together for us just now is how much life there is to the thing. You feel the blood of the thing, you feel its humors. It is a living poem with meter and rhyme and all of that. Yom asher ne' esaf Yoshiyahu b' ni shame' mu be' tochi be' mechoni vehashacha olam le' eni et hovalti le kever mahmad eini ve' oz geoni. I have tried to translate the thing, simple as I can. I've not tried to capture the lovely, complicated rhythm and rhyme schemes. We will all need to wait for a better translation than mine, though I did try hard to be precise. But if you can, you must go back to the original. What Rav Yeshua says, in part, is this. The day my son was gathered in. My foundations within me were laid desolate, and the world grew dark before my eyes as I took to the grave the delight of my eyes, my power, my pride. End quote. After that, Rav Yoshua goes on. And I wailed a bitter wail, a wail of a day of dread and awe, as if some of the world was taken from me. Oh, that my head were water so I could pour it out, and my eyes a fountain of tears so I could spill them forth. And I would weep day and night for Yoshiyahu who has been taken from me. How can I be comforted? How can I be still and quiet? How can I forget him? No one ever had a child like him. How all at once is he gone? How can he be no more? End quote. And after lines and lines of what? Pure grief like that? Harav Yeshua describes his boy as a scholar of focus and talent much beyond his six short years. Quote In Torah he was a warrior, a spear in hand. He would not rest, would not stop until his foe was beat. He would rise early in the morning and go to his teacher and read all day. His soul never grew weary. He thought always of Torah. Not for a single hour was it absent from his mouth. And he would say, my father, my teacher, this verse, what is its interpretation? And this one too, and this one, and this one, until he was done with them all. Yashkim ba bok yaretzel milamdeu li krot kolayom lo tikshar ruheu hayatamid be' Torah hegyoneu aphilu sha' ahat lo tamushmi piu vayomar abba mari zeha pasuk ma pitroneu vegamze vize ad gmaryehu. At night at my bedside, when I hugged him, he would start. He would say the day's lessons on the tip of his tongue. And from when he was a baby until he was gathered in, he did not play and laugh with the boys on the street. Even when he was home on his own, he studied and he took pleasure in doing acts of kindness. He was gracious to those beaten down who begged at our gates. He would not eat alone, whether he had plenty or not, until he had given of his to others, to an old man or a child. End quote. And then Rav Yeshua writes about a remarkable conversation he had with his boy only days before he got sick. Before he was gathered in, he asked me a question the likes of which has never been asked before. It astonished everyone who heard it and startled them because a boy just six years old asked this question. On the Day of Wrath at the end of days, will all people die? I said, yes, everyone is destined to die. He said. He who dies last, who will bury him? I said, he will be cast out like dung in a field. He said, who will clear the dust that settles on him? I said, the Creator of the heavens, who laid him out. He will say to the spirits, hover above them and clear the dust. He replied, with such gentle sweetness. Will they return, be resurrected and live as they had meaning? Of course, with the coming of the Messiah, I said, God will breathe life into them. He said. Where? I said, in their nostrils. And there will be among them no one who is blind or lame to serve God. They will be made whole. He stood after hearing this, pondering the matter in his heart, end quote. Of the day that Yoshiyahu died, Rav Yoshua wrote, quote, one cry was his only cry from the time the pangs of death grabbed hold of him. My father, I have redeemed you. And he said nothing more. And now I say the same. And all of this happened in gaza city exactly 1000 years ago this past week, and it is not lost on anyone, I'm sure. How could it be that Gaza City carries for us today, meaning that it did not carry when Shlomi Talizore started working on the manuscript pages collected over 100 odd years from all over Europe? And Shlomit Alithua writes in her introduction quote, preparing a text about a bereaved father from Gaza a thousand years ago took a painful turn, and while making this book I could not free myself from its meaning today. This thing left its mark on my writing. I felt that in my descriptions of Rav Yoshua's different poetical ways of addressing his tragedy, I was turning too to my contemporaries for whom it is hard to find solace for their own relatives who lately died. On the dedication page of the book one finds this dedicated to the memory of IDF soldiers who fell in the war that broke out from Gaza, and among them heroes who grew up in our neighborhood, my nephew, the devoted Dr. Eitan Menachem Ne Iman. May God avenge his blood. And the great educator Yossi Herzkovic. May God avenge his blood. May their memories be blessed. End quote. And the great gift of this distant, distant echo of long past time, 1000 years ago this past week, still so alive, still so fresh and full of love that one man had for one boy, his one and only boy, is that it tells us again, though we really don't need to be told of the love and longing and loss and grief of every parent, of every kid who died also in our time in Gaza, be it by bombs or by bullets or by sickness or by medicine that could not be got, or by men with guns setting fire to safe rooms in kibbutz homes, this love and longing and loss and grief, great enough for us to feel it generations a thousand years later, great enough to touch us today, is great enough too, to let us hope with the boy Yoshiyahu that maybe, maybe, maybe all those terrible deaths will if not now, maybe soon, and if not soon, then after that, maybe all those terrible deaths will help to redeem us, of which redemption as Harav Hadayan Yeshua Hechaver Baribi Nathan well knew we are very much in need. Today we have discussion one and discussion two, and also as an added bonus, discussion a discussion one unbounded as Atlantic staff writer Yahya Rosenberg, in a recent essay called the Israel of October 6th is never coming Back, argues that while Prime Minister Netanyahu used to be timid and reticent about going to war, now he is something completely different having cast off his cautiousness and like Dr. Strangelove, having learned to love, if not the bomb, well, at least bombs in general. What's more, Yair Rosenberg writes, israeli society as a whole has been changed in pretty much the same way that so we will ask discussion too undergrounded, as most of us find ourselves these days, dodging from fortified rooms to underground shelters, which is a weird way to be. And we will ask what we learn about Israeli society today and about ourselves from how we is and how we ain't holding up in the home front. Can it be mere coincidence? We will wonder that the word resilience anagrams to sincerely lie. And before we get to these topics, we will have discussion, a confounded in which we will ask the question asked by my favorite of the four sons of the Passover Seder, the simple one. We will ask of the war raging around us and of the weird international politics of the thing and of the morality of it and of the causes of it and the possible outcomes of it. We will ask Mazot, what is this? Or as the kids say, what the actual fuck? But before we get to any of that, listen to this. That song is me by Rotembar or Imlo, Anakhtun Miyagi, if not us, who will say peace? Somehow, even now, that that is music of this moment of a sort that we will listen to over the course of the show. And now it is time for discussion. A so, Miriam, in two weeks at the Seder, we will read the story of the four sons, three of whom have got one question or another about what's going on around them, of which my favorite, like I said, is the simple son who asks simply, as befits a simple son, the simple question, Mazot, what is this? Which is the question I, being a simple sort, have got for you, Miriam, about all that is going on around us at this moment in Tehran, in Washington, Beirut, in Jerusalem. What is this?
