this year i can only participate on zoom, and i got the notice about the ceremony just a bit too late to get in. but there was a little post-ceremony, a talk about democracy and violence which focussed on the Rabin heritage, the historical events which became violent, and those that were determined in a democratic manner. and i was reminded that we are, indeed, an unruly people, with many opinions and demands, and each group has a sense that they are the chosen ones. Since i don’t belong to a group I know that I am the only chosen one – right? But although I may be living in my own world, I don’t think about violating anyone else.

And although we’ve never talked about it, I’m pretty sure that every one of my friends that could be called ‘left’ (since we have no center any more), even those lefties who would have been considered ‘right’ in a previous decade, would spurn the use of violence. and we were too dumb then to realize that it could possibly be in someone’s mind. Now we know it’s going to happen. but when? who?

since we have no heroes left it will probably be some guy like Emil Grinsweig.

Rabin was the last true hero.

Sometimes it occurs to me that we were really not connected to reality. That Saturday evening before Rabin was assassinated we were coming home and saw a bunch of religious girls – girls with long skirts and long sleeved shirts – walking down the street from the bus stop, and we asked each other what they were doing in our neighborhood. And then someone said, “Oh, they’re going to demonstrate outside of Rabin’s house!” and we laughed, and went home. Years and years later I woke up and said to myself, “We killed him.” We thought all the violence being demonstrated against our neighbor was a family disagreement. We saw the signs in Bibi’s rallies with Rabin dressed as a Nazi, we heard the calls against him for signing the peace agreement, and we even saw the demonstrators doing their best to disturb his peace on a weekend. How did we not see what was going to happen? and now, twenty five years later, we say – in the demonstrations against Bibi – that someone is going to get killed. But we think – it will be a demonstrator who will be killed. this time i think we are connected to reality.

the only feedback i get from this site is from people who miss the old site – homey, unpredictable, intimate. but i promise to try harder with this blog to get back the old style. i need guidance.

i started feeling sick yesterday. my stomach felt like i was in my last month. by night i was in agony and took all kinds of medications to ease my way through to the morning, when it got better by itself, but still sensitive. My doctor thinks it’s a virus. if this doesn’t improve i won’t be able to go on the israel trail tomorrow. not without a diaper – no, a few diapers.

this is our fourth year of the israel trail. we’ve missed a lot – not just because of Ezi’s torn achilles heel and my toe accident, but also because of the corona shutdown. we’re just trying again now – with masks and social distance – starting from a bit north of Zichron Yaakov and down to the coast to sdot yam – eight kilometers in a heat wave. i really hope i can make it.

Come on, you have to admit it is incredibly ironic that we’re expecting our first rain of the year on the day we’re reading the book of Noah as the chapter of the week in the bible. Noah, who was shut up in a boat with his family and all those stinking animals for longer than we have been shut down at home, must have been something. I mean, have you figured out how old he was when he built that ark? if he didn’t have those sons of his until the age of 500, how old was he when he went into carpentry? In my book “A Word in Edgewise” there is a little rumination about this… if he was 500, how old was his wife? Did the women have to be under 45 to have kids? I don’t know, but I just hope we don’t have a flood tomorrow night. Anyway, here’s the poem

The Generations of Noah

When Adam was 130 years, he had a son … and he named him Seth. ³ … When Seth was 105 years, he fathered Enosh. ⁴ When Enosh was 90, he fathered Kenan. ⁹   When Kenan was 70, he fathered Mahalalel. ¹⁰… When Mahalalel was 65, he fathered Jared. ¹⁵When Jared was 162 years, he fathered Enoch. ¹⁸   When Enoch was 65, he fathered Methuselah. ¹⁹ When Methuselah had lived 187 years, he fathered Lamech. ²²  When Lamech ¹⁰lived 182 years, he had a son. ²⁶  He named him Noah  ²⁹ After Noah lived 500 years old, he fathered Shem, Ham and Japheth. ³² 

Genesis 5

All you need to do

is count the ages of the men

and exactly when

they begat their heirs

And you know

the suffering

of child-bearing women

after the fall.

p.s. Saturday night is almost over and it hasn’t rained yet – but, as the weather forecaster keeps saying “conditions are very unstable”

I’ve probably written about street cats in Tel Aviv hundreds of times – because there is so much to say. but here is an outline that i will fill out in the coming days 1. cats in the ’70’s 2. cats in the ’80’s 3. cats and politics in the first decade of the milennium 4. cats and corona.

1. When I first moved to Tel Aviv I was overwhelmed by the skinny cats peeking out of the garbage cans. Hundreds of thousands all over. Suspicious of humans, they tended to flee when someone passed by, or arch their backs and hiss. And they were ugly and dirty. I had lived in Ramat Hasharon before that and barely saw an animal on the street. it wasn’t even popular to have a pet. Who could afford it or waste time on a cat? My cousin had a dog, now that I think of it, but he had brought it from Italy, and seemed very sophisticated compared to the rest of my neighbors. Maybe it was just my neighborhood… we were pretty primitive – but i loved it. and didn’t even think about missing animals.
2. we moved to the US in the 80’s. Ezi was sent by Israel and we went with. There we acquired a rescue dog. we wanted a small dog, so we picked a puppy with tiny paws. He grew to be enormous – so tall he could stand on all fours, rest his head on the table and point with his nose to the delicacy he wanted. But he had small paws. When we returned to Israel we had to take him with us because we couldn’t find anyone to adopt him. but he was too large for a cage. Eventually we found one and called El Al to ask if they would take him with us, and they said ‘sure, if there are no bodies in the cargo’ and i asked, how will i know, and they said ‘we don’t get advanced information on who will die’ … ah, but that’s another story. anyway this dog learned to fear cats – they would jump on his nose and cover his eyes with their tails… terrifying! Eventually we all learned to live with one another – they even began to demand food from me.
3. in 2008 i was asked to join the municipal animal rights party and run in the local election. i was excited about it – particularly because we had 300000 cats in Tel Aviv and the only way to neuter them was to hold a flash campaign and neuter them all at once, and that needed organization and funding. Reuven Ladnianski was first on the ticket and I was asked to be second, but shied away and went down to number 4. We started our campaign and it was the real thing. I sat on a few municipal meetings and was just beginning to get the hang of it, and then Ezi got sick and I bowed out. Two people got into the municipality, and saw a number of regulations adopted. I think Tel Aviv was the only city in the world with a voting animal rights party! Eventually the party morphed into the Green party which continues today. Dogs learned to live on a leash, and owners learned to pick up after them. The cats became accustomed to being fed by kind inhabitants and became extremely people-friendly, and then attention got turned to the trees…