Twice a day I say all kinds of things to many people. From eight in the morning until half past nine on network 13, together with my fellow panelists at Geula Even, I say things and according to the rating index there are 100 thousand people who listen. Later in the evening, from six to eight, I speak on the radio, and according to the TGI index, there are tens of thousands more people listening. In between I have no one I can say anything to. In between I’m alone, walking around my apartment in masterly silence and not meeting anyone, or rather no one, and I still haven’t decided if it’s great or it’s horrible.
After a decade and a half or so where I was always part of a couple, part of a double room and a shared life, suddenly I am alone, with no one to tell me to close the closet after I take clothes out of it and not to throw the clothes on the floor. And now I’m getting used to it and I take out clothes and close the closet by myself and hardly ever throw clothes on the floor, and there’s no one to wake me up, but still, occasionally, I have the urge to do it and wait for someone to come and wake me up to close the closet and pick up the clothes.
I don’t really meet new women. Most of the people around me say it’s good, some say I’m not ready yet, and some say it’s time for me to be alone for a bit and learn to really know myself. I’m not sure I really want to know myself, but I’m trying. For years I could hide from myself and be part of two and it was quite nice.
When you’re in a relationship, you don’t have too much time to think about things, there’s always something to do or someone to tell you that something needs to be done. And if there are children in this relationship, then you don’t have a free moment at all, and most of the time you find yourself wandering to the supermarket and coming back each time with a different loot. Sometimes it’s diapers and wipes, and another time it’s similac and diaper paste. I remember that one day not long ago, when I was standing in line at the cash register at a supermarket, I tried to calculate the total amount of time that I had stood in line in this place in my life, and I came to a result that said that in total I had about a day and a half (36 hours) spent waiting in line at the cash register at a supermarket.
I can’t tell if I like this felt or not. There are moments in a relationship that are a tsunami of happiness that you will never reach when you are alone, and there are moments of peace and quiet that you can only reach when you are alone. In general, a relationship, it seems to me, is most of the time noise and sometimes it is music. But when it’s music, it’s the most amazing music you can hear. Except that I am now outside the concert hall, and I am trying to understand what is being done here outside the hall and how urgent it is for me to enter it again.
My father died at the age of 68, and a month before he died he finished writing a script for an autobiographical film. He described the second scene that takes place in his bedroom as follows: “In the almost total darkness, you can see bowls, a window, a pile of papers, a double bed, half empty and the other half full of Esi, 67 years old, half naked, next to him is a dresser with a telephone and a reading lamp and a clock that claims that It’s 05:00. The rest of the bed is ‘covered’ with stacks of paper printed in Hebrew and English. Next to them is a tray with an empty coffee mug, an ashtray full of stubs, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, reading glasses.’
For a long time now I have been asking myself if I, too, am on my way to ending up in a bedroom dripping with loneliness and emptiness. Will my bedroom look like this too? My father didn’t want to end up like that either, but on the other hand he wasn’t ready to do the most important thing for maintaining a relationship, which is to compromise. He didn’t compromise on anything, lived his life like Frank Sinatra – in his own way – and achieved great things and lived an interesting life, but in the end he died alone and lonely. All the awards that were around him in his bedroom and all the posters of 18 films he wrote and directed and became classics did not comfort him and did not overcome the vacuum of loneliness.
Many times during my wanderings in the 90 square meters of my apartment I think to myself how will I manage not to reproduce the Time.news of the destruction? How do I get out of the hereditary crash course I’m on? What should be done? I have already gathered some conclusions and drawn some lessons, and I believe that soon the investigative committee that I lead will announce what its conclusions are and what are the recommendations for the way forward.
I think that above all and even before my personal attempt to run away from the gospel, I would not want my children to see me and draw the conclusions I drew when I looked at my father. And actually also about my mother. My father was a member of a Rabbinical family and married four times, my mother three times. I also visited the rabbinate once and became another item in the collection of failed couples who go through the rabbinate.
“You and I – we are the same,” said my mother, who in her third round found her the best partnership that could be asked for, “we need difficulties and failures to find what we really need.”
“How do I know what I need?” “You’ll know when you meet it,” she said. But in the meantime, in the battlefield of loneliness called “my home” I don’t meet anyone, I wander around without encountering anyone, and the closest I get to social dynamics is when I fill a cat with food in a bowl and give it a few caresses. I walk back and forth and sometimes I stop and look at one picture of her standing on the bookshelf. This is the only picture I have where both me and my mom and dad are in it. Both my parents are smiling, and my father is holding me in his arms. A record of a rare moment, a second before the chaos begins.
I’ve been there many times, in those moments a second before the mess starts, and I’ve always acted in the worst way possible. Somewhere I always felt that this was my destiny, that I was condemned to repeated visits to the rabbinate. But lately I have started to understand that there is no such thing as fate. Most of the times I declared to myself and others that something was in the possession of “fate” was only because I did not want to take responsibility and preferred to remain in a passive position in the face of life. Contrary to the rules of Greek tragedy, you have the option of escaping your fate, but it involves a lot of work. And God, how I hate to work.
Sometimes I extend my wandering range in my house and go for a light stroll in the garden. Not long ago I planted daffodils there, in one of the beds. In the world of flower interpretation, daffodils are attributed a meaning of rebirth and a new beginning. In the meantime, my daffodil flowers have not yet sprouted and popped above the ground in the bed, but I’m waiting. I have time and I have patience.