Shvuout starts on Saturday evening as shabbat ends. We have our traditional dinner with friends on Shvuout, but that’s where our tradition ends. Half the family with corona will be out of quarantine by Monday so we will celebrate Ezi’s birthday then, but for a beginning we”ll have dinner on the beach at sunset with the healthy half tonight. The beach will save me from exploding over all the screwed up plans for the holidays. My ideal shvuout would be to take all the grandchildren to a kibbutz where there is a parade of the first fruits.
When I first became exposed to Israeli pop culture – in the seventies – I wasn’t very excited about him. Even though he was incredibly funny, it took me years to see that he was exposing the very decadence he embodied, and it was not an enormous revolution when he turned to religion.
Most people thought Uri Zohar’s ‘conversion’ was a joke, that he would soon shave off his beard and cut his sidelocks and announce that he fooled us. But he continued for at least a quarter of his life to study torah every day and practice virtue in earnest.
The feral cat we feed has not been happy with us since we went away, leaving a neighbor to leave her food. And until everyone came down with Covid, the house was full of strangers to her – a fact that disturbed her greatly. So today she left us a message – she crapped on our welcome mat.
Somehow I thought that agression is consistent with this country. In general. We all crap on the carpet of the people who feed us.