UNCUT

I was going to style my hair.

I had the scissors in hand

And the blades were moving

Almost on their own,

But then I remembered

That someday very soon

My barber will be back at work,

And won’t be able to make sense

Of the hack job I’ve done.

So I trimmed the cactus on the window instead.

And it looks absolutely terrible.

I would never have believed it – somehow Halloween has caught on in the middle of plague, in the middle of Tel Aviv, and i’ve got grandchildren out trick-and-treating. Maybe it’s precisely Because of Corona – the fear and the death and the ghosts of generations past – that the kids are attracted to this holiday that my parents objected to in the States because of its paganism. It’s creepier than Purim, and we’re masking masks in any case, so why not?

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.