- I saw the professor with a woman I guess is his wife.
- Me too. He was with her for hours.
- Maybe she's making an effort to take care of him. Have you seen Revital?
- Yes. She's the same.
- And you?
- Selling my computer. Going to a job interview this afternoon. What about you?
- The reporter in L.A. says she won't write about my wife after all. She's too dangerous, and I made it too complicated by "blogging" the story in progress. For me the complication just makes it funnier, but that's not her style.
- So what are you going to do?
- The reporter suggests the best way to get myself home is to get myself deported.
- But you're legal in Israel.
- The sad truth.
- You could get a job too.
- You know how I told you I used to travel in Europe, making money by buying and selling things? Today I found two financial accounting textbooks, wrapped in plastic, new, left with other books on a bench on the street. Worth hundreds of dollars in this country of the dollar. I gave them away.
- Why?
- I can talk with you here at the shopping center, look at Israelis on the street, in the right mood I can joke and make small talk, but for the most part I can't stand dealing with them. Their rudeness is unbearable.
- It's how we are. We're a small country at war most of the time. You should understand.
- I think it goes deeper than that. The national character has miraculously reconstructed itself after thousands of years.
- What character?
- Slaves freed and given laws by god. I spoke with a religious Israeli who deals in expensive watches, and do you know what he told me?
- What?
- "The secret of being a Jew is to understand that there is no one else in the world but yourself."
- What did he mean?
- He meant that Jews make an agreement with God directly to follow the rules, not with each other. Everyday life with other people is unimportant compared with the deal with god.
- That's right.
- It's not a bad arrangement if the rules are good. Envy and resentment don't arise. And rituals are good for people. I'm not religious because I like to know for myself why rules are good before I make rituals out of them. But here's what I want to say: just before god gave the Jewish people their rules they were slaves. The combination of being former slaves, and the making deals directly and individually with god is responsible for what I can't take about Israelis.
- You said that already.
- If you are not god here it's hard to get anyone to listen. When people are trained not to respect the judgement of others, and are put into a condition of slavery where god's rules are not practiced - all rules are broken when you treat someone as a slave - you can expect pretty much the behavior we see all around us in this city. Neither care for each other nor real obedience to the rules, with the mere practice of rituals, whether orthodox or of the new, but biblically recorded old golden calf religion of money worship.
- It's what I said: the wars are responsible.
- Israelis tell me it's not the wars - less than ten percent of soldiers get near battle - but being in the army, being treated like slaves for a mandatory 2 or 3 years. Everything about Jewish life teaches them to be individually responsible for doing good, and then, at age 18, they become slaves where they are badly treated and cannot do good.
- When we get out of the army we've escaped slavery in Egypt again and we worship the golden calf. I like it.