- [35:16]
B
What is this? Well, my, my, my, Ba Ben Hayakirli hatam, my dear simple son, this is a bid to finally, once and for all, shake free of our enslavement to the bonds of existential fear. That's the answer to the simple son.
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A
Really?
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B
Yeah.
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A
Now you're being completely earnest. This is sincere tongue and sincere. Go on, go on.
- [35:44]
B
I looked at the text in the Haggadah, and I thought they boiled it down to this is, you know, we were slaves in Egypt. So if you're looking for the core of this and its meaning for us, that's what it is getting freed of the threat, the existential threat from Iran. That's the simple answer. If I'm answering the Chacham, the wise son, I'd say it's a regional war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime that openly seeks Israel's annihilation, that enriched enough uranium for 11 nuclear bombs, built a vast arsenal of long range missiles, and spread its reach through proxies that threaten Israel while bringing ruin to their own local populations and societies. But if you want, like the truth in the Jack Nicholson, you can't handle the truth sense, then the answer is there isn't just one truth. There are many truths. And we can't handle trying to hold them all at once, because this is so many things. It's a multifaceted, intensely violent and volatile cluster of conflicts and geopolitical dramas. It's another chapter in a millennia long clash of empires. It's an epic failure of diplomacy. It's the story of the Iranian people and the question of whether they can shake off their murderous leaders and how many of them will die trying to do that. It's about Islam, it's about oil, it's about China, it's about American and Israeli domestic politics, and it's apparently a new ground war with Lebanon. And for me, it's just one more stage in this long, ongoing transformation of the region. It's also worth saying that this conflagration is so loud that for days now we haven't heard the word Gaza. I think you said the word Gaza more times than I've heard it in the last, you know, since this started. And that like, armed Jewish militias are rampaging in the west bank that barely registers. And the coalition's political maneuvers just keep rolling along in the background. So we're in the middle of something vast and violent and unstable. A story with, like, lots of threads. It's all pulling in different directions. And at any moment it could take a sharp turn, possibly, you know, the kind of turn that goes kaboom.
- [38:12]
A
I want to go back to the very first thing you said. Do you personally experience it as something that may free us from what you called the existential threat, but an existential threat? Is that really what it feels like to you when you're, you know, in the shelter?
- [38:33]
B
I am skeptical. I'm born skeptical. And I think it's also my job to be skeptical about the claims and rhetoric that politicians make. But I would start with the fact that, yes, we've gotten accustomed to living with a powerful regime that, that is shown itself to be brutal and to have the aim of destroying me and my children and my friends and my country. We've gotten used to it, but it's there and it didn't stagnate. When the enrichment of Uranian is part of this story, it's a real casus belli that I accept. Whether it's being conducted wisely, whether there's any chance that anytime soon there can be regime change in Iran, I'm highly skeptical. But in terms of the story of this war, yes, I believe that the purpose of the war. I also believe that there's many other purposes and some of them many and perhaps most are hidden. Obviously, there's a story about American policy and an American president who is mercurial and taking a role in history that is frightening in its unpredictability, and it wields the greatest military might in the history of civilization at his whim. So with perhaps some possible pushback from. From the generals who seem to be going along with this plan. But. So I think, like I said, a lot of things are going on. But at its core, I think the story for us as Israelis is that this is confronting an existential threat. How do you see it?
- [40:42]
A
I don't see it clearly, but what you're saying makes sense of one thing that I've noticed that has struck me as odd and also interesting, which is that this war that's been going on just for 19 days now has had the strange impact of retroactively, I think, redefining in some ways everything that's gone on for the last two and a half years in the way that, you know, if a person suddenly discovers that their wife is having an affair, and then all of a sudden, all the years before of marriage become obviously something different than you thought it was. And now I think that this entire war more and more is seeming as if it was a war with something big that spread in Iran and in Lebanon and in Gaza and partially is always threatening to spread in Egypt and in other places too. And that it is this, like, massive world historical something that will be in the, like the history books years and years and years from now, and not something as local as a fight between Palestinian nationalists who seek to control what they view as their homeland, Palestine, versus, you know, Jewish Zionist nationalists who seek to maintain control over what they view as their homeland in, in the land of Israel. It's. It's bigger than that, it's broader than that. And I have been, I. I've been sort of reticent to see that, or I Just haven't really seen that. But, but what you're, you're saying is big and capital lettered like, like that kind of thing. And, and that's, that's interesting to me.
- [42:44]
B
I've seen this from, you know, very shortly after October 7th as, as precisely situated in a regional context. I don't think there's any way to understand Hamas's choices and their power without factoring in their, their patron, their Iranian patron. Same goes for Hezbollah. These are not border conflicts. These are, you know, these are existential wars about the right to be here. And they're also fought, you know, at the micro level and by people with stories and grievances and aspirations. And so, you know, that's what, that's what makes it difficult. But, you know, just, I think it helps to keep in mind the munitions that were being fired over the border from Gaza. We came via Iran and were supported by Iranian proxies. And I think it's important to keep in mind that as difficult as this story is right now for us, the United Arab Republics are getting hit harder with far more munitions than we're experiencing. And it's just wild to think about a country that's right across the way from Iran, much closer, along with other Gulf countries that are also experiencing this and who's, you know, so it's. It, you know, every morning I think it's important to get up. This is what I've said before the war. Every morning we need to get up and thank whatever God we thank that we have peace treaties with Egypt and with Jordan. And I am fine with these being, you know, not warm. Peace, you know, fine. We're not at war with our longest border neighbor, and we're not at war with the geographically largest Arab country directly on our south. And that, you know, that is a reminder that that reality seemed absolutely out of reach until 1978 or so when people made these decisions, and it eventually led to that. And every morning we probably need to. To say the same thing about Syria. Syria is not a threat to us. And the fall of Syria, as worrying as the current regime is, means that our planes can cut right across their airspace and get quickly to Iran. So this is so, for me, so regional. I think maybe it's because I've spent some time in the UAE and sort of felt the weirdness of that place and its vulnerabilities and its own, its sort of identity as a place that's, by the way, populated by a large expat community of Iranians and had to make a decision. So to me these are big stories while I'm also trying to figure out whether I can bring my hot cup of coffee with me across the street to the shelter.
