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Other Nights — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:44:10 +0000

illustration by Avi Katz

“This night is no different from other nights,” says Pharaoh, “True, on previous nights I have had a son, and on this night I do not. But this is not relevant to what I must do now.”

“This time sounds different from other times,” says Mozart, “for in previous times I did not have a son, and now I do.”

What time is it? I write this two days before the Seder night. It will reach its readers a few days before Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen soldiers.

It is not a good time, I tell the friend who sits down next to me on the row of chairs outside the sanctuary. I have a glossed Haggadah open on my lap. I am trying to prepare for this year’s Seder, to think of how to retell, once more, the Exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the sea. Pesach is next week and my son Niot, who was a soldier, will have been dead for a year. The earth has circled the sun a single time since the last Seder, which was the last night he was with us. We are cleaning and preparing once more to eat matzah and bitter herbs and tell again the story of how we came out of Egypt. Two and a half weeks later we will again remember the fallen soldiers. But this year is different, for there is a newly fallen soldier to remember, and he is my son.

“This night is different,” says Alexander Pavlovsky, first violinist of the Jerusalem Quartet, “because Mark Kopytman is dead.”

“Shall I prepare the palace for mourning?” asks the chamberlain, weeping, for his son too is dead.

“You will not,” says Pharaoh. “To mourn is to repeat, rehearse, to wallow in death. In the face of catastrophe, we must not look back. Saddle my horse and muster the army.”

“D Minor?” asks the copyist, staring at Mozart’s staves. “But D Minor is the key of tragedy, of suffering. Your first son has just been born. Why this key?”

I cannot focus on the Haggadah nor on the huge backlog of work. Neither Ilana nor I have much strength for cleaning. There is a concert at the YMCA, I tell Ilana. The Jerusalem Quartet is playing Mozart, Kopytman, and Shostakovich. Just drop everything and go, says Ilana. It’s already ten after eight. I hop on my bike and speed down to the Y.

“We will now play for you,” says Alexander Pavlovsky, first violin of the Jerusalem Quartet, “Mark Kopytman’s String Quartet number four, which we have played many times before because of our long collaboration with this greatest of living Israeli composers. But now we will play it again and it will be different because Mark Kopytman is dead.”

A performance of chamber music is much like a Seder, I think to myself. A work of music is like a text read in different times and places, endlessly reinterpreted by players and listeners. Mozart’s string quartets were inspired by Haydn’s, and in turn inspired those of Beethoven, and later Shostakovich and Kopytman, the man who just died. If the Jerusalem Quartet played only newly-composed works at each concert, its audience would have no context, no tradition on which to base its experience of listening. If it played only Haydn’s quartets, it could never bring its audience to look forward and experience the new, rather than just experience anew. Kopytman’s quartet sounds weird and dissonant; even experienced audiences have trouble parsing it. But the same audience might delude itself into thinking it understands Mozart’s simply because melodies and structures that are familiar in form may seem, illusively, to be transparent.

The text of the Haggadah is like a string quartet. It has four movements, it goes slow and fast, varies from major to minor and modulates from key to key. It is interpreted and embellished differently in each year and by each family, for each Seder night is a different night. It can be puzzling and infuriating, seem beautiful in one place while dissonant in another. Yet if its puzzles and dissonances lead us to change the text or abridge it, we would be like a string quartet that plays only those themes and motives it likes from Mozart’s or Shostakovtich’s or Kopytman’s work, permitting itself to revise those parts it thinks the composer got wrong.

My Haggadah’s text has not changed this year, but it is entirely different, because last year was the last time I read it with Niot, and this year is the first year I will read it without him.

Remembering a fallen soldier is like listening to a recording of a concert. The abstraction of the music fills the ear but the eye cannot see and the arms cannot embrace.

