October 27, 2017
We always considered Friday morning as "SEX" - siddurim, kniyot, sponga. or Chores, shopping, cleaning. But for the past 11 years it has begun with Smadar, our trainer, and continued from there. Me, I like to finish things fast and then write. Usually don't get to the write part.
Did I mention that the little talk i did on Kurt Gerron is on youtube?
i don't look very good there but i really wasn't happy about the congress, the panel members subjects - because nobody was in film, the size of the audience, and i was hot and tired and in Mount Scopus.
I was recalling Mount Scopus yesterday at Hadassah hospital because they both give you the same impression that Jerusalem often gives - of a purposeful maze, meant to complicate our lives, make us feel inadequate, and keep out anyone who doesn't belong.
October 29, 2017
For two days I've been involved in conversations which turn around political corruption - and discovered that some of the best of my friends believe things that I've long accepted as outrageous. That Trump is much less corrupt that Hillary because she made so much money after her husband left the presidency. "How do you know this?" I ask a very close friend "From her tax reports." "And what about Trump?" "He's clean." "And you know this from his tax reports?" "No, he didn't release them." Now one would think that this question-and-answer session would open some eyes, but our minds are so made up we don't even hear ourselves talk, it seems.
This is the way I feel when I listen to Hillary reading her book What Happened. There are some times when she says things that comdemn herself. In one of the many time she criticizes Bernie Sanders, for example, she complains that Sanders voted for the 2005 law that protects gunmakers from being sued if their weapons are used to kill citizens, and that obviously he was bowing to the NRA. She doesn't seem to see that Sanders was aiming for direct responsibility, and that he was trying not to destroy weapons manufactors. This idea that we not only do not listen to others, but we don't even realize when we ourselves are speaking nonsense, makes me long for those days in high school when we studied Plato. This remind me also of Shaike Ophir and his definitions of monologues and dialogues. Where monologue is a person talking to himself and dialogue is two people talking to themselves. My latest problem is that people have stopped listening even to themselves.
Maybe even me.
October 30, 2017
I love it when men read my poems, especially when the poems are very female and the voice is very male. So last night Nathan Brand read a bunch of poems including a bunch of my poems in his program of jazz and poetry: Jazz 100. I even postponed looking at my thyroid ultrasound results while i listened to the program.
I do these checks frequently because I have all kinds of little nodules on my thyroid. Sometimes I even do biopsies on them. Usually they are in the usual place but when I suddenly remembered i'd forgotten to do one for almost 3 years I asked for an early appointment and got sent to some dinky clinic in Ramat Gan. Now Ramat Gan is not my favorite place and I wasn't impressed with the tiny clinic on a small street, a clinic that looks like a converted ground floor apartment. But when I walked into the ultrasound room, and the doctor greeted me with a hearty "WELCOME!" I felt much better. And he explained everything as he went along - that indeed there are many many nodules, but they look benign and there don't seem to be any changes from the last time. And he wrote his detailed letter immediately so that they appeared within hours on the internet site. Usually I get a technician who looks worried and tells me the results will be in a few weeks. So bravo Ramat Gan.
Today, 2 kilometers from kibbutz Kissufim, Israel blew up a terror tunnel that was being dug from Khan Younis. What does this mean for us? Do we feel safer? No, we're waiting for revenge.
October 31, 2017
I understand the film 1945 came out today. It looks like a great reminder that the nightmare for the Jews did not end with the end of the Holocaust.
My father-in-law lost his family in Hungary AFTER the war and I won't ever forget the expression on his face when he talked about his cousins.
Ronen Shapira played the simple melody of my poem Your White Skin
A series of programs on life in the West Bank on tv makes Ramallah look much more interesting than Tel Aviv - with a new restaurant opening every day, high tech heaven, luxury hotels. "Shufu la view" the owner says as he shows us the window, using Arabic, French and English to point out the wonderful landscape. On the one hand I believe that the poverty and frustration is carefully hidden, on the other it makes total sense that their stock market is connected to the Arab countries and not to us, that their customers are wealthy Israeli-Arabs, and their lives are less complex because they are more unified as a community.
We are now on the eve of the memorial day for Yitzchak Rabin. Every day brings us further from his dream. Even the rearranging tonight of the television channels is an attempt to confuse the public and further us from objective truth, from genuine understanding and real culture.