- [45:52]
A
Now listen to this. That song is Bachurot Tovot. It's a cover of a song by Odaya and Sarit Haddad by Shiraz Zloof, who is amazing. She was the first runner up this year in the competition to represent Israel at the Eurovision, which I worry is gonna be a pretty thankless thing. But the more important thing about Shira Zloof is when I talked before about Tel Aviv's deputy director general for operations, the city's coo, who is one of the people who's running the city's response to this war, he is Ruby Zloof, Shira Zloof's dad. She is his girl and she is so hip, while he, for all he's a genius administrator, is really, really not hip at all. It makes you think about genetics and it makes you think about legacy and it makes you think about the hodgepogeny of progeny. Now it is time for discussion 1. Miriam are we seeing a new Netanyahu and are we being a new Israel?
- [48:14]
B
Well, the Israel of October 6th is never coming back. That's the title and the thesis statement of a bracing essay in the Atlantic by staff writer Yair Rosenberg. He argues that, quote, the Netanyahu who is currently commanding a high risk assault on Tehran is not the same Netanyahu who governed Israel for nearly two decades prior and the country he leads is not the same either. The old Netanyahu, according to Yair Rosenberg, was faint hearted. He reminds us that more than 10 years ago, a senior advisor to then President Obama said, the thing about Bibi is he's a chicken shit. And he also recalls that just two years ago, then ex President Donald Trump told a campaign rally how he'd put plans in motion to assassinate Qasem Soleimani, the notorious head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, only to have Netanyahu pull out at the last moment. I'll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down, trump said to his supporters. This perception of Netanyahu isn't new. Friend of the podcast Haaretz writer and Bibi biographer Anshul Pfeffer described the prime minister as, quote, the most risk averse of Israeli leaders, averse to making war or peace. That is, until lately, according to Rosenberg's Atlantic Peace. Even after October 7, the Prime Minister did not attack Hezbollah in Lebanon out of concern that Opening a northern front while fighting a war in the south risked spreading the IDF too thin. It was only after Hezbollah kept up bombings for 11 months that Netanyahu was compelled to respond in full. Through the first 20 months of the war with Hamas, there were calls for the prime minister to. To attack Iran, which, after all, was Hamas's great patron, but he did not. Eventually, this reticence, too, was worn away by circumstance. In Rosenberg's view, what we're seeing now in this war is a Benjamin Netanyahu who has, quote, cast off his cautiousness and put all his chips on the line. Behind the prime minister, Rosenberg suggests, is a nation that, like him, has grown tired of caution and weary of half measures. What's more, Rosenberg implies, once the prime minister and the nation have cast off the constraints of caution, it is not likely that they will return. So, Noah, is there something to this? Are we seeing now in this war a prime minister unleashed from his prior restraint, governing a country that, like him, has no appetite for restraint?
- [50:51]
A
I understand this interpretation, but no, I don't think that there is as much to it as meets the eye like, behind this description. And I felt it the whole time I was reading this essay, and similar things have been said by many other people, including many people here in Israel. Behind it is an image of Prime Minister Netanyahu these days as a figure like Dr. Strangelove. In a way. He's like finally to. Just ecstatically devoted to seeing these bombs fall, partly because. Because he all of a sudden has gotten a taste for this thing. He's tasted blood. And after years and years of basically an entire life of being very conservative about using force while being. While being very broad in his willingness to. To speak about using force, that after a whole lifetime of that, that suddenly he has.
- [51:57]
B
You don't buy it?
- [51:58]
A
I don't buy it. I think that what happened, or at least I don't think that. I don't think that it's a. That it is a thesis that is necessary in order to understand what's going on today. I think that what's going on today is partly that our very, very cautious about using force Prime Minister suddenly felt as though the circumstances offered an opportunity that was like you were saying just before Miriam, I think, historic and crucial. And he had a choice of either acting or not acting. And I think that all of the times in the past when he was reticent to go into Gaza with great force and to sustain an IDF presence in Gaza and to attack over the northern border in Lebanon and to attack in Syria all the times in the aughts and teens and early 20s when he was obviously reticent to do those things. I think he would make those decisions again. I just think that he thought with Trump that the stars had lined up in such a way that there was no way for him believing what he believes to not take advantage of that, that history would be cruel to him and that the future of the Jewish people would be less sure if he did not act. And so I think that he just acted. I think that when this is over, we will go back to seeing Netanyahu, who was just as cautious as the old Netanyahu is. Having said that, I don't know if his decision to act, having seen this quote, unquote, historical opportunity, I don't know if it's a good decision. Susan feels strongly that it's a bad decision. She's against every single aspect of this war starting on, I think October 8th and certainly including this war. I don't know what I think about it, but I don't think that we have a strange, loving, estranged lovian prime minister. And I don't think that the rest of us have become any more warlike or gleeful about causing destruction to our enemies than we ever were in the past. What do you think?
- [54:18]
B
I think it's a truism to say that October 7th and what ensued is transformative. I do think that Israelis have a greater appetite for victory. Listen to the people up in the northern borders and they're talking about decimating Lebanon because that's it. They're done with living under this threat. So I think that is there. Whether it will die down in the reality of the messiness of war and how it's achieved. It's not achieved solely through the military, I don't know. But we are definitely a different kind of population right now. And you can say things out loud that people, I think less, fewer people were permitted themselves to say. I think the analysis is wrong. I don't see. I thought chicken shit was absolutely wrong. To ascribe a decision to not go to peace as rooted in fear, I think was such a weird and, frankly, I don't know, male way to frame things. And also just it's not helpful. It's. It's this timid, faint hearted, chicken shit thing. Just doesn't hold up. You look at his record, he is selective but timid. You can't call the 2014 Gaza war timid. We left a Dresden like footprint on a significant portion of Gaza. And if you Think about the boldness of the Abraham Accords. You know, they talk about war. He's timid and.