On the night of the first Seder, Pharaoh has no time for texts or compositions. He hears no music; memories are a waste of time. His gaze is directed forward, not back, as he leads his army into the desert. His dead son was not so much a son but a sign, a symbol of the future of his dynasty and of the stability of his state. The fleeing slaves threaten the very foundations of his kingdom. Another heir can be sired, but without the slaves who will perform his empire’s hard labor?

The third movement of Mozart’s string quartet in D Minor, one of six inspired by and dedicated to Haydn, is a minuet, as the third movements of classical-period string quartets are supposed to be. But the minor key renders melancholy what should be a stately dance for a celebratory occasion. The dissonance between the nature of the dance and its sound is jarring. It is the sound of a dark and different night. But then comes the middle section, in which the dark clouds give way to a light and jumpy melody that sounds like children playing. But then the night returns, as if the children have died. Tears well up in my eyes. Was Mozart imagining that his newborn son might not survive?

On the Seder night we speak of four children. I have four children. This year, one is dead. Niot had wisdom, mostly of a commonsensical sort, and in his younger years he could be challenging and disobedient. He had a simple and pure love of other people and he asked many, many questions. On the afternoon after Seder night, I spotted him lying on a couch, reading a book. He did not often read books. He did not like string quartets, either. That night I drove him to a bus stop and let him off and said good-by, and did not see him again conscious and alive. This Seder night we will again speak of four children. Every year on Seder night, and not on Seder night, we will have four children. And one will be dead.

And on Memorial Day, two and a half weeks afterward, we no longer mourn only the sons of others. We mourn our son as well. He is buried in the Mt. Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem. The tulip bulbs his older sister planted on the grave have sprouted and are now starting to bloom.

To the best of my knowledge, no one in Egypt today mourns Pharaoh’s son. His grave is unknown. His dynasty ended long ago. The ancient kingdom of Egypt crumbled and the people who live in that land today speak a different tongue, worship a different God, and listen to different music. Pharaoh pushed forward. He had a kingdom to build, wars to win. There are no tulips. But each year the Jews take a drop from their wine glasses and set it aside, in memory of Pharaoh’s oldest son.

Kopytman’s string quartet is unexpected, at times lyrical, at times jarring. Pavlovsky and his three partners lunge, grimace, and grin as they play. It is a signature piece of theirs and they have not recorded it. It can be heard only when they play it with their arms and bodies. They first played it under the composer’s direction. But now he is an abstraction, and they continue to play without him.

A Seder is like the performance of a string quartet. The composer is long dead but the notes remain and we may play them as we see fit and as we feel best. On Memorial Day the players are dead as well. We can only recall the music in our minds. The music may be happy, but it does not lighten our hearts.

We continue to perform our Seder without Niot. We look backward, and forward, like a composer.

We now live in other nights.

******************************

The Niot Project, established by our family in Niot’s memory, in partnership with the Society for the Advancement of Education, Jerusalem, offers comprehensive assistance to Israeli teenagers with learning disabilities and their families. For more information, see The Niot Project on the SAE website.

See also:
The Day of His Birth (on SoJo)
June 6, 2011

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Driving Louella — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 19:07:11 +0000

Haim Watzman

Thanks to the editors at the Jerusalem Report for permitting me to post this before the current issue reaches subscribers, so that you can read this story before Pesach.

This is the story I tell my family every Seder night.

When I was about two years old, soon after my little brother Saul was born, my mother fell ill and was hospitalized for a time. My father, then covering City Hall for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, couldn’t handle a toddler and a baby on his own.

illustration by Avi Katz

My memories of that time are fuzzy around the edges, pervaded by a soft light like an ambient dawn. But they are real impressions of a time when I was journeying into consciousness, not long after I learned to talk, to turn feelings into words. In them my gaze is always directed upward, for nearly everything is bigger than me. Our modest suburban ranch house thus remains huge in my minds eye, centered on an endless corridor that had to be crossed to get from my bedroom to Mommy’s and Daddy’s, and to be run down to escape into the light of our living room with its wall-sized picture window. A troop of monsters, led by a sour-smelling pig, lived in a cavity in the corridor’s wall. At night they threatened to devour me.

