The Swinging Chicken Dance

Saudi Arabia, you up?

Greetings from Tel Aviv, where your heathen co-host just emerged from Yom Kippur sin-free and ready to accumulate a fresh batch of transgressions to fill up the new year.

I often come to Israel to be with my friends family during this time of the year when we celebrate the Jewish holidays, which is - and forgive me Chaya Leah who is sleeping now and also may not even know that we have a Substack - kind of like a monthlong Thanksgiving. Sure, the traditions may be older, and we alternate between happy (Shana Tova! Let’s have dinner!) and sad (Let’s fast and mourn for 25 hours…and then have dinner!) but some things are universal - you spend a lot of time with loved ones, join your countrymen on some sort of national schedule, fight, argue, gossip, make up - sometimes all over the time it takes to eat a bowl of chicken soup.

Fun fact - did you know that what Americans think of as traditional Jewish food like chopped liver, gefilte fish and brisket are served here only on holidays? Most days of the year it’s hummus and veggies, but come September-October you are practically drowning in Matzah Ball soup.

Scenes from a “normal” lunch the other day in an Arab village

Anyway, in this episode you can expect:

• Is MBS hot?

• Bibi and Elon, sitting in a tree

  

• A beautiful tradition or antisemitic blood libel? Why not both?

• Non-binary silverware

• Yael asks Chaya Leah about a Yom Kippur tradition involving Jews paying Arabs

• The weird chicken thing that Orthodox Jews do, explained. As horrifying as it may seem, both of us agree that as soon as PETA gets involved, it becomes somehow more pallatable. Reminds me of this amazing discussion on animal rights, back when The Onion chose to be funny instead of preachy:

• Tradition! Here’s a PSA Israeli 80s kids know by heart about how everything can explode at any given time. Just noticed that the dumbass girl running toward the bomb is named Yael! Watch this even if you don’t undertand Hebrew, if only for the trippy graphics and music.

• 🔔 Holocaust bell rings at 26 🔔

• We also talk about Lauren Boebert, Bari Weiss, and Palestinians antisemites at UPenn, because we always like to be 2 weeks behind the news.

• It turns out that BDS (Bari Weiss Derangment Syndrome) is real. Our friend

  Meghan Daum
  writes about it more eloquantly than we can right here on Substack:

“For reasons I remain unable to fully comprehend, Weiss elicits in otherwise mild- mannered people an unfathomable level of visceral disdain. I have seen entire dinner parties fall apart at the mention of her name. Moreover, Bari Weiss Derangement Syndrome has a second-order effect you might call Bari Weiss Anti-Defamation Derangement Syndrome. She elicits in her defenders a ferociously protective instinct. “

Also, when you really push people on why they hate Weiss, they fall back on a claim that she “canceled” a Palestinian professor when she was a student at Columbia, right? Once again, smarter people than us have covered this, so please read David French who breaks this crap down, and let’s put this issue to bed once and for all.

If you speak to someone who suffers from BDS and they reach for this story, know that they are either misinformed, or they associate any support of Israel as something unseemly. You can decide for yourself which is more annoying.

• The time Chaya Leah got scolded for bringing a Nazi to campus

• Are we in control? Hashem says: lol.

• Yom Kippur chat

  Exlusive Substack update: I fasted and was on my phone…less. Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv is for the kids, who zoom around like crazy on their bikes and skateboards through the streets empty of cars. Trailing alongside them are the adults, particpating in various degrees of redemption - most of the people around me fasted but used electronics and maybe even treated themselves to a cup of water and tooth brushing. Here’s me almost getting run over:

I did spend the last 2 hours of YK synagogue hopping with my dear father, ending up at a Chabad spot where a kind French lady came over several times to show us what page of the prayer book we were on. Can’t say I felt particularly connected - watching people pray never really did much for me, even when I try to mutter the words that I can easily read in my native language. It always seems a bit awkward, like it belongs to someone else. I wish that wasn’t the case, because faith seems like fun. However, it was not lost on me that my feelings don’t paricularly matter. We were still connected to each other and our community, secular and religious, those repenting all day in synagogue and those skateboarding along the beach - whether we felt like it or not.

I shall leave you with a piece from the beautiful 9/11 musical Come from Away, which you can watch on Apple TV. It is not really connected to anything we discussed, but it still gives me chills and tickles my spirituality. Shana Tova!