- [55:59]
A
Well, I think that, by the way, that that is part of the, in this thesis of. I think that part of the claim is that what happened in Gaza was Netanyahu's freeing himself from his timidity. That that is the newfound heedlessness of Netanyahu is expressed in destroying.
- [56:20]
B
Yeah, I just don't find heedlessness I. And timidity useful categories here. He's many things, including an extremely strategic thinker. And so I don't think it helps to try and understand this without saying, okay, what's the strategy? What's he looking at? And why is he making these decisions? And again, going back to the okay, war, he's supposedly timid for making war. And now he's lost the timidity and peace as well. He figured out that he could make peace without making concessions. Previous peace arrangements were made with significant, especially with Egypt, a significant territorial concession. Any discussion of trying to work with Palestinians in the past historically has been a discussion of territory concessions. And he figured out how not to. He supposedly promised not to annex west bank, but he later said that that was temporary. So he's figured out how to sort of get the, you know, what is it? You know, get the cake and eat the whole, the whole damn cake.
- [57:23]
A
Have the cake and eat it too. Have a steak.
- [57:26]
B
Yeah.
- [57:28]
A
I would like to ask you about the second part of this, the claim that is really just added tacked on to the end of this essay that the Israeli people has changed too. And you spoke about this some. You said that Israelis are impatient and presumably I, maybe I'm misunderstanding what you said, but presumably less concerned about like the niceties of protecting human lives that don't happen to be Jewish human lives, especially across borders. How else do you. Because I do agree that, that this, that we have, we will find one day, many, many ways in which we changed over these past couple of years. I don't know, I don't see how we can know what those ways are right now. But, but what do you think they are?
- [58:15]
B
You know, I think there's a kind of good index if you, you know, if, if there's one thing you can say about politicians is that they are looking at trying to read the pulse of the population. And there is, there is not a single Jewish politician other than Yair Golan. As Tal Schneider wrote in an interesting piece in. In Zman, our Hebrew language partner for Times of Israel. She wrote that he's the only politician who has said anything resembling a criticism of the decision about going into Lebanon. And I think it's important for us to note that we have ground forces there going in the Channel 2 or. Sorry, old habits. Channel 12 broadcast a stunning video of the soldiers at what is essentially a pep rally ahead of entering in which they're rousing their commander is rousing the soldiers. Did you see that, by the way?
- [59:20]
A
I did not. It just seems great to you.
- [59:23]
B
So I think, first of all, soldiers in war are in a different headspace. And I wouldn't call the way that they are talking about going into battle the same. What I found remarkable was that it was broadcast as heroic talk for the entire country. And I think, yes, I hear all the time the discourse like we heard flatten Gaza. We heard there's no innocent. I hear a lot of maximalist language.
- [59:59]
A
I heard a lot of things. And one of them was one of them, save for, you know, in Facebook posts and a few quotes of politicians whom I particularly, you know, dislike and do not have respect for. I, you know, I, I don't in my neighborhood and I don't in my university and I don't at any time in my life ever hear anything like flat in Gaza. I just keep that. So. But, but you hear many, many things.
- [60:24]
B
Things.
- [60:25]
A
And I'm not, I'm not sure if the, you know, if the packaging it, I mean, I understand what you're saying is that we have be become more enamored of war and violence. Maybe that's true. I, I don't know how to, how to judge a thing like that, but I have not observed it.
- [60:45]
B
I have, I think polling shows it. I think that the, the stuff I've, that I've heard, and I don't want to say that it's enamored. Look, we had a massive scale pogrom and I don't think it has a calming or it really feeds well into the analytical part of our brains when we exist at an elevated state of fear for a great amount of time. And I think there's rage and there's hate, and I think that's part of the society. And I think it was always there. I just think it's been given, it's been unleashed wider. I think that exactly when you say that your neighborhood in the Old north and your university campus is not a place that you hear that these exactly seem to me to be the bastions of places where that discourse is, is more muted, if at all. But I think in Vast swaths of the country, particularly people who are under direct threat and have been experiencing these direct threats for years. You hear it. And by the way, you hear it from people who otherwise sound like people you want to hang out with. They feel like they've tried everything or everything has been tried and that what's left is. Is going beyond a security zone, as we had for many years in Lebanon. They felt like, I think, rightly have analyzed that the world really doesn't care about trying to impose a peace on. I'm here, I'm focused on Lebanon because, again, we're now in an active war, apparently. And you had a United nations that was worse than toothless. It was deceptive and corrupt. And so I think that feeling of isolation has filtered into very reasonable people who would be happy to have other solutions to this than sending their kids into battle.
- [62:56]
A
Yeah, could be. And I don't doubt the thesis that of this essay that we're talking about that Israel and Israelis will be different after October 6th. The only thing that I would say is, I don't know. One shouldn't be too quick to draw conclusions about just how that will work out. We're still in this thing.
- [63:17]
B
Well, journalists don't get held responsible for wonky predictions. We know that. And what's he got to lose? And I like. By the way, I generally really like his writing. Yeah. Rosenberg. And I just thought this was overreach. And also, I don't love that. That personal, you know, psychological analysis. I don't think it's useful to really understand the decisions that are being made now.
- [63:38]
A
Listen to this. I know.
