In August in Tel Aviv there are at last days when the heat and
humidity slightly relent, a breeze blows in from the sea, and you
can walk to the supermarket and back — at least in the morning —
without breaking into a sweat. There’s a mood both of summer —
which began quite some time ago — lengthening into endlessness and
of intimations of its inevitable demise.
The seafront area seems to get more crowded than ever, and it
would make sense with much of the world on vacation and
particularly France. You hear so much French down there in August
that I nickname the area “Little France.” Many of them are French
Jews who have bought apartments in Tel Aviv and come to live in
them only in August. It’s created a scarcity of apartments in the
city and driven rentals sky-high, a reality I’m all too familiar
with. Yet I’m happy to hear the French down at the seafront — it
not only sounds nice but means that we who live here all year round
have given French Jews an Israel they can be connected to and
visit, and maybe even come to permanently if things get rough
enough in France.
At night, though, the seafront becomes so enjoyable that it’s
possible — for intervals — to remove even thoughts on that level
of “ideology” from my head. Particularly charming are the cafes
that spread chairs out on the beach next to red or orange
cone-lights, so we can sit under the stars watching the waves and
the airplane lights float in — it goes well with a glass of
cabernet sauvignon. There’s trouble even in paradise: this summer
these cafes have decided it’s most profitable for them to attract a
youthful clientele and so they play awful music over their PA
systems, brute rhythms and ugly electronic sounds; still, troubled
paradise is not a bad place to be.
If someone were to come at these moments and ask me some of the
questions that have been plaguing me for almost three decades —
How successful is the Zionist experiment? How does a country of
mostly secular Jews fit into Jewish history? Is it a break with the
past or a continuation of it? — I’d probably answer: I don’t know,
I’m having too much fun. That Israel could be this much fun was one
of the discoveries of coming here — and there are certain more or
less objective reasons for it. The Tel Aviv seafront, for instance,
is crowded with hotels and cafes but without strip joints and the
like, and it’s not at all unusual to see families with little kids
here at midnight and beyond. This blend of nightlife and
wholesomeness, the lack of menace, produces a sense of freedom — a
sense almost of regained youth, being able to go where you want
when you want; and in that there’s a lot of elation.
It can’t last too long, of course, the suspension of “ideology”;
a different kind of menace hangs over this place, even more than in
the past, and it takes on depths and dimensions beyond spontaneity
and fun. With fall will come the High Holidays, the profound
optimism of Rosh Hashanah and profound somberness of Yom Kippur,
phenomena felt throughout the society from the most pious to the
most liberated. I’ll keep reading ever-more-perturbing reports
about weapons development and weapons smuggling, and I’ll stick
with my questions — What is the meaning of the Jewish state? Does
God care about it? Did it make Jews normal or even more different?
— even though by now I’ve at least made enough progress to know
I’m never going to answer them and they’re with me for good like a
counterpoint, a tune.
Still I’ll take what August in Tel Aviv gives me — a sense of
largesse (summer will last forever) and a sense of reassurance (it
won’t last forever, it won’t always be this humid), a teeming
seafront at night, a patter of French and Hebrew, airplane lights
floating in, that sense of festive spontaneity I love without
knowing what it means.
