New Semester

I got a lot of teaching hours this semester. Yesterday was a full day and am tired like ... I was about to say like a dog, only that dogs live a most pampered life. The campus is built on two levels and I had to walk up and down in the stairs several times. I am well impressed by the quality of the new class, they look serious and purposeful. I saw only one female in my classes, but the campus is full of religious girls that study psychology and other social work courses. There has been much building in the campus and the infrastructure is better than last year.

My little daughter is the national co-ordinator of some program of the Ministry of Education for exceptional students or whatever. She is in a meeting today. Yesterday was worried about meeting the representatives of Arab and of Haredi and of the settlements colleges. There was a problem how and in what language to write the invitations. I advised Hebrew and Arabic, both languages are official. Will the settlement colleges object? The multicultural age is arrived in Israel with its supersensitivity to pretended "offenses". In the end the only safe subject to write about will be food and pets.

A Horse Walks Into a Bar

Thursday night we went to the Kameri theater in Tel Aviv to David Grossman's "A Horse Walks Into a Bar" - a kind of stand-up black comedy. I could review the opus but someone did it better for me. The Washington Post.  Surprisingly, the WP reviewer Ken Kalfus noticed the same things I did and his review succeeded in sharpening some of my observations. The black, tragic joke of Dobaleh, from a family of dwarves that "passed through" Auschwitz death camp, that "we could say that Mengele is our family doctor" is notable. Kalfus writes that Dobaleh is dying, but that was left out of the act or I missed it (Kalfus is reviewing the book, which I did not read). I may have missed some details and I don't know if the people that stood up and left in the middle was real paying public or actors playing the part of the public leaving Dobaleh's failed standup routine.

All in all, good.

Remember Amalek

Today we read the chapter Remember (parashat yizkor) that starts with "Remember Amalek what he did to you in the desert when you were escaping from Egypt and you were weak and exhausted. He followed you and destroyed those straying behind and the sick and the weak..."

Paradoxically, the chapter also instructs us to erase and to delete the memory of Amalek under the heaven.

The result is that there are no Amalekites and no one remembers them. Only we are mentioning them all the time.

Since every generation we are attacked when we are weakest, it is fitting to imagine that it is always Amalek that is torturing us in the desert. Amalek, always the same Amalek, attacked us when the remnants of the death camps in Europe were trying to re-form in Israel. Three thousand years from now we shall still remember this Amalek, although no else will.

Early morning dread

Well, they came back. The reason is simple: the taxmen is again sending me frightening letters. I pay a tremendous amount of money but that only whets their appetite. How do I survive? I leave the bed a 0400 AM and drink coffee and do some works. The coffee makes me sleep and I return to bed for one hour. Then ready to work for the day. If the anxiety bothers me, I take 5 mg diazepam. Once a week, 60 - 100 cc  and cheap alcohol to erase myself for a while.  and start the week with a tabula rasa mind. I asked my doctor if there was any danger of addiction. He said that at my age there is none. Israeli doctors have a peculiar opinion about old age. They think one should spend his last days in comfort and contentment, and drink is an important part of happiness. I think this comes to us from Russia. As Solzhenitsyn says, we exchanged some habits after two hundred years living with Russians. Jewish abstinence did not stick to them, but we did learn to enjoy vodka with salted fish. 

Israeli Gas Royalties Fund

The Treasury is seeking candidates for the position of manager of the newly established Fund of Gas Royalties. That means that there are gas royalties and more are expected. The model seems to be Norway, that has one trillion dollars fund from oil royalties. They are not injecting that income in the national economy, so to avoid the Dutch disease or the fatal Venezuela disease. Anyway, they are so rich that living income is assured for all citizens, and working is more or less an option. They could learn environmental or gender studies in the universities, all of them.

The prosperity in Israel is starting to be such that my competitors are rejecting projects for lack of manpower. I am paying 50% tax, and wondering if continuing working is worth my stress.

Difficult days ahead

This is the second day of the difficult weeks ahead. Once again, I have to collect and organize documents to submit to the Authorities. Once again, my thoughts revert to the existential, I seek strength in my personal and family history. My parents courageously left everything and passed illegally the Hungarian - Austrian frontier, and we arrived at Vienna with absolutely nothing. They were not slaves to real estate mother language and culture, promising jobs. They were ready to throw it all away and start from nothing. Penniless refugees, yet we survived without much pain. What is the worst that can happen to me? Nothing. At my age, I am done and all I strive for the future is to help my grandchildren. They have good parents so my contribution is inessential. Let's get down to the work on the table and keep going.

The Shofar Sheep

The spotted sheep breed was created in England in the 17th Century (pic). They are called Jacob's breed because they are like those described in the Bible (Jacob was an expert in animal husbandry.and no one succeeded yet to repeat his results). Each animal may have up to six horns, each one of them can be used to manufacture the horn blown during the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement. A shofar with good sound sells for several thousands dollars.