- [63:54]
C
Whoa. Oh,
- [65:11]
A
That song is Kaitsu Choreth Milhama Kafe. Summer Winter War Coffee by Hazeev. More music of our moment. And now it is time for discussion two, which we are calling with poetical license, undergrounded. And here's why. The Hebrew word for home front is oref, or nape of the neck. There may be all sorts of reasons for that. First, the nape of your neck is in the back, just as the home front in a war is behind the lines where the guns are firing and the bombs are dropping. The nape of the neck also carries associations of beings taken care of, as when a mama cat arranges her kittens by picking them up by the skin on the back of their neck. Quote, mother wolf caught Mowgli by the nape of the neck. Rudyard Kipling wrote in the Jungle Book and dropped him among the cubs, thereby keeping the man cub safe. NAEP also carries a frisson of uncanny danger, as when H.G. wells wrote in the Invincible man that the hair at the nape of his neck stirred, though there was no wind. There can also be something sensual about a nape, as when D.H. lawrence wrote in Women in Love, he touched her lightly at the nape of her neck and she shivered. Miriam Most all of us have, in the 19 days since this war with Iran started, been in the oref the nape. And we have experienced, I think, all of the associations that come with that word. Knowing that we're not soldiers at the front, knowing that our leaders are, for better or worse, seeing to it that we're mostly safe in fortified rooms and bomb shelters and sharing all sorts of intimacies with our neighbors and people we maybe did not know 19 days ago, but alongside whom these days, each night we maybe unroll our bedrolls and fall asleep. The great sociologist of everyday life, Ray Oldenburg, wrote about how in good, healthy societies, people have a third place. Places that are not home, not work, but instead somewhere they meet up with other people informally. Coffee shops, bars, bookstores. You know, Israel in normal times is full chock a block with third places, which are mostly shut down now. But for some people, who knows, maybe the shelter is their third place, or maybe that is too fancy. Miriam, I guess what I want to ask you is what is this sheltered life we are living today? What is it like? What impacts do you think it's having? How, how sustainable do you think it is? Also, the day this war started was the 35th anniversary of the last day of the first Gulf War with Saddam Hussein and the Scud missiles and the gas masks in that war, which was the first war here in which most everyone was part of the orif. Remember, the IDF did not have a role in that war. Folks worried that Israelis did not have what it takes to stay both passive and impassive in the face of potentially deadly attacks. And in that war, by the way, you were on television, you were the one telling us to start taping up our windows and putting on our gas masks, which was a source of great humor in our house and also and great fun. And at the time you were like literally the person telling us how to be safe. So, Miriam, give me the back of the envelope for our backs of our necks. What sense you make of the weird lives we're living these days on the home front? And before that even start with what is your weird life on the Hova front been like these past weeks?
- [68:37]
B
It has not involved rolls of masking tape, I'll tell you that. But, you know, for Us, we've been home most of the time, but we had a few days in Ashkelon and a weekend in Jerusalem. So we've been around a little. Our safe option is a public shelter like you guys. Ours is across a big street, like around 140 meters. So for you Americans, that's around one and a third football fields. We sleep at home because it's closer than your setup. But when the siren goes off, we do hustle. Sometimes we run. Actually not the siren, the pre siren alert, which can come anywhere from 3 to 10 to forever minutes before the siren. We're lucky because we're able bodied, we don't have to carry kids or worry about elderly parents, we don't have pets. And still yesterday, March 18, we ran to the shelter six times in 24 hours. So if the day before the war was the Tel Aviv marathon, this is the Tel Aviv Sprint. And again and again and again without any finish line, you start to live in this strange fog. It's like having a newborn baby. No sleep, disoriented time, just sort of collapse. Except, well, except this baby's trying to kill you. But I want to get to this word aurifier. I'm really glad you looked at it because you talked about the back of the neck and the vulnerability and the exposure. But we're also stiff necked people and those two things are both true right now. We're exposed, we're tough, we're vulnerable and we're telling ourselves we're resilient. And I don't mean that just as an actual reality. I mean it as like a narrative, the story, the powerful story that we're telling ourselves. Because I think once you call people the home front, you've basically recruited them. We're not just like civilians, we're part of the war effort. We're like, it's sort of a division of the army. And you feel that everywhere, especially on the news, there's like a home front command officer sitting next to the anchor and there's split screen with sirens and every report is quote, you know, or a lot of them anyway are like, this was approved by the military censor and on again, back to channel 12. There's a new logo that says Stronger together. And then there's the app, this home front command app, which is incredible and life saving, but also like lives inside your nervous system. And it like wakes you up from the deepest sleep and tells you when to run. And you are grateful, completely grateful, because it saves your life. And following the rules, save your Life saves your life. But that constant alertness, that obedience, that exhaustion, I think also narrows you. It narrows me. It becomes harder for me to think outside the frame that I'm being handed. It's harder to notice the stories that aren't urgent but still are incredibly important. So like it's a weirdly intimate thing that's happening. You know, where the shelters are, these accidental third places, like you said, and we're seeing our neighbors and we're getting to people are in pajamas and their hair is not brushed and their faces are not washed. And there's something almost like tender about that encounter with strangers. It's like that's the nape of the neck feeling like that exposure, but it's also really, I don't know, tight. You're calculating distance. You're half listening for a siren at all times. Everything sounds like a siren. Motorcycles, fuck the motorcycles. And so your body's never fully at rest. And so there is a question about sustainability. So short term, short Israelis are very good at this. We've been in this movie many times since the first Gulf War. The stiff necked thing, I think is incredibly real. They adapt, we cope. The humor is phenomenal. You know, just there's such great jokes going around. But long term, I, you know, the endurance, I think is going to eat, eat away at this.
- [72:52]
A
And do you think there's anything left of that worry from the first Gulf War in Saddam Hussein, that, that putting the vast majority of Israelis in the position where they just have to passively wait? Right now they have just now begun to call up what looks like it's going to be, you know, between a third and a half million reservists to fight in Lebanon. And the first 100,000 of them have already been, yeah, been called up. So it's going to change. But for the, for the past, most of the past three weeks, this war has really been carried out by a couple, few thousand people, frankly, all together in, in the Air Force. Like basically it's been, you know, the Air Force and then the people manning all the rockets and lasers who protect us. And most everyone has been kind of at home. Do you think that that has been in some ways psychologically tough? Because I don't see it at all. And I think that 30 years ago in the Gulf War, I did understand that, but I think that that part of.
- [74:01]
B
Let me understand what you're asking. You're asking whether it's potentially eating away at Israelis that there's like this sit and wait and run, this sort of hiding Running and hiding.
- [74:13]
A
Then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's biggest worries about not being involved in that war back then was that he thought that it would have a long term terrible effect on Israelis to have their fate being decided literally above their heads by people from other countries and them not to be involved. I think that he, I don't know like the complete metaphysics of it, but I think that he thought that sort of a forced wimpiness was incompatible with the Israeli spirit and would inevitably tarnish or begin to disintegrate the Israeli spirit upon which our ability to defend ourselves in normal times depends. But to, and I back then that seemed like a plausible thing to think. And now I don't sort of like
- [75:02]
B
almost like undermine the whole thing.
- [75:04]
A
Zionist ethos of taking, yes of all of us are part of this. We're all doing something, but it doesn't.
- [75:11]
B
And Jews don't sit and cower.
