Rishon Rishon

Some sense of the season

Well, in these days of cooking and cleaning and boiling pots and pans and children on vacation under foot I am coming down with a cold and, with a few spare minutes, would like to take some time out to share my sense of the season.

Passover comes on Sunday. Though this month - Nisan - is called in the Bible hodesh aviv (חודש אביב) - the month of spring, Israelis usually consider Passover, on its 15th, the beginning of summer. Indeed, it has gotten quite warm all of a sudden. I turned off the heating system a few weeks ago, and since then we've been living with the ambient temperature. Our house, like almost all houses in Israel,  is built of masonry and, cave-like, averages the daily temperature. The newfound warmth of the season gives us a sense of freedom, in keeping with the theme of the holiday, as does the end of the rains.

And I must say, that though I love diversity, I also love what one non-Jewish visitor of mine once called the "tightness" of the society I live in. When everyone's doing the same thing at the same time there's a kind of gestalt consciousness that's very agreeable to the soul. You always have something to talk about, an icebreaker, a shared vocabulary of metaphor and association. More: that shared vocabulary, metaphor, association is not mere faddishness, not a shared allusion to "Friends" or "Seinfeld" but a shared consciousness of wealth and depth, a timeless thing of intrinsic meaning, that binds not only you and your neighbors, but also your parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, and great thinkers and artists of the past and present.

I daresay that once this was more true of the US than it is today. When Hemmingway titled his novel, "The Sun Also Rises," I suppose he could count on his readers recognizing the quote, understanding its meaning, and resonating with the associations of its source. Somehow, it seems to me an impoverishment of the culture that this is no longer true. No offence intended to "Friends" and "Seinfeld" - but to me, it doesn't fill the void.