Written over several days (Note: I’m back in the US – a travel tale I’ll have in a separate post.)
So it’s been several days, and overall, the frequency of “incoming” has gone down by a large margin. But while there are qualitative as well as quantitative indications of that, fire seems to be focused on the Israeli center along the seacoast – Tel Aviv and Natanya (where I am now on a day trip). In fact, just upon arriving in Netanya on a day trip, both my and my host’s phones rang out with an alert, and we had to dart into the underground parking at the mall – where we were going anyway – and I’m sitting at a coffee shop starting this after the All Clear notice. Later, also inside the mall, another alert came, and we ended up in the reinforced concrete service tunnels.
It’s been quite interesting. I’ve been in multiple situations where I’ve heard rather large BOOM! sounds, but oddly neither I nor most people seem to be overly concerned. Life, for the most part, goes on. And, at least, with the people I know having a very “If I die, I die” attitude.
In Jerusalem, where I’m staying, I’ve doped my way to the Yahuda Shouk (marketplace) several times and bought some souvenirs; once, while there, an alert came, and I followed the crowd to one of the shelters for a sardines-in-a-can 20 minutes. Back in the shouk, to my joy, I found a store that sells postcards, but because of the “current situation” as most people call it, I’ll wait until I get back to the US to mail them. Israel Post is, in general, truly “snail mail” – I’d sent a friend an anniversary card over two months ago and they just received it! (Over the years, I’ve had multiple instances where things I’ve mailed to them just vanished.)
Taking It In Stride
For the most part, I’d say that everyone’s reasonably comfortable. The mall, where I am now, has good foot traffic. The Jerusalem Shouk also has a lot of traffic, and nobody that I saw was overly panic-buying to stock up against a doomsday scenario. Food and other goods are available in abundance. Services too – I needed a haircut and stopped at a barber shop. Money change places abound, but rates differ significantly, and unless you’re in a rush, it pays to do some comparison shopping. ATMs also work and are, from what I’ve been told, generally the best exchange rate. Do be sure, generally, to let your bank know you’re going overseas, or they’ll flag your card for possible fraud.
A High Trust & Traditional Culture
Granted that the people I’m staying with are “modern” Orthodox, but the kids pray, as adults, three times a day. Prayers are said at the right times, singing after meals is common; prayers after meals, when there are three or more men present, happen (I have no idea what’s being said, but OK… it’s called “benching”). And walking around Jerusalem, one can’t go more than 50 yards without passing a Synagogue. Even the mall, in a significantly more “liberal” city, has a room set aside as a Synagogue.
Evening meals see the kids at the table, and talking as a family. Growing up, my parents and I always ate dinner together – a far cry from many families today where kids grab food, stare at phones, etc. Instead, and I admit it’s a sample of one, it’s a real family dinner with conversation and talking, but from what I gather, that’s actually very common.
Kids play in the street and walk freely without helicopter parents watching like hawks at every step. And on Friday night, after dinner, both adult daughters went out at 10-10:30 PM. Alone. I don’t know where they went, of course, or when they came home, but young women out-and-about late at night alone seems to me to be something that would rarely occur in most American modern cities.
And speaking of kids, Israel has a high, above-replacement birth rate. IVF is government-funded, so free to citizen couples, for (I think) up to five children. I routinely see women going around pregnant, often with a few other children in tow, too. Several families in the building have at least three children; my hosts have five, but they’re mostly grown and out – the only reason they were all home is because of the war. Younger couples with whom I’ve spoken discuss wanting large numbers of children. “Be fruitful and multiple,” is taken seriously.
In one visit to a semi-military base, populated by recent youngster-immigrants preparing to enter the IDF (from America and myriad other countries), the atmosphere was relaxed, but one young woman (early 20’s?) wore a shirt that read “Virginity Rocks”! I thought that was fascinating, given my perception of today’s American youth with the pressure to partake in hook-up culture. Does that mean she was? Of course I didn’t ask, but I cannot imagine someone wearing such a shirt around, for example, the Pheasant Lane Mall, or on most American college campuses.