- [75:13]
A
Right. Anymore. Right. But now literally what we're being asked to do is to go and sit and cower in our case with our dog. And you know, for me a big thick book right now about Robert Crumb. But having posed that question, I do not see any signs of its, of its destructive effects. I don't feel like being passive, especially after years now of hyperactivity by all of us. You know, either you were, you were fighting in Gaza or your, or some loved one was fighting in Gaza or you were out in the street like you were making meals and bringing them to people. And now the like cowering in a shelter doesn't feel like it's somehow, like it's somehow antithetical to the spirit of the times. But, but I, but I have that question and I hear people asking that question.
- [76:05]
B
Yeah, I think a few things come to mind. One is we identify closely with our heroes and you know, notwithstanding the way that the many of the Air Force reserve duty Air Force fighter pilots were raked over the coals by this government during the. When they expressed support for the, or opposition to the government's legal changes that they were making. There's sort of been a resurrection of them as heroes. I mean you've got the head of the Air Force making a video that's released and you get to sort of worship, go back to this worship of the pilots. That's one thing. The other thing is our technology, you know, our ability to, you know, many, many, many Israelis live in the vicinity of Iron Dome anti missile installations. I passed, I was in Jerusalem and walked by one the other day. And we are very Sort of, you know, possessive about our brilliant technology. So I think we're able to sort of be. Be proud and say that we see that as sort of taking active. It's not something that someone else is doing. Zeshilanu that's our technology. That's our genius. Or as often is the case with Israelis, that's the Jewish genius protecting us. And in general, I think also these daily briefings where you are made to feel like you are important enough for a commander in the army. Army to be answerable to you. In fact, this sort of. If you watch these briefings, it's a guy telling what the purpose of things are and what they're doing. Recently, there was a misstep, and he came out, had withheld some information from residents of the north, and you could see how they scrambled to fix this because, you know, we are all meant to have this trust. And we also stand in judgment of what it is that they're telling, you know, that they. What their instructions are. So everybody sort of, you know, who was that line? You know, like, it's a country of generals, you know, where everyone feels like they've got something to say about what the decisions we're making. Everyone's very engaged, even if, in fact we're doing nothing but running to the shelters. So I think there's a lot of that. But. But the exhaustion is a very real factor also.
- [78:42]
A
One thing that I would add is Lucy the dog, whose grasp on sanity and stability is, in the best of times, never fully sure. She is a basket case now. I mean, we take her, we run back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, and she is just so overrun with anxiety and incapable of focusing on anything. She's taken it the hardest. And, I mean, I guess in a way, really, the war is mostly for her, Lucy's war. But I wonder if. I sometimes wonder if deeper down, if she's just not more in touch with her feelings than I am. Deeper down, all of us are. Are feeling that, though. Like, I don't. On the surface, I don't feel like I'm in danger. I don't feel particularly nervous. It's a little bit of a drag, but it's a little bit fun. I like meeting the people that I meet. There's like. Every day is filled with very, very funny stories of a sort that I never saw before. All sorts of, like, inspirational things are happening around us in the city and other places. So for me, that's. It doesn't feel like my spirit is somehow being abrasively brushed with a wire brush. But I do notice that for Lucy, that's exactly what it is.
- [80:09]
B
I think there definitely has potential for an accumulative impact, and we're going to see it in all kinds of odd ways like irritability and eating changes and sleep problems and. And chemical dependency, which is already a problem in this country and I think will extend. I don't think humans sustain this kind of tension very well, even as we know that others are in far worse straits than us, both on the other side of this war and again in the uae, where they don't have any culture of a home front and don't have shelters, and in villages in the west bank where yesterday three women were killed. And, you know, so, you know, it's important to keep perspective. But, you know, a sustained period with this kind of stress is not good for anyone. Even the most sanguine people like you, Noah, I promise you it's not.
- [81:15]
A
I don't think I'm the most sanguine people, though I will say that this war has totally gotten in the way of my drinking because really because of
- [81:22]
B
the running and you don't want to change the shit.
- [81:23]
A
Well, I mean, I don't like. First of all, we like go to the shelter. At the time that I would be watching something on Netflix or HBO. Max, this could be the 13th step
- [81:35]
B
in the 12 step program, I think.
- [81:37]
A
So who wants something have to pee in the shelter. So it's really put a. If I had one complaint about this war, I think it might be about the drink.
- [81:47]
B
Drinking, I don't know.
- [81:48]
A
It doesn't leave enough room for.
- [81:49]
B
It's a new system for getting off alcohol.
- [81:53]
A
Now listen to this. Shabbat.
- [82:38]
B
Sam.
- [83:04]
A
Sh. That song is Lechadodi, of course, by Maayan Linik, who is ETI Ankri's girl. More music of these strange days. And now it is time for our Vada country segment. Our first Vada Countrys in months are in which each of us described something that maybe brought us solace or brought us excitement or brought us joy or brought us or, you know, as we wended our way through our worlds over the last little while. Miriam, what is your about a country?
