Today’s meeting took place under the present extreme heat wave.
Rami felt responsible for the participants’ health and notified them that “it’s better to stay home today”… but, (I allow myself to quote singer Sanderson…) – “We still made it”.
The place we usually sit in our circle is a few degrees cooler thanks to the wind, the shade of the trees and the spot’s altitude compared to its surroundings. But come on, 43 degrees centigrade in the shade…
Rami and I took off our shirts… Not a very attractive sight, but when it’s so hot and no women guests arrive, we take them off…
After going over the “angry” whatapp messges about our coming anyway, we began talking about old books, especially Rami and Shmulik.
Nahshi and I were more interested in the bread and olive paste that Nahshi brought long. And the coffee.
Shmulik spoke about old book stores in Tel Aviv and Rami about the book collection of the late Meir Buchsweiler who had been a member of Kibbutz Be’eri.
Suddenly, as some desert mirage, a car passed by with a man and a woman. Like survivors on some desert island we waved our arms, all four of us, but they didn’t even open a window to ask what… The heat had beat even curiosity.
Rami brought a subject that was put more or less as follows: since the 1880s, namely about 140 years, Zionism exists. It can be either totally justified, or totally negated. But if each of us had the chance to mark the point during that time when s/he began to doubt the justification of Zionism, where does this point lie on the timeline amidst the historic events… Fascinating! We all spoke and brought up emotion versus knowledge, books and facts, world history events versus local ones, and more.
Coming to our spot, we had thought the hot weather would shorten our meeting and we’d leave after maximum 2 hours. However, the talk became interesting and a breeze coming from Gaza’s beach improved things.
At 15:15 Uri came after Nahshi assured him we’re still there. He joined Shmulik, Rami, Nahshi and Oded.
As I wrote, we filled the weekly time quota of our circle, and finally got into our cars and turned on the air conditioning…
That’s it.
Wrote: Oded