Daddy needed a live-in nanny for us. In the late 1950s, in Cleveland, this meant a black woman from downtown. A series of matrons in long skirts and aprons made an appearance and then vanished. Sally said we were too noisy, Emma that we lived too far out. Cynthia simply stopped coming, without prior notice. In a dream from that time a dozen of them enter and leave the house in a line, like models on a fashion show runway.

Then Louella came and stayed. Dark, broad, taciturn, and creased, she was stern when that was required but smiled easily. She was very old, older than my grandmothers. She had sons and daughters and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Sometimes she’d bring one of them, a Joe or a Lloyd, to unplug a pipe or fix a fixture. She told us that her parents had been slaves in the south. She slept in the house’s third bedroom, which served during the day as a playroom for my brother and me.

After my mother came home, Louella kept living with us for a while, and then moved out of the playroom and started to come to us three times a week to clean, cook, and babysit. She’d bring gifts for Saul and me—boxes of Crackerjack, plastic balls, flashlights. In the evening, when my father came home from the paper, she’d serve dinner. Despite my parents’ endless pleadings, she refused to sit at the table with us and insisted on eating by herself in the kitchen.

In the summer of 1962 Daddy was assigned to cover a national mayors’ conference to be held in Miami Beach. Cleveland’s mayor, the earnest and dour Anthony J. Celebrezze, who had just won a record fifth term by a landslide, would be presiding. Mommy’s Aunt Lil and Uncle Sam ran a seedy hotel in nearby Hialeah, patronized largely by tinhorns who hung out at the nearby racetrack. So it was natural to make it a family trip. Louella’s people lived in Columbus, Georgia, and she asked if she could squeeze into our Rambler and be dropped off in Atlanta, where she could catch a bus. Daddy said she might run into trouble traveling with us. Louella said that as long as we told everyone that she was nanny to us kids, everything would be all right.

We set out on a fine summer morning in our 1957 Chrysler with the long back fins. Since I was the oldest, I got to sit behind Daddy. Saul had to sit on Louella’s other side, behind Mommy. I had a pile of books. Saul, who was already displaying the passion for organization and classification that would later make his side of our shared bedroom its only presentable half, had brought a pile of junk mail. When we weren’t counting telephone poles or red cars, I read and Saul meticulously removed the contents of each envelope, arranged the papers by size and color, and then stuffed the papers back into the envelopes in the order he thought fit. Daddy headed south, following the thick red line that the American Automobile Association had drawn on the rectangular, spiral-bound Triptik tour book. The interstate highway system was not yet complete, so the route followed old roads and involved a number of roads. Daddy had the navigational skills of a one-winged artic tern on drugs, so he was very tense. Mommy had to keep us busy with repeated games of Twenty Questions as he slowed down at each intersection, trying to figure out where to go. Sometimes he’d perform a last minute save when, in the middle of a turn, he suddenly realized that he really had to go straight. Fortunately, we were all held tightly in place with seatbelts, which Daddy, unfashionably for the time, had insisted on installing.

Daddy managed to get us to Cincinnati, and in the mid-afternoon we crossed a huge suspension bridge over the Ohio River which, Daddy told us, was formed by the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in Pittsburgh, where he had a cousin who’d married a Catholic, but not before the two of them had together converted to Presbyterianism.

To Mommy’s surprise, Daddy managed to take the right turn in Kentucky, which brought us that evening, as the Triptik promised it would, into the outskirts of Lexington. The Triptik had a list of recommended, AAA-inspected motels. We drove up to one of them and Daddy, Mommy, Saul, and I piled out of the car and entered a small lobby with mustard yellow wallpaper and green diamonds on the carpet. The man at the reception desk had wispy white hair brushed over a bald head. The buttons on his shirt strained slