24/10/97

The Post-Holiday Holiday Season

Now this country can get moving again ג€“ well, at least until the next holiday gets close.

    For the Jewish People of the  Jewish State, these are hallowed days, the sacred time of year devoted to reflection, regrets and redemption.
    I am not talking about the holidays. I'm talking about after the holidays.
    "Aharei ha'hagim," as they like to say locally.
    If you haven't noticed, nothing gets done in this country before a holiday. Not merely the day or two before, mind you. Weeks.
    Nobody wants to start anything before the holidays, and the way things are done here, nothing ever gets finished, so to play it safe, everyone promises to get cracking just as soon as the holidays are over.
    In other words, from today.
    Today, 98 percent of Israelis will participate in at least one  conversation that starts with "Nu?"
    "Nu? You promised to put in the new floor just after the holidays."
    "Nu? You were going to clean out the boidem right after the holidays."
    "Nu? The holidays are over. You promised to look for a new job."
    And the answer is always the same: "What, start something new, with Hanukka just around the corner?"
    The school system, too, has successfully integrated Jewish holidays into its schedule. Every year, the school year commences right on time -- a month late, just after the holidays. The reason nobody takes seriously the annual threat of a school strike, is that it's timed for the start of the school year. That's bad timing. If they were smart, they'd start the strike just after the holidays.
     Who can learn a hypotenuse hypothesis with all those interruptions every few days? Nobody teaches, nobody learns, as long as there's a holiday coming or going. That's because it takes time to prepare for, and recover from, every religious experience.
    It's nutty. The High Holidays we've just been through consist of a grand total of five holy days (some of which usually manage to fall on a weekend). Why that has to kill the entire month I don't know. Pessah is only a week long, but the schools close for something like 19 days. Succot? Eleven days off. Shavuot, another three. Hanukka is treated like eight Days of Awe: God forbid the children of Israel should attend classes during a holiday whose most meaningful religious activity is grating potatoes.

IF NOT for Jewish holidays, what this country could have achieved by now!
    The state has a patent-pending on the process. It emerged in the Post-Austerity Posterity Era of the late-'50s. At the time, there was plenty to do (nation-building, refugee-rescuing, marauder-defending, etc.), but it was a time of patriotism, so everyone was expected to work like a dog for neither money nor thanks. (Israelis at the time were paid gruschim, which was not hard currency but rather an economic theorem, akin to the Bupkes of the New World. The reason for this is, the country had no money yet. That would come much later, with the creation of the New Israeli Shekel, or NIS.)
    Anyhoo, people started looking for excuses not to work. You didn't have to be extremely Orthodox to catch on to the fact that the day of rest actually began the previous evening. (Still does.) And you didn't have to be extremely Orthodox to milk that sucker for all it was worth. (Then as now.) Thus, Sabbath Eve, even for the extremely secular, began not at Friday sundown, but at sunup. Friday became a dead day.
    Naturally, no one was going to start anything they couldn't finish, which killed Thursdays as a day of productivity -- and after being idle for three straight days, who had the inclination to go full tilt on Sundays?
    That's how the four-day Israeli weekend came to be, but something still had to be done about the other three days. The obvious solution was "aharei ha'hagim" -- after the holidays. Then somebody noticed that every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of the year follows one hag or another.
    That brought up an obvious problem.
    The solution was ingenious: foreign workers. They don't know from Shabbat, Erev Shabbat, erev hag, hagim or aharei ha'hagim; they get a day off once a year, on Christmas -- and if you're Moslem, not even that. (For that reason, the Six Day War was held.)
    That was supposed to solve everything, but it didn't, because the bosses were still restricted by the Jewish calendar. And so today, it's not that you can't find anyone to do work in the months before a Jewish holiday; you can't find anyone to do the bossing.
    What were we talking about?
    Right.
    So today is officially Aharei Ha'hagim. A month of worklessness, following two months of inactivity, has come to an end. Promises made, projects delayed, foundations laid -- today, the nation rolls up its sleeves.
    In theory.
    In practise, "aharei ha'hagim" works out something like this...
    "Look, I know what I promised. That was long ago. Did I know my supplier was going to go abroad davka today? What can I say -- he promised his family they'd go to Disneyland after the holidays."
    "OK, when he gets back then..."
    "Sure! No problem! First thing in the morning, the moment he lands, I swear, we'll start working on our client backlog, and as soon as it's your turn, I don't care if it's lunchtime or what, I'll have the supplier order the parts you need so that with any luck, if they arrive in time, we can get started on the work immediately after the hagim. Is that fair or what?"
    "You mean I gotta wait till Hanukka?"
    "No. Pessah. Like I said, with any luck."
    Eventually, you might get lucky and say "nu?" on one of the handful of days in the year when no one has an excuse. It isn't the day before, of, or after Shabbat; the last holiday was more than 10 days ago, and the next isn't for a long time, Jewish-calendarly speaking.
    That's when it becomes necessary to evoke the all-weather substitute for "after the holidays" -- the last resort, without which this great country never would have got this far:
    "Tomorrow. Try again tomorrow."