- [83:57]
B
Well, of course it's gonna be about the shelter. Our public shelter has its characters. Last night, an older man came in after the early warning alert and cheerfully announced he was just dropping by for a little visit just to see how everyone was. And there's the guy in the spot furthest away from the door who screams Close the door the second the siren starts and there's two year old Ava. She's like a dumpling who has recently discovered the joys of spinning in circ. But the two constants are Shoshana and Meira. Both women in their 70s, Shoshana has been in the shelter since the first day of the war. And when I say she's always there, I don't mean usually or every time I go. I mean she has been living in the shelter day and night since the first day of the war. She sits in an office chair and has an upholstered yellow ottoman for her feet. Her walker is positioned as a bridge over her lap with a bag that holds a portable oxygen tank tank and a thin clear tube runs from the tank to just beneath her nostrils. Shoshana is petite, sharp featured with a warm, ready smile. She's tuned in. She chats with all of us coming and going. She stays. Because of her limited mobility, there's no way she could make it here in time from her apartment. So I've been fretting about her since the start of this thing. This just can't be right. Early on, I was hopeful about a private initiative offering hotel rooms for elderly people with mobility issues, but the minimum age was 80, so Shoshana didn't qualify. Her social worker told her the only option is to go to an elder care facility, but it doesn't have a secure space, so she prefers this. Her home health aide brings food and whatever else she needs a couple of times a week. Social services sends two guys to bring her up the stairs so she can get some air and sun. And she's not alone. There's Meira now. Meera has also decided to spend most of her time in the shelter if Shoshana is the welcome and send off committee by the door. Meira is stationed in the corner near the bathroom, bundled in a wool cap with her toy poodle Mozart on her lap. Meira is not shy about letting everyone know what they're doing wrong. She writes signs one on the door says please close the door when you go out and when you come in. Another says to all the chaverim in the shelter, please keep things tidy. Do not leave scraps behind. Papers, cups and other remnants. Please leave things, things clean. Thanks from the chaverim. There are two more signs about keeping the sliding roof extended over the stairs when it rains. The second one is just an angrier version of the first. All of these are taped on or near the door, exactly where people are rushing in and out. There's not even the remotest chance anyone will ever read them. Which is probably for the best, because if everyone actually followed these instructions to close the door every single time they went in and every single time they went out, we'd have a real problem with that door. But Meira is furious. How could people not read her signs? Why do people come here and use the bathroom? She demands. They should use the bathroom at home, and now we're out of toilet paper, and will the city bring us toilet paper? I don't think so. Two Fridays ago, she was beside herself over some mysterious flooding. She said she'd cleaned up all alone at six in the morning, ruining her back in the process. She had folded back the rubber floor covering, and after watching two people trip over it, I stayed to help lay it back down. I was doing it all wrong, according to Meira, and I don't know why, but I found her bitterness kind of like, invigorating. It was. Also, it was so bonkers that I couldn't take it personally. I went to the market across the street, bought my Friday ice cream, and added a jumbo pack of 48 rolls of toilet paper. Then I picked up flowers from the little nursery next door and talked the flower guy into lending me a dusty plastic vase. And back in the shelter, Meira was washing cups at the sink, and the toilet paper got a grudging nod. But the flowers. What is this? She yelled. It's Shabbat, I said, even a mi clat should have flowers on Shabbat. And she said, no, they're gonna rot. They're gonna create a terrible smell in here. I showed her, and she grabbed it out of my hands and rinsed it. And then I took the cellophane off the flowers and she was like blocking the trash, so I set it down on a chair and she yelled about that. I asked her if there was a knife to trim the stems, and she just grabbed the bouquet out of my hands and with her fists she twisted it so like, she broke off like way too much of the stems. And nope, I was not going to let this get to me. I stuffed the cellophane into the bottom of the vase to add back some height to the flowers. And then there was a whole drama about where the flowers should go. And in the end they ended up as far away from both of these women as possible. And it's weird, but the grouchier Meira got the lighter, I felt I kind of just giggled about it the whole way home, and I don't know why? It's probably because, you know, we're in a war and everything feels too big, too much. And I keep thinking I should be able to fix something, like help someone solve something. But I can't really fix Shoshana's situation, and I can't breach the iron wall of Meira's rage. And yet somehow, I don't know, Shoshana's managing on her own terms, and Meira is also managing on hers. And me, I don't know, in my fatigue, I still have some resources to at least try to fix things. See?
- [89:40]
A
See, that's just what I was saying about you at the beginning of the show. That's just. That's pure Miriam right there.
- [89:45]
B
Thanks, Noah.
- [89:47]
A
So that book that I talked about at the beginning of the show, Al Mut Laben on a son's death, that Pew by Rav Yoshua of Gaza about his son who died exactly a thousand years ago this past week, that book just came out now. And I saw a notice about it in Makori Shon last Shabbat. And right away I felt like I had to see it for reasons somehow that are tangled up psychologically, spiritually, with the war in a way that I really myself don't even understand. I also, for some reason, felt I had to see it now, as close as could be to the actual 1000th yurzeit of the tragedy the pew is about. So on Sunday, I called up Magnus Press, the publishing house at Hebrew University. They are distributing the book for the World Union of Jewish Studies, who published it. And a woman named Einat Weinstein answered the phone. And I said, I saw that you published this book just now, so I imagine you haven't pushed it out yet to too many stores. And I was wondering if you could tell me which stores anywhere in Tel Aviv have the book so that I could bike over and get it. And I added that I really need the book and that it's sort of, kind of an emergency. And in that Weinstein, she was right away, she was just serious. She did not ask how getting a hold of a 1000 year old poem could be an emergency. She accepted as a given that such emergencies happen, and that I was having such an emergency like that now. And everything about what she said and how she said it let me know that in light of my emergency, she would help me if she could, however she could. Ennat Weinstein said, hold on, I'll check for you if the book is in stores in Tel Aviv. And a few minutes later she was back on the line. And she said, no, unfortunately, with these books that we're distributing for the World Union of Jewish Studies, we don't make the decisions about where they go, when. And I checked, and in fact, there are no copies anywhere in Tel Aviv, not in any store, and not even in the libraries, which are in any case closed these days. And I said, is there any way I can have the book shipped to me from Jerusalem very fast, which I know I'll have to pay for, but I'm happy to pay, even if it costs more again than the book costs in the first place, because like I said, this is sort of an emergency. And they. Not Weinstein again, she is very serious, and she says, I do not think so, but let me check. And she goes off, and then she comes back on the line a few minutes later, and she says, no, I called our courier service and they can get the book to you in three days or so, but I understand that you need it before then. She says, you can arrange to have your own courier come and pick it up up on the Hebrew University campus at Givat Ram, or you can find a friend who's going back and forth between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to pick it up for you, and I'll make sure that they get it. And I said, well, I will try to find someone. But I knew it would be hard because the people who I know who teach or learn in Jerusalem, well, the university is working these days by Zoom. Campus is pretty much closed, so no one's going in. But still, it was worth checking, which after I hung up with they not