On Saturday, we met my family in Eshtaol Forest, considerably higher up in the Judean hills, but also at midday rather than late afternoon. Temperatures hit 41 degrees there, and my parents arrived nearly an hour late, despite being sent the precise location once we had reached it. In the end J went to fetch them ... apart from that, it was great to see everybody again. We didn't hug or kiss (either time), but we did not really social distance either, apart from no one getting right up next to my parents. They are the only really vulnerable ones, and being outside was certainly the right choice: despite the heat, it was pleasant enough in the shade and our gazpacho was a great hit.
Going back to the beginning of the week, on Sunday I was depressed and spent the day reading fanfic. At the time I thought this was possibly due to watching La Haine on Saturday night, but yesterday I realised it was more likely to have been a spot of PMS. La Haine was S's choice, although it was a movie he knew nothing about, and it was excellent. One of the interesting things about it was the taken-for-granted friendship between a Muslim and a Jewish character, and the complete lack of radical Islam. Such a movie about life in the banlieux of Paris made today would have had to include a religious Muslim,
On Monday I bounced back, and began translating the last chapter of RE's book, all about expressions of affluence in the late Roman Republic. I couldn't face translating 27 pages, and tried a new method of editing Google Translate: instead of translating each sentence myself, I fed each paragraph into Google Translate, and edited the result. I've done this before when translating from Arabic to English, and it felt a bit like cheating when translating from Hebrew, but it did speed up the process a bit. As RE wants to get the book off to the press asap, I felt it was justified.
Tuesday marked Lag Ba-Omer, the 33rd day of the Counting of the Omer, the 49-day period between Pesach (Passover) and Shavuot (Pentecost; hence the name). This is traditionally Israel's Bonfire Night, despite being in the middle of heatwave → wildfire season. This year, of course, all such gatherings were banned but, equally of course, this was ignored by many ultra-Orthodox communities and the media was full of pictures of gatherings of over 20 people, none of them wearing masks. Ironically, one of the legends explaining why Lag Ba-Omer is a day of rejoicing in a period of mourning (it's a favourite date for weddings, as it's the only day observant Jews can get married in the spring) claims that on this day a plague that was killing many students of the the great 2nd-century CE rabbi, R. Akiva, stopped. We'll see if this works for COVID-19, but I am predicting a spike in cases in ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods in two weeks' time.
Meanwhile, Wednesday was our first visit to Mahaneh Yehudah. Next week the market will be open on Friday again, so we will really be able to resume our usual routine. Most of the places we usually go to were open, including the Iraqi Market, which has only stalls, and not proper shops - it had sounded like stalls would not be allowed to open. This is the best time of year for peaches and nectarines and we brought home two kinds of each, plus apricots. The fridge was very happy.
On Thursday the heatwave began. It was M's birthday, so we met her at the local ice cream parlour, Mousseline, and treated her to a cone. You had to go in individually (wearing a mask) and choose the flavours, and then the vendor would go into the back and prepare your cone or cup. Very interesting - especially as as soon as we were outside, we then all pulled down our masks in order to eat the ice cream. There is definitely a theatrical element to this (especially if you wear a cloth mask coordinating with your top, as M and I were doing. ADC has just one cloth mask at the moment, the least feminine of the 5 I bought last week). Continuing the "heat" theme, when we got home we watched In the Heat of the Night, still an excellent movie and deservedly a classic.
On Friday we finished our movie-watching week with another recommendation of S's, First Reformed, an eco-thriller featuring a priest who has lost his faith, played by Ethan Hawke. I'm too tired to properly do it justice now, but I'd never heard of this movie, and it was very good.
I hope everyone's life is beginning to go back to some kind of normal. On Thursday afternoon it was announced that grades 4-10 (i.e., including S) were to go back to school from Sunday. On Saturday night the headmaster of his school had a very reassuring Zoom meeting with parents (over 100 participants, meaning over half the parents of his grade) about the coming week. From Tuesday, all six grades at the school, 7-12, will go back to the pre-Corona timetable, but wearing masks and neither food nor water coolers available to them. I feel very sorry for them all in this heatwave, but S is looking forward to seeing his friends again and that's the main thing.
Stay safe, healthy and serene!
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