On the final evening of our former life, an old feeling came back. Leaving work after sundown, I started wondering if I should take a cab home because I was too afraid to take the bus, an open air petri dish like so much else in Israel.
In the end, I got a ride home most of the way with a colleague, and took a cab for the final leg as a wind storm raged outside. On a main street near home, two transformers exploded one after another in the treetops above the cab, shooting sparks down to the street. Outside the wind was blowing so hard I ran to the entrance of our building, got upstairs and sealed every window shut. The wind still howled through the windows late into the night, and then it rained all weekend.
Those first moments of the coronavirus lockdown in Israel started with a familiar sensation rushing back – a taste on my tongue I can’t explain, a weight in the pit of my stomach, my jaw clenched, a hyper alertness as I start making calculations for things I have no control over.
I’ve made these calculations many times before. In 2015, it was if it’s safer to ride my daughter to her daycare in Tel Aviv on a bicycle seat perched on the handlebars, or for both of us to wait at a bus stop during the “Stabbing Intifada” and see if I could fight off some guy with a knife armed only with a diaper bag. In the summer of 2014, it was wondering if I should screech to a halt on the freeway and lay down on the side of the road if there’s a siren, or floor it and keep driving? In the Second Intifada around 2002-2004 it was endless – there was already a pigua tonight so it’s probably safe to go out, and if you’re on the bus, should you sit in the back or the front? Is the train safer? The sherut? Does it matter at all?
Every time it was about calculating risks you had no control over, and even if the formula didn’t make any sense, at least it gave you agency in a terrible situation that made you feel powerless.
For the past few weeks, as it became clear that this plague was going to sweep across the country – and that no, it is not just basically the flu – I started taking steps to make myself feel safe. First it was wearing a scarf, then a mask, touching the elevator buttons with my sleeve – and finally wearing rubber gloves anytime I leave the apartment. Does all of it make me and my family safer? Probably not, but I know what it’s like to be afraid and how important it is to feel that you’re doing something to establish control, that you’re not just hearing footsteps everywhere you go, looking behind your shoulder for something you can’t see that might kill you.
Largely, what we’re grappling with now is – again – the traumatic and dizzying realization that life can change entirely in an instant. And never has it been this striking. Two months ago we drove with the girls to an Australia-themed zoo in the north and I had the bright idea that every Shabbat from now on, we’ll do a mini road trip. The only rule being that the drive is about one hour each way. The next weekend we drove to the south for “Darom Adom” to see the anemones in the fields of the western Negev, a springtime ritual I’d never taken part in all these years in Israel. The next morning, a volley of rockets from Gaza sent people scrambling for cover across the entire area we’d been as a family just a day before, including the town where we stopped at a convenience store for lunch. It happens a lot but it couldn’t have been farther from our mind the day before, and less than 24 hours later, the realization that we’d just been there with our kids had me kinda shook.
A few nights ago I was working late, like most nights now that we work from home and mainly take care of our daughters. On YouTube I found that somebody uploaded entire sets from the Griselda Records tour. In the concert in Los Angeles, there must be 50 people on the stage, and the theater is packed.
The show at the Novo Theater in LA was on March 7th, three weeks ago.
The week before the lockdown went into effect, my wife went to see a movie with a friend. That week we went to the mall as a family and I bought new sneakers (that I’ve worn once since then) and we ate at McDonald’s, which ended up being our last dinner at a restaurant until the end of the world. Was that three weeks ago? Was it a year ago? What’s for sure is that if I’d known our last time at the playground with the girls was gonna be the last time until the war is over, we would have stayed a little longer.
About an hour after I got home on the last day I went to work, the new regulations were announced on TV. Schools were cancelled until (at least) after Pessach in April, all non-essential businesses were closed, and gatherings of more than 50 people were banned. The next morning daycare teachers went on strike and it was clear our girls weren’t going back anytime soon. Our older daughter developed a fever and a bad cough, and my fears became rational. The next day, I started seeing those clips of Italians singing to their neighbors on lockdown, and wondering what it’d be like when the trend got here, which happened a few days later.
With each passing day, the restrictions became more strict but also more confusing. You can’t go to work if it’s not essential, but you can go to protests or synagogue. Finally, you could only leave the house to go out for supplies or go to your work – if it’s an “essential job” – and you had to be within 100 meters of your home at all times.
By mid-week, my older daughter’s fever passed and my heart rate started to subside – and then her little sister got a fever and a bad cough, and like countless millions across the globe I started feeling anxious and wondering if my headache, congestion, and the tightness in my chest might be that other thing.
Her fever broke too, and as far as I can tell we’re all healthy and waiting this out, realizing as crazy as this new normal is, as long as we have jobs and we aren’t sick, we’re the lucky ones.
At home, while I’m working and watching the kids, it’s all COVID-19 all the time, especially on Twitter. It’s taken as a truism that too much social media – especially during a major breaking news event – is toxic and unhealthy, but I find the opposite to also be true. Social media gives the fearful and the isolated a voice and a feeling of community, and gives them agency over their fear and loneliness.
If I’m being honest though? It’s the memes, the memes and the short clips sent on WhatsApp that are really keeping us sane right now. There’s that one adult film star that has become the face of this moment (technically not the face), the dad jokes that don’t seem as bad as they used to, and all those clips of people in dozens of languages posting the type of Rube Goldberg type shit they’re getting up to at home. So far, the best jokes are coming out of the UK, and it’s not even close.
