I will have halva of that!

 I am feeling a bit sick right now (Rafi, please don’t read this; I know my lack of discerning taste will disappoint you). I was heading back to the apartment when I succumbed to temptation and bought just a sliver of delicious halva at the corner store.

Halva anyone?

As I child, my mother (who grew up in Rishon LeZion, south of Tel Aviv), would tell me how much she loved it when she was growing up so I have always associated it with Israel (OK, that was my excuse for eating it and I am sticking to it). 

Halva is a crumbly dessert, made from tahini and very, very popular here; pretty much every food store has loads of it on display, like gum back home. Its primary ingredients are nut butter and sugar. It contains 615 calories per 100g, 31.9 grams of fat, 54.2 g of carbohydrates and, right now, a slightly nauseous aftertaste.

The halva mention is a good lead-in to my major accomplishment of today: I went to the gym for the first time and worked out with Emanuela. She is a terrific woman, looks very fit, is very positive and friendly and chatty --  but she must have been a Sargent in the army (I am in real pain right now).

Emanuela

After the gym, I spent 20 minutes reading labels of products at the supermarket next door, trying to decide which variations of yoghurt I was going to buy (I was looking for the label in French).

Yoghourts

 At noon I met N., who drove in from Jerusalem to have lunch with me. We sat outdoors in a nearby café, overlooking Rabin Square. The temperature was around 20 degrees and the sun was shining and the sky was blue… and I am sure somewhere birds were chirping. 

N is a fascinating and hugely accomplished man, and it was a real thrill to talk with him for over two hours. Our conversation took us many places, from the brilliance of American companies setting up tech centers all over Israel to the Israeli start-up entrepreneur mind-frame to government policies to encourage entrepreneurship... to politics.

I asked him whether he was concerned about the current situation and, as I am starting to see is the pattern here, his answer was No. From his perspective, even under the worst circumstances Iran is unlikely to nuke Israel because bombing Tel Aviv would take down Jerusalem, and Muslims consider Jerusalem to be a holy city as well, so no deal. As proof, he pointed out that during the second Lebanon war, the missiles were aimed at Tel Aviv but not Jerusalem.

Then he said something that took my breath away: “Why worry so much about this? During the second intifada, 1,053 Israelis were killed by Palestinian attacks. That is less that just one train-load to Auschwitz.” (That number, I just Googled it, was 100 people in a freight car × 50 cars = 5,000 people in each train).

It took my breath away for obvious reasons but also because a few days before departing to Israel, I started to read an extremely well written but horribly sad book called Until the Dawn's Light by Aharon Appelfeld, an Israeli novelist, which Jennifer had bought on our "shared" Kindles. The book is about a Jewish woman who marries a gentile laborer in turn-of-the-century Austria, with disastrous results. It recalls a time and place that are no more (thank G-d) but that powerfully reverberate in collective memory.

By the time I landed in Toronto I had almost finished the book and had a heavy heart. So during my stopover I phoned Jenn and asked her whether the book had a happy ending. It doesn’t. Then, I told her, it was the perfect time for me to be reading this book: by landing in the State of Israel in a few hours I was creating a happy ending for me in the novel.

That is why, just a few days later, hearing N say that while sitting in a nice Tel Aviv restaurant enjoying a lovely low-fat/low-carb/high-fiber lunch, with smart-looking people (in both senses of the word) all around us and lots of happy-looking children walking around dressed up in costumes (tomorrow is Purim), simply brought tears to my eyes. I think I know why I am here.

Purim is tomorrow; the party here lasts 3 days

 From lunch with N. I went straight to coffee with I. – and it was just as if the conversation had continued (in my head anyway) across the street. 

Cafe Masaryk in the sunshine

 We sat in the sunshine and at one point, I. asked me if I wanted to sit somewhere else because it was getting hot (and I guess I was turning red). I told him I was Canadian, and to never-ever ask me that again. 

 He then told me that, since his career had taken him to many countries (Israel is such a small country, with no possibility of vacationing in the country next door, so Israelis like to travel and travel far), while away he often wondered what made people happy, and what the happiness coefficient of each country was. His conclusion? Sunshine. Sunshine in one’s life is what makes people happy.

I am not sure the data bears that theory out (I just Googled that) but I sure felt happy right there and then, sitting in the sun, overlooking the little park across the street from the café.

After we parted I went to my apartment to start planning the evening. I was Skyping  with Jessica but my cell phone kept ringing and ringing from the same person calling me. Each time I let it go to voice mail but that person kept calling and calling and calling. So I put Jess on hold and answered.

It was D., with whom I was supposed to meet tomorrow but he got the dates mixed up (of course at first I thought it was me). He was at the very same café I had just left, a block away from my apartment. I apologized to Jess and walked over (I am so often at that café that am seriously thinking of opening a tab there).

D. is a young entrepreneur with degrees in Engineering, Computer Science – and Philosophy! When I told him it was good that he had insistently kept ringing my cell over and over again, he shrugged his shoulders and told me that as an Israeli he was not shy, and had figured since I was a Yekke and well organized (having arranged our meeting over a month ago), that surely he had to keep calling until he got me.  D. is persistent and has has a great sense of humour: Me?? A Yekke!?!?

Needless to say, the next hour and a half went by very quickly as we engaged in more fascinating talk and lots of laughter. With three such intense meetings back to back, I hope I was able to keep up with him.

Below is a picture of the gym fitness class schedule. There is something odd about it, and it took me a while to figure out what that was. 

Can you tell what is odd about it? I will bring you back a piece of halva if you can guess.