Weinstein, I still started to do, though I wasn't optimistic about it. Now, later in the day, I got a call from a number not in my phone, and when I answered it, it was a not Weinstein. And she said, I may have found something. She said. Our director general, the CEO of Magnus Press, Yonatan Nathan, he lives in Tel Aviv on Dubnov, near the opera and the museum. And these days he's coming into work a few times a week and he'll be in tomorrow. And he said he'd bring the book back to the city if you buy it online now. And I knew, of course, because it's kind of common knowledge that Yonatan Nathan was the kind of legendary founder of a legendary India publishing house named Hargol that for 20 years was the home of writers and poets that I like, like Aaron Meged and Yair Asoulin and Aaron Sabtai and. And there are others too. I thought it was Maybe like if back in the day you called the American publishing house at Printed Kafka and said you had an emergency and you needed to get Metamorphosis by tomorrow. And sure, Alfred Knopf lives not far from you. We'll have him fetch you the book. I don't know, maybe it's not like that, but I think it is. Anyway, I thanked Anat Weinstein and I rushed to order the book online. And when I got to the part about how the book was gonna be shipped, I did not know what to choose whether to choose. It was gonna be shipped by a courier which cost 35 shekels. And in the end, after going back and forth and back and forth, I clicked on I'll pick up the book at the publisher, the no cost option. And I paid for the book. And then right away I called back Enot Weinstein and I said I did not know what to do about the shipping fees. Your site does not have a the CEO of the company will courier the book for me option to click on. So I clicked on the free option. I will pick up the book option, but obviously I'll be happy to pay any amount that you say. And she said, no, nothing is exactly the right amount. So the next day in the afternoon, I called Yonatan Nathan and I said who I was, and he said, oh, you're the one who needs the book right away. And I said, yeah, just let me know when and where to meet you. I have a bike. I'll be happy to get the book at your house or anywhere you say in the city. And Yonatan Nathan laughed and he said, yes, I gather you will be happy to get the book at my house. And arrangements were made. And at the agreed time, I biked over to Yonatan Nathan's very beautiful apartment near the opera and the museum. And he gave me the book and we talked some, and I met his wife and I said, this place, your place, place is beautiful and it's also in like the most perfect spot in the city. And she said, you mean perfect to be bombed in the war? This on account of the fact that the apartment is close to the Kiryat IDF headquarters. And she showed me the window where the glass was shattered in the last war with Iran in the summer. And I lingered for a bit. And then when I turned to leave, Yonatan Nathan said, before you go, I got one question. What kind of emergency is it that makes you need a millennium old poem right away? And I said, well, I felt like I needed to See it before Yoshiyahu's thousandth yortzite. And he said, I see. And I think he did. Then I said, there's also a thing about a podcast. And of course, obviously Einat Weinstein and Yonatan Nathan, obviously, they are wonderful people, kind and generous with their time. And they're also obviously game people up front for like an adventure or a lark or something. I am sure that this is just how they are, that this is just who they are. But I cannot help but wonder too, whether the war might not have something to do with all of this, with all of us being of a mind that it is right now hard out there for everyone and it is a time for each of us to help other people as we can. Like you were just talking about Miriam, without troubling ourselves all that much to try to understand why they need what they need just when they need it, and without needing to know what could possibly be an emergency about their emergency. Just all we need to know is that it matters to them. I think boiled down to the basics, maybe what Einat Weinstein and Jonathan Levy did was when they saw that I needed a thing, they did not ask questions, but instead they just said hineni. And that brings us to the end of our show. Huge thanks to Itai Shalem, our station manager, without whom there would be none of this. Thanks to Ashibolim, my favorite band from Kibbutz Geva. They gave us the music of the start at the end of our show. Thank you, Miriam, for finding the time in the midst of all of this and for being yourself. Thank you, Natalie. We'd like to thank all of our Patreon supporters for your generosity and support. It keeps the show going and the station going. We, of course, did not take your money during the time we were not broadcasting, but now we will be happy to take your money. And we will be happy to be moved and grateful and in your debt. For those of you who stopped patronizing us while we went on break, we are so grateful for all your help in the past. And we would add that if you want to come back and patronize us again now, we will be much more grateful into the eternal future stretching forward before us. And we'd like to thank all of you out there for taking the time to listen, for coming back after 10 weeks away. And we'd like to ask you to like us on Facebook and drop us a line. We are going to answer. After you do that, go to Apple Podcasts and give us a five star review. Maybe one that starts with this. Having now seen the extent of destruction that a real bomb can be, I realized that maybe I was wrong. All those times that I said that the Promise Podcast is a bomb, maybe all that time what it was was really just a dud. Finish that any way you want. But before you do that, remember that today, March 19th, we celebrate international Read to Me Day. So stipulated way back in 2018, apparently by one Emma McTaggart of the Child Rights Fund, spelled W R I T E S, writes with the aim, as we learn@readtome.com of having the more the better kids around the world hear the more the better stories read to them aloud as quote. This stimulates their imagination and expands their understanding of the world. And this is a beautiful thing, and I love it. Obviously. How could I not? Because books for kids read out loud are like the greatest things ever. Like I asked you, what could be better than hearing E.B. white himself read aloud from Charlotte's Web?
- [99:18]
C
Why did you do all this for me? He asked. I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you. You have been my friend, replied Charlotte. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life any anyway? We're born, we live a little while we die. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that. Well said, Wilbur. I'm no good at making speeches. I haven't got you a gift for words. But you have saved me, Charlotte, and I would gladly give my life for you. I really would. I'm sure you would. And I thank you for your generous sentiments.
- [100:05]
A
Oh, my God. Well, maybe there is one thing, just one thing, even better than EB White himself reading aloud from Charlotte's Web, and that is the late Reverend Jesse Jackson. May his memory be for a blessing. Reading this.
- [100:19]
D
You do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam. I am. I could not, would not on a boat. I will not, will not with a goat. I will not eat them in the rain. I will not eat them on a train, not in the dark, not on a tree, not in a car. You let me be. I do not like them in a box. I do not like them with a fox. I will not eat them in a house. I do not like them with a mouse. I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere. I am. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam. I am you do not like them, so you say, try them. Try them and you may try them and you may. I say, Sam, if you will let me be, I will try them. You will see. Say, I like green eggs and ham. I do. I like them, Sam. I am. And I would eat them in a boat and I would eat them with a goat. I do so like green eggs and ham. Thank you. Thank you, Sam. I am.
- [102:06]
A
And obviously I love International Read to me day. It's probably my favorite day the entire year. And even though it is, as we record, not even yet halfway over already, I can feel it fading away like Charlotte's strength not to be back at best for a whole nother year. Not so the Promised Podcast. We will be back for you very soon. Maybe as soon as next week, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Modjtaba Khamenei permitting. And in any case, very soon. Reminding you that while some things, if you try them, try them, you will see that you like it. Them other things will just bug you on a boat with a goat in a box, with a fox in a house with a mouse here and there and everywhere on this, the Promised podcast.