And he said, oh yeah, we have a word for that, תכלס - tachless.
“Speaking ‘tachless’” means speaking to the point – delivering a clear and unambiguous message. Saying “In ‘tachless’…” means “the essence is…”. In recent years (as a part of a slang trend), Israelis even started saying “tachless” as a stand alone word, meaning “I completely agree with what you just said, you spoke to the point!”.
-From here.
I agree that this is something I love about Israeli culture, I love that they tell it like it is.
A lot has been written about the physicality of Israel. For all the laws in the Tanakh dedicated to farming practices, before the founding of the modern state of Israel, most Jews around the world were far removed from working the land. They were forced into insular communities and were often the only ones in said community able to read and write, or for religious purposes lend money (a problem that entire books have been written about, see History of the Jews for a start...), so they had lots of middle-man type jobs... clerks, doctors, lawyers, bankers... and then of course you had those that learned texts all day and led purely religious lives. But the point is, you didn't find a lot of Jewish farmers or laborers in Europe.
Which adds to the marvel of the nation's modern founding because, like I talked about in the last entry, you have all these teenagers who came from communities in which they what - studied Torah? Trained in the law? Studied finance? And now they were creating farming communities and building homes and digging drainage ditches and fighting in skirmishes. In the new Israel, Jews had to fill out every level of society, yes, there was a Jewish Prime Minister, but there were also lots of Jewish farmhands. It wasn't just this insulated, ghetto-ized Jewish middle class.
Israel changes me a lot, and one of the ways I like best is it gets in there with a crow bar and pries me out of my head. Not (necessarily) because I'm Jewish, maybe just because I'm a nerd, in the states I basically live in my head. I have an intellectual career, I studied very text-based topics in undergrad and grad school, I'm a writer, I'm attracted to cerebral pursuits always. Most of my life I've been preparing myself to be a professor of one sort or another. Gabi pointed me to Ken Robinson's talk on creativity in education chiefly for this quote: "There's something curious about professors... they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. Don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings."
In Israel I lose interest in those things pretty quickly. I still love Tanakh study but mostly because of how exciting it is to study Jewish history and law in a place where it is lived and real.
Lived and real, I guess that's what I'm trying to get at. In the States I run once or twice a week, in Israel I go for a run almost every day. I love the Jerusalem hills and the air here, I love getting to know the city this way. And I'm surrounded by vegetable markets and I love to buy them and chop them up and cook them and eat them. I'm so much more interested here in what comes out of the land and what enters my body. And I keep kosher here (in a general sense) so I'm already more mindful of what passes into my bloodstream. I love hiking (I think everyone here loves hiking?) and the beach and touching how warm the stones are in Jerusalem, and sitting in the sun and baking like a soft, white, American potato. And I have to drink so much more water here, just constantly chugging it, and every street has enormous fruit trees on it, their branches all weighed down by it, and flowers of every color are always literally spilling over fences and into the road. Everything is just so tactile here, people are more tactile too, both in their affection and when they shove you out of the way because they want to get on the bus first.
At the Dorot alumni panel, one thing Aaren said really stuck with me. She said "When I was in the states, I was really square. Just square, in every way. And on Dorot I thought what I wanted to do was thoroughly un-square myself. And I set out to do whatever would most un-square me."
I think that I love travel and risk-taking and putting myself out there too much to be VERY square, but I'd like to be even less so. And I've been thinking about what un-squaring would look like for me personally, and I think that whatever it is will be a physical process.
-Tons of yoga?
-Volunteer on a kibbutz doing manual labor?
-Cooking classes?
-Some kind of orienteering class?
-Some kind of really uncomfortable, long hike?
-Diving in Eilat?
-Learning to boat?
-Getting a personal trainer and doing something with weights?
You guys know me. What would unsquare me? What normal patterns of mine do you think I need to challenge?
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