Is this a dvar? No. It is a response to the many texts, whatsapps and messages of concern.
It is Monday. Volunteering is indeed farther away. We went to a hotel north of the Old City, the Olive Tree. Many hundreds from towns near Gaza are housed in three neighboring hotels. Some of the volunteer-staffed infrastructure:
Help desks to coordinate visits to medical clinics and psychologists
Stock room full of new, warm clothing (Jerusalem is colder than where they came from)
Stock room of toys and kids books
Play rooms for kids
After half an hour of tasks, my volunteer manager runs out of things for me to do, and I am at loose ends. Tomorrow I expect to join the team running activities for kids. Here is some of that activity:
More About Weapons
Carrying a gun all the time is onerous. They are bulky. Heavy. In the way. Soldiers on home leave (e.g. most weekends) are %100 responsible for the weapon either being attached to their person or locked up. At all times.
From Ten Years Ago:
The Jerusalem Bar closes at One AM, and the staff stay another half hour for the soldiers to return who left their weapons at the bar. (Ack: A.U.)
From Today
A friend on active duty discussing his experience two days ago.
On Shabbat morning I had to make my way to the other side of Jerusalem to a military base near Ein Karem. Given that my activity was semi-מבצעי I didn't want to drive a car (חילול-שבת wise ((oh, and we don't have one))), so I took my bike. Picture this:
Me on uniform riding a bike, shirt open and flailing about like a cape (with a dry-fit shirt underneath) and my gun slung across my shoulder. The gun was a bit annoying but I managed to cross Jerusalem twice that way. It was hilarious and people didn't believe what they were seeing. Too bad I couldn't take a photo
Directly Felt
Tel Aviv seems to be getting a red alert once or twice a day. Jerusalem has been without until a half hour ago. The siren. One or two minutes. Then a few loud booms.
My ulpan class is meeting on Zoom. Small cafes are open in Jerusalem. Tel Aviv is, by reports, largely shuttered.
Thought Area
Micah Goodman is one of the braver current thinkers. Not long ago, I heard him discuss the tension between the Zionist idea (which was a State as a solution to anti-semitism) and contemporary reality (in which the State is a cause of anti-semitism).
Regarding events of the past week, three paragraphs (excerpted from here):
What we’ve learned is that we are disoriented. Just like the person who thinks he’s funny, but he’s not. Israel thought it was scary, but it’s not. Here’s maybe my best take at this moment — when we [Israelis] speak about our international relationships, there are two emotions we have to be thinking about: love and fear. We want love. We want Western civilization to love us. We want Bono to sing songs about us. We want Madonna to share stories on Instagram, about how much she admires us and loves us. That’s what we want. In the West, we want to be loved.
In the Middle East, we don’t want to be loved. We want to be feared. It’s a different emotion. We want that Hezbollah will have a panic attack when they think about the Israeli Defense Forces. We want Iran to shiver when it thinks about the possibility of a military interaction with Israel. We want the Middle East to be in fear of us.
We want two things. We want love and we want fear. We want love from the West. We want fear from the Middle East. But here’s the problem, Amanda. There is a zero-sum game between these emotions because here’s how it goes: Everything that we are going to do to restore the fear is going to erode the love. Everything we do that will guarantee that the Middle East is afraid of Israelis, of these crazy, unpredictable Israelis, everything we do in order to build that myth back again is going to make people in the West not like us, not love us.
Relief Area
Two little girls were here today for informal day care. Ages three and six, I think? While sitting in the hallway during the Red Alert, I read The Lorax to them.
That was nice.
No funny photos came my way.
That’s it for Monday. I am going to either watch junk TV (Broad City) or Woody Allen. Not yet sure how to decide.
Raf