- Missing the Psycho Ward
One of the hardest things about living in Israel is how crowded it is. The constant crash of people everywhere you go, the 17-floor apartment towers with 100+ families everywhere you look (including our own), the fact that nowhere in the center is ever not gridlocked, except for that couple of hours late on Friday afternoons, when Shabbat is coming in and things slow down. It’s the best time of the week by far.
Now, I find myself wishing they were here, that we were surrounded by heaving masses of people again, that me and strangers on the street could yell at each other over nothing, that I could be part of that psycho ward again and not alone with my family and my thoughts.
I miss the closeness, the kirva that you can never get away from. I know it’ll be back some day, and the thought of it almost makes me tear up. I also know when it does, I’ll be sick of it in 30 seconds, but I’ll try to remember this.
Another part of what makes living in Israel hard is the entitlement, the feeling that your life and that of your family could be snuffed out because of the negligence of someone too careless to see the world around them. It could be a crane that falls on your car next to a poorly-managed work site, a lighting rig that falls on someone you love at an official state ceremony, and the list goes on. A friend once said that it was Israelis’ entitlement that will be the end of this country. That might be a stretch, but I’ve often thought that in this country life is largely about trying to protect me and my family from the carelessness of the people around us. It’s like defensive driving, but on foot, everywhere in life.
This feeling comes to mind this week not only seeing the way so many people in the Haredi community are flouting the social distancing measures, but also, all the people in Tel Aviv who barely over a week ago were still going to the beach en masse. I can only do so much to protect my family, I cannot force these people to look outside themselves.
Living in Israel – just like the rest of yall – we always took some solace in knowing that there’s an escape plan, even if it just means that one trip to Europe or the States each year. It’s the realization that you can always duck out for a 3-day weekend to Europe, or the thought in the back of your head that someday we could maybe get a work relocation somewhere in Europe, or maybe…southeast Asia? Or we could go to Canada, where my wife is from, or maybe, someday, give it a second try in the States and make it work.
Now, all the borders have been closed for weeks, air traffic is all but shut down, and anybody returning (citizens or permanent residents are the only ones allowed in) must self-quarantine for two weeks. It’s much bigger and darker than that though. I realize that now, being in Israel is much safer than being in the States facing what is to come. Even if we had health insurance there somehow, I have no faith in American society to deal with this calamity, to come together and solve a problem that you can’t shoot to death. There is an absolute dearth of leadership and the person actually in charge of the American response is so inept that it seems almost as if he’s actively trying to make it worse. It looks terrifying and I worry for everyone I love in the States and am grateful (for now) that we never found that escape plan.
- What’s a Life Worth to You
So much of the debate about the pandemic revolves around things that we think we know so far – it’s most dangerous for people over 65 or who have pre-existing conditions, it doesn’t seem to threaten children, tons of people never even know they have it.
It has been amazingly disheartening to see how much comfort people find in the fact that this disease is (we think) only truly dangerous to people like my mom. Or the way they breathe a sigh of relief when they hear that someone who died was immuno-suppressed, like a dear friend of mine, or my cousin (both are alive). I understand how hard this is for people, especially those who are not as fortunate as my wife and I, and are out of work and desperate for life to return to normal.
But I also know that I lost my father at 71, and how young that is and what a difference just another 2 or 3 years would have made. I know that when people die of this disease they die alone on a respirator and none of their loved ones can be near them. I believe that I would do anything to keep my mother from that fate, but I know that too many people feel otherwise.
This feels like a critical test for the morality of a society, and too many people are failing – and doing so proudly.
- Things Go From Suck to Blow – But Then?
I feel like I’ve been fortunate enough to witness or experience a fair number of dramatic events living in Israel for the past almost 20 years. Along the way there have been sustained, painful periods of real fear and adrenaline that I’ve put far behind me. I could never see the things that were trying to kill me, but often saw the victims, the pain, and the layers of trauma that remain long after we all move on.
Nothing was like this though. Nothing this absolutely sci-fi in its weirdness. Never an event in which no matter where you are on Earth, things are weird where you are.
What I do know is that almost every time that things changed 180 degrees in an instant, they also changed back very suddenly. None of us were quite the same as we were before, and I don’t think there’s any playbook for what to expect for who we’ll be when it’s all said and done.
But I have no choice but to believe that we will make it to the other side of this, and we will be together again – and not on Zoom.
- Musical Epilogue
A lot of people are posting quarantine playlists, so here’s what I’m listening to until the vaccine comes:
- When I’m doing the dishes after a long day of working from home: Maxo Kream – Drizzy Draco
- When I circle the block with the volume blaring after going to the store across the street: Young Dolph – Major
- When I’m Sad and Want to Be Sadder: Thundercat – ‘Fair Chance (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil B)
- When I’m Wondering How Paul Wall is Doing: Paul Wall & Statik Selektah Ft. Benny The Butcher – Overcame
- When I Think Someday We Might All Go To Amsterdam Again and See a Thundercat Show: Oh Sheit It’s X
- Since yesterday, when this EP was released: Conway and the Alchemist – Lulu
- For all occasions: Griselda Records Channel