Smoking is much more common, though, from a smattering of articles I’ve read, that’s not unique to Israel but is also much more common in Europe generally. On the flip side, I’ve seen very few significantly overweight people, and nobody morbidly obese. I’m not obese, but I am “round”, and I was definitely a notable outlier even in my age group.
As in my last post, people know people. Walking around with my host, we ran into multiple people he knew. Friends in general, neighbors from the street, and connecting streets; in some ways, it reminded me of when I grew up, where most people knew each other. Again, unlike my modern American experiences, where even house-owning neighbors have only a passing connection & communication with those nearby. There is a common sense of culture and a high level of trust of others that is in evidence. We went to a park near Jerusalem where my friend dipped in a spring-fed pool, and his girls left their bags completely unattended – successfully – as they went around the park. Nobody touched anything.
Not Paradise
Obviously it’s a different culture, environment, etc., but in civilian life I definitely get a sense of “good enough” in many things. I won’t say the streets are highly littered with trash, but they’re not clean either and, worse, there doesn’t seem to be a pick-up effort on a volunteer basis. For example, in the shelter, there were candy wrappers on the floor as a leftover from having a small Purim celebration there during an alert, and the next day I picked them up as nobody else had… I’d meant to clean up the Purim trash in front of the building, but time slipped away. And speaking of trash, plastic, cardboard, and glass are recycled, and trash is picked up from dumpsters at the end of the street, not at each building. I did not see a specific thing for metal recycling, though it might simply have been labeled, and I couldn’t read it.
Also, after Purim, which was essentially an all-day, country-wide street party in which “day drinking” started quite early in the morning! – streets still have trash littered around. Repair work seems to be minimal effort… not exclusively but enough that “run down” appears on some buildings.
I volunteered to do the dishes after dinner, and apparently, the water flow down the drain leaked onto the floor, necessitating clean-up (interestingly, there are drains in the floor in the kitchen and bathrooms for easy handling of water on the floor, whether from this kind of thing or intentional cleaning). When I asked, though, I was told this overflow onto their floor was not uncommon, and when I asked why it was not simply fixed permanently a shrug of “Too much effort” was evident. It reminded me of a Bill Whittle video where Bill said that the Western mentality was – paraphrased – “A church group and a few hundred dollars at Home Depot, and we solve this problem forever”, but that mentality was not in abundance. “Good enough to get by” seemed the watchwords, though obviously in the military, this is different, given how well-performing the IDF is in its pursuit of Iran and others. (I recall reading on one Telegram channel a comment by some US pilots to the effect of “These guys are good”.)
Religion is Central
On a purely gut-feel level, I’d say that the majority of men wear kippot (yarmulkas), and at least in Jerusalem, many women definitely dress very conservatively. Here at the mall in Netanya it’s visibly different for women, but even in Netanya, I see men wearing tsitsit (the tassels that hang down from men’s undershirts). Yet in the Netanya mall I also saw women walking around with cropped-top shirts, showing their stomachs, and tight yoga pants – something that in Jerusalem I don’t think I saw even once. Even the women jogging did not seem to be flaunting themselves.
My friend also took me to a wake in Jerusalem, called a shiva, an ultra-Orthodox one where men and women were strictly separated. His friend’s father had passed away, and people were coming to pay their respects. That… was like being in Amish country. Totally different, with no real sense of the secular world evident. Men and women were strictly separated.
Weapons Out
One other thing – walking around, one sees active-duty soldiers with their M4 rifles and/or sidearms, casually out and about. Both men and women. Even in civilian clothes, open carry of military weapons is common. Granted that it’s a country at war, but even on my earlier trips, soldiers in uniform with weapons were very common then, too. And despite the RKBA prevalent in New Hampshire, with the occasional person open-carrying a pistol, it’s still eye-opening to see that done with full-on military rifles.
On the next-to-last day, my friend mentioned that the Army had contacted him to do guard duty, freeing active-duty soldiers to go to the front line. He’s spent a couple of tours doing that and was weighing how he could do that again. There’s a real sense of duty to country there.
And speaking of, Israelis flocked in from overseas. El Al planes were chock full of Israelis rushing home. A war, incoming missiles, and Israelis flood in to help.
