Marque My Word

4am: Erev tov. Time for an end-of-day recap. Recap of the day. I had enough hours in bed last night, but I didn’t really sleep well. I don’t know why. It was kind of just… it seemed like I woke up a lot of times. I just wasn’t as dead to the world as I usually am when I sleep. But I got enough sleep, all in all. I was confused. I woke up in the morning and I went to the bathroom, and on the way I looked at the clock and I thought it said… you know, it was around 10 o’clock. I don’t remember. A little bit before, a little bit after, I don’t remember exactly, but you know it was around 10 o’clock. My mind registered it as 10 o’clock. And so I thought, okay, I’m going to go lay in my bed, and if I go back to sleep for an hour, that’ll be okay. If not, I’ll just rest for an hour more, you know, just to see, give myself a chance. If my body wanted to sleep more, to sleep more. Because it wasn’t quite enough sleep. And I never did go back to sleep. I just laid in bed and, I don’t know, just rested a little bit more. I finally got up and looked at the clock and it was 12 o’clock. I must have seen the clock wrong when I thought it was 10 o’clock. It must have been 11 o’clock. Somehow I got confused. And so I had to be ready to leave the house at 1:00. So getting up at 12:00, getting out of my bed and starting to get ready at 12:00 did not leave me, really, enough time to have the kind of morning that I prefer. You know, the kind of relaxed time to get up. I had to kind of hurry, have a quick shower, you know, get dressed, get my clothes organized, get dressed, and get ready to get out of the house. And so that’s what I did. I made it. I was actually 5 minutes late. I was ready at 1:05 to leave the house. But considering that I didn’t get up until about 12:05, I think I did pretty well. I decided… I usually wear this black-and-white, kind of a gangnam-checked A-line skirt to, I don’t know, shiva… shivas. Or to halva yaz. But today I wore a black-and-white satin skirt that I have. I’ve only worn it once before, I think. And I like it. It’s… it’s nice-looking, it’s comfortable, it has the same… it has kind of a modern, bold print. It isn’t loud, though, because the colors are just black and white. So, I don’t know, I wanted to wear… I wanted to wear black because of the, you know, it being basically a funeral, we could say, in English. But I also needed to wear something white because it’s really hot. I didn’t think I could just stand to be wearing all black, even if they were summer clothes. So I wore this black-and-white print satin skirt with a black sleeveless chiffon top and this very, very lightweight white sweater over it. It’s hard to describe. When you think of a sweater, you think of something kind of like knit and bulky. But this is a very light sweater. You can see through it. It’s so light. A little bit. And, um, I wore some black ballet flats. So I was very much black and white, you know. Heavy on the black in my dress code today. We, uh, got to the train. Didn’t have to wait too long for the train to come. It was, I think, about 20 minutes, maybe 15. 15, 20 minutes at the most. It was, you know, we got there at a good time. And we took the train. It arrives pretty fast down to Ashkelon. And then, uh, more neat, a taxi over to, um, Simcha and Rani’s house. And when we got there, Simcha was standing on the sidewalk greeting us. I’ll come to that in a minute. Anyway, Simcha had invited us to eat with them. I think we got there so late that they had already eaten, but she had food all set out for us. And we had a kind of a big meal. We had kube, and her kube was very substantial. Because it had chunks of beef in it besides the kube. And, yeah, so we had that, and rice, and a whole bunch of different kinds of salads, and really tons of food. I felt pretty rushed. You know, Rokhamim eats way, way faster than I can. I’m not really the fastest eater. But I felt kind of a pressure to hurry up and eat. I could tell that they… they wanted to move on to the next thing. So I managed to eat my big lunch. And, uh, we went over to the house of the, uh, the mourners. The mourners’ house. Where we just hung around for maybe 15 minutes or so. And then everybody went over to the cemetery to start greeting people who would be coming. We got there, I would say, maybe an hour and 15. An hour and 20. Um, early. I think I’m going to have to pause this. I’m falling asleep. Okay. That’s all I can do.

12pm: I’m going to try and finish my diary entry now. I fell asleep during it last night; I just woke up, so I’ll try and finish it now, now that I’ve had some sleep. I might be able to do it, I hope so. I was saying I, you know, I had to quickly get ready to go, which I did. We left the house, we walked to the train station—no, we didn’t, we walked to the bus, and then we took a bus up the street to the Shin Kai train stop, and then we walked a short distance from there to the train because it was very hot outside. I didn’t want to get all sweaty before—well, I was just leaving. It was probably laziness talking, but I preferred to ride up the street rather than walk up to the bus stop or the train stop. Usually we walk up there, but I was slightly on the late side, and it was very hot outside. So we did that. We got on the train, we rode over to the—we rode the light rail over to the regular rail. We walked to the regular rail train station, and we planned to buy bagels from our little favorite bagel seller that is there, who is Rachamim’s age. Rachamim has made friends with him. He’s really a nice man. I mean, he’s a regular guy, but Rachamim just made friends with him, you know. And he’s Rachamim’s same age, but he—he works. He spends all day standing outside in the—under a tree in front of the Savidor Merkaz train station, selling bagels. So we bought a couple—actually we bought pretzels this time—and asked him a few more questions about himself. If he, you know, that he must buy the bagels from a bakery. And he said, of course, you know, he—and he said he has a—his family has a bakery. And, you know, he explained kind of his situation. And that I think they have 4 places where they sell bagels, kind of on the street. Anyway, we learned a little bit more about him. He’s not like some poor case that is just barely surviving and that is pressured and forced to be on the street selling bagels and just barely scraping by. It’s his family business, and, you know, they’re established. Anyway, we learned a little bit more about him. And then we went to the train station. I bought a couple of juice drinks for Rachamim and I, and an iced coffee for me. And we went and caught the train to Ashkelon. We rode the train to Ashkelon. We got a—we came out of the train station and immediately got a taxi to go to the Mosheov. We didn’t order a GET this time; we just grabbed the nearest taxi. And, yeah, we kind of talked to the driver on the way. He—he asked questions about Mosheov Noga. He said, “That’s a Kourdi Mosheov, isn’t it?” We said, “Yes, it is.” That the people there that built that Mosheov were all Jews from Kurdistan. And he said he really thought that the Kurdish Jews were really nice people. I don’t know what his ethnicity was. I mean, he’s—at first I thought maybe he’s Arab because he was listening to Arabic music, but I’m not sure. In the end, he may—he may be, like, he’s some sort of Mizrahi Jew. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not sure. He—anyway, he said he lives in Ashkelon, and he—he loves the sea, and because of that he loves to live in Ashkelon. And anyway, we just chatted with him until we got to the Mosheov. When we got there, Simcha was standing out on the sidewalk, waiting to—kind of looking for us. Simcha is Rachamim’s cousin, his first cousin. And there’s something about—there’s some quality that runs in that family that I think Rachamim and Simcha share. Not all of the kids in the family have the same quality. You know, just like in any family, there’s a lot of variation. But there’s kind of a—kind of a nervousness, a kind of high-strung nervousness. I don’t know if it’s high-strung, but kind of a nervousness about them that both of them seem to have, where they don’t really just settle down well. I think Rachamim can sit better than Simcha can. Simcha is the kind of person that she has to be constantly moving, constantly doing something. His other, more distant cousin, Nahuva, is like that as well. And I can just see that streak in his family. Rachamim’s kind of nervousness about time and about, you know, forgetting things and keeping things organized is a little bit the same. I don’t know. I think it must come from a similar, I don’t know, tendency. And I think it kind of runs in the family. I don’t know Rachamim’s siblings so well, too. To say how that tendency is expressed or isn’t expressed in his siblings. I mean, I know them all to some extent or another, but I don’t—I don’t really see that in Rachamim’s siblings so much. Maybe Kohi a little bit. Kohi, maybe, and Rachamim are more similar in that, just in their biology. The other siblings, they seem a little bit different, a little bit more, a little more relaxed. I don’t know. So, Simcha had lunch waiting for us. She had bowls of kube and a whole bunch of salads. She had beets and kind of a pepper salad, and roasted peppers, and olives, and—I don’t know—all kinds of salads. And the kube that she made, the soup to it had big chunks of beef in it as well. It was very hearty. Pashti da, there was that. I never heard of pashti da. It’s common here. Anyway, she had a lot of food. She also had chicken, which she forgot to put on the table. She was really mad at herself that she did. But I don’t know how we could have eaten more. It was really a lot of food. And Rachamim, he’s a pretty fast eater, and I could tell that we needed to eat fast because Simcha seemed kind of nervous. I’m a slow eater, and I just had to keep trying and trying to eat. It was really more food than I wanted. And I would have loved to have had another half hour to eat it, but I felt this sort of pressure to eat fast. I did my best to finish my meal as fast as I could. And then we went over to Rachamim’s brother’s, and he drove us over to the house of the person who passed away, who was a next-door neighbor to their growing-up family home. So, I don’t know. I must really be a weird person to them still. I mean, I come with Rachamim to all of these things. It’s hard for me to—I don’t know. I guess maybe it—well, I’m sure it must be a blessing from the Creator that I don’t live in the Mosheov. The Borei must know that it’s not the best place for me to live. I don’t know. I seem to have a—I don’t know. They don’t seem to know how to relate to me in some ways. I must seem different to them. Like some sort of weakling or something. I just—it’s like Simcha wanted us to have a ride. She said she wanted us to have a ride from her house over to the Shiva house, we’ll say. Which is—I mean, I’ve walked over there a lot of times. I’ve walked over there probably at least 3 or 4 or 5 or more times with Simcha herself. But she said that we should ride over there because, you know, she—she wouldn’t mind walking over there. She does it all the time. But because of me, you know, we should have a ride over there. I don’t know why because of me. She said because it was, you know, hot outside or something. I don’t know, you know. But she kind of—it was because of me, she said, that we should have a ride over there. That otherwise she would just walk. Which seemed kind of—I don’t know—kind of weird to me. I mean, for the reasons that I’ve said, we’ve walked over there a lot of times. I’ve walked over there with him. I’ve not straggled behind or barely made it or something like that. You know, I’ve walked like a normal person over there. I don’t know. Anyway, that was kind of weird. Maybe she just wanted a ride for her own reasons, but she wanted to blame it on me, so she did. I don’t know. She just did it in a very matter-of-fact way. She didn’t make it any kind of big deal or anything. Just kind of a big deal to me that it was because of me that we, you know, drove to the other side of the Mosheov rather than walking. The Mosheov is not all that big. It’s basically one big circle of land, one big—one big circle, circular street. It’s large, with some other circles kind of in the middle, a few, a couple of streets. There aren’t that many. It’s not a very big place. And so we went over to the house of the guy who passed away. His name was Haskel. Haskel. And his wife is also Simcha. And we, you know, walked in, connected with her. I’ve been told what a wonderful woman she is, and what a caretaker she was of him. He must have had some sort of diabetes, and he lost fingers and legs, and I guess he just really, really suffered for many, many years with some terrible blood disease. I imagine it must be diabetes. And that she, Simcha, was his caretaker all these years. And only during—only this past month did he—did they have a medical pallet that came to care for him in the home. That all those years that she took care of him, and he must have needed quite a lot of help, you know. Apparently he just really suffered a lot, and apparently he was a very, very nice guy when he was young and healthy. He was a great help to Rachamim’s and his family. He was their next-door neighbor. So anyway, we were at their house not for long, I would say for 15 minutes maybe. And then we rode with somebody over to the cemetery. I noticed the women—the women—a lot of people came to the Hovayah. There were a lot of people there. It seemed like a good number of the people from the Mosheov, particularly the older people. There were some young people there, but most of the people were older people. And most of the women, I would say, out of the women, probably 75% of the women were wearing pants. They were most, I would say, 80% of the women, or more, were wearing black. And 75% of them were wearing pants. Many with black pants and a black t-shirt. Very—quite informal dress, but very dark, subdued black color. And there were a few women that wore skirts, but just most of them did not. I mean, you know, it wasn’t like you would notice. It wasn’t like you would notice somebody wearing a skirt as being weird. But I was just noticing because I had, like, wondered what I should wear to this thing. And I had the feeling to wear black, you know. But I didn’t want to wear all black because it was so hot outside. I was afraid of being too hot. But I always choose a skirt when I go out. And I know that in the Mosheov, the people wear pants. I’ve seen this before, but I don’t know. I just—I just feel that it’s more appropriate for a woman to go in a skirt. So anyway, I was paying attention to the dress of the women because of that. Like I said, I had worn this black-and-white print skirt and a black shirt, short sleeve, sleeveless shirt, with a white sweater, very thin, cover-up type sweater over it. I’d say my clothes looked slightly more dressy than most of the people there, except for the younger people might have been a little bit more fashionably dressed, you know, with fashion consciousness of some sort, of an Israeli sort. It’s not a very fashion-forward group in the Mosheov at all. And I wondered—I thought about the kind of people they are, and I thought about how I, you know, was not—it was not for me to live in the Mosheov. And I tried to think, you know, why the Creator wouldn’t want me there, you know. And I tried to look for, you know, what—if I would have fit in with the people who were there. I mean, the women are nice, you know. The women are nice. They’re friendly. They’re nice people. But they’re probably just—they must be different people than me. I don’t know. I don’t know why the Creator didn’t want me there. But the Creator decided it’s not the best place for me. It would have been a very isolated life for me. Very isolated and rural-ish life for me. It’s not close to the sea or close to the city or, you know, it’s—it’s a very basic life there. So anyway, it would have been a very big lifestyle change for me. Something that—a kind of life that I’ve never lived. Or the closest thing to it would have been when I was a child living in maybe McGill, Nevada. But even McGill, Nevada, I would think had more people in it than the Mosheov. So maybe, you know, it just didn’t fit me. Anyway, we went over to the cemetery. There’s a great big shade—I don’t know what—what would you call it? They call—have a name for these places. It’s covered. There’s a roof over it. It’s a large shaded area. There’s a cement floor in there, and there’s kind of a bed for the—made of stone—for the deceased. They put the body, the covered body, on, and people gather all around it. And there is a PA system in there. So that the place could be filled up with people, and people in the back could hear the family members who were speaking about the deceased and the rabbis. And it seemed like two rabbis spoke, and then a couple of family members, one brother and one sister-in-law, I think it was. And then they took the body, and everyone went to the graveside. The men went. The women kind of stayed behind, stayed back, and watched from afar. The men and women are just completely divided in this Hovayah. The men stood on one side and the women on the other side. Most of the people stood, but older—some—a lot of the older people sat around their kind of a bench built into the side of the wall, around the edges. And I sat during all of it, which was nice for me. And, you know, other older people were sitting as well. I wasn’t like the only one. And the rabbi—both the rabbis talked about the parsha, hashavuah, aspects from that, and related it to Haskel. Yeah. And then they buried him. It’s—so it’s very different in Israel the way burials and funerals are conducted from what I have seen in my life in the United States. In the United States, they have laws about rules, that you have to have a casket. And here, bodies are usually buried without a casket. They’re just wrapped in, you know, burial cloths. And buried in the ground, just right into the ground, right next to the dirt, so that the body decomposes more quickly here. There are stone boxes that, after, I think, a year, are placed on the grave. But there is no casket for the body. It’s—I think it’s better. I think it’s better. I like it better here. I don’t like, like, these—the way in the US they try to get as much money as possible out of people. You know, there’s a thing where if you really loved the person who died, you, you know, you spend thousands of dollars on an ornate casket. You know, that just seems—I don’t know. I don’t—I really don’t. I really hate that tradition in the US that I’ve seen. This seems where people are just kind of stripped down to the essentials. And there’s an emphasis away from corporeal expressions of difference between people. At time of burial, it seems much more natural and relatable to me. I couldn’t hear what was being said at the graveside. None of the women could, and most of the men couldn’t either. I could see, you know, I could see the shovels going into the ground, into the dirt, the dirt being put inside the grave. And I thought about how—I don’t know. I guess my intention, my intention or my idea at this point in time, an intention is to be buried in that same cemetery, in one of the more peripheral graves. Rachamim will be buried next to his wife. He already has a grave purchased there. And we’ve spoken about me being buried there, but of course I won’t be buried next to him. I’ll be buried, I don’t know, on the edge there somewhere where the new graves are, I guess. And I kind of thought about that. I thought about that as I was there. I guess death has been on my mind lately. I guess I’m thinking about end-of-life concerns, the things that people think about when they’re coming to the end of their life. And so that was on my mind as I was there. While they were—when they were getting toward the end of the burial, I decided to walk down to Rachamim’s wife’s grave and Rachamim’s father’s grave. I know where they are well because we’re there every year for the Haskara. So I took a little stone to each of their graves and thought of them, kind of said hello in my mind, and thought of them as people, and thought of my connection to them, and my kind of, I don’t know, connection to them, and a little bit a promise to them, to Rachamim’s wife, to try my best to take care of him, the best I could, since she can’t any longer in this world. And Rachamim’s father, just to respect him, he was good to me, included me in the family, and I liked him. He reminded me of my father. I mean, he was very different from my father in his life as a person. My father was a lot more gentle man than Rachamim’s father. But I knew him as an old man, and as an old man, he kind of looked—he looked a bit like my father as an old man. So anyway, after that, there were not brachot at the cemetery like usual at a haskara. There were not brachot. It’s not like a haskara. And I don’t know, there was probably a dinner for people. I don’t know. Anyway, we got a ride to Kiryat Gat with someone who was returning. We went straight from the cemetery to the train station, took the train home, and by the time we got home, it was probably quarter to 9, 8:30, quarter to 9, past 8:30, probably about quarter to 9 at night. And we were tired. And I sat at the computer for quite a few hours. I caught up on my Tanakh reading, because I forgot to read the Tanakh the night before I got ended up getting sleepy, and I forgot to read the Tanakh, so I needed to catch up. I did. I’m almost—we’re almost finished reading Judges. So anyway, and then I went to bed. It was kind of a very—that’s what filled my day. I didn’t have a lot of time to, I don’t know, decide what to do with myself. My day was more or—the actions of my day were more or less programmed. My mind was free to think about whatever I wanted, but my actions were decided in going to that Hovayah, and traveling down to Nogan, traveling back, you know, it takes time. So that’s what my day was. And I guess I will close this now and post it in a short while, and maybe read some Zohar.

Always in love and soul devotion.