Rosh Hashana

Wishing everyone a healthy, prosperous and, most importantly, happy new year. Shana tova!

Summer's End

It rained yesterday for the first time since April. Summer is gone and no amount of wishing can bring it back. Those hot, steamy, sunny days – all gone. Sensible people here pray for rain. We depend on it since our benighted government can't seem to manage sufficient desalination. So the water has to come from the heavens.

I don't like rain. It's wet, nasty stuff. It gets under your collar and runs down your neck. It's cold. And just when you think it's over, a great big drop hits you smack in the eye. But, and I realize this might seem like a contradiction, I love water. I love the look of it and relish every glimpse of the sea. When I have enough money for a water feature in the garden, I plan to spend every free minute just sitting and looking at it.

What I don't like is being attacked by those cold little drops from the sky that leave sludgy spots on the windows. This could be because I come from a place where it rained all the time, except when it snowed. We saw the sun once a decade if we were lucky. So Israel's glorious heat and relentless sunshine is a miracle to me.

It rained yesterday and again this morning. As I look out into the garden, the plants look wonderful. They've all been washed of their summer grunge and seem to be grateful for the extra water. I'll try to find comfort in this.

Banana Bread Nostalgia

For comfort food, there's nothing better than banana bread. Why it's called bread when it's clearly cake, I don't know. Maybe because it's eaten unfrosted, like zucchini bread and pumpkin bread. But of this I'm sure: when fall is on the horizon, it's time to bake a batch.

Of course, Israel has it's culinary delights, like humus with zaatar (an herb mixture whose main component is hyssop) and olive oil. Anything with zaatar and olive oil. Warm pita. Halla with raisins. With Rosh Hashana almost upon us, most people here probably dream of honey cake. Not me, I find it usually too dry. And let me add that I cannot swallow much of the Eastern food so common here – coriander tastes like rot and cumin smells like sweaty socks.

Different people have different tastes, that's part of the diversity of humanity. I know this well. When I've shared banana bread with my coworkers it has met with mixed reviews. Some found it good enough, but others thought it inedible. I admit I was taken aback. It's a wonderful cake – bananas, butter, walnuts – what's not to like? It could be an American taste.

There is something about the fall that makes me long for home and the gorgeous leaves and fresh apple cider. So when the summer heat has passed and a stiff breeze whips through the house as it does today, I comfort myself with a little baking. The aroma fills the house and a mug of raspberry tea is ready and waiting. There, the oven just dinged!

The House of Wine

A few years ago the kibbutz decided to open a restaurant/café/wine store called, prosaically, The House of Wine. It is located in a sturdy building that looks like an airplane hanger but was actually a cold storage room used by the kitchen. Why it was located in the middle of the dairy with the cows milling around it is a mystery to this day. But they have long since moved to their new dairy somewhere vaguely in the direction of the Kingdom of Jordan, leaving a nice chunk of land for building houses and a chunky building for the café.

The House of Wine is pleasantly decorated and landscaped with a few tables on the decking and some more on the lawn. Inside is a store that sells domestic and imported wine as well as the harder stuff. The food is acceptable, if not exactly inspiring, and it's a nice place to sit and scarf down a bucket of beer after a hard day's shopping. It's also a reasonable place to hold parties, wedding receptions and anything else that requires celebration.

As luck would have it, my house was built right next to The House of Wine. Convenient, you say? Yes, there's that. But when festivities are going on the noise can be invasive. The problem, of course, is entirely because of loud-speakers, the bane of civilization. I remember once hearing someone opine that the curse of modern civilization is unwanted music, and I have never heard a truer word spoken.

Tuesday evening there was a polite knock at the door. A woman told me there would be a wedding reception and apologized in advance for any noisy inconvenience. She then gave me a complementary bottle of Leffe Belgian beer as compensation. It was a nice gesture, much appreciated. It was also my first experience of Leffe, which is quite tasty. As it turned out, given the hemorrhage-inducing volume as the evening wore on, it would have taken a six-pack, no, two to make amends. But what I really don't understand is why you would have that raucous cacophony at your event when you could have a string quartet?

Space, the final frontier

When you immigrate to Israel, especially if you're coming from America, you have to come to grips with the lack of space. Walking down even not-so-crowded Jerusalem streets with people bumping and pressing up against me used to send me screaming for the nearest gin and tonic. I like strangers to keep their distance. It's an alien concept in Israel.

Living quarters are also tiny, even more so on a kibbutz. In the real world you are free to buy the biggest house you can afford. But here on Fantasy Island, somewhere in some dossier there is an actual document that dictates to how many square meters you are entitled according to your age. If you're 30 years old asking to build an extension so your 4 children will have a room to sleep in, you will feel like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel.

When you reach my exalted age, you are entitled to 90 square meters, although you can add another 30 or 40 in the form of a second story if you pay for it yourself. I don't quibble with this. The kibbutz has a finite amount of land and hundreds of people to house and does the best it can with the resources it has. By the time you get your permanent house, leaving behind the flat that was the size of a walk-in closet, 90 meters feels quite spacious. Until, that is, you try to fit furniture into it.

How does one cope? By keeping everything as uncluttered as possible and furniture to the barest minimum. This has the advantage of also being cheaper. There is one thing about finally getting into the permanent house that is both comforting and alarming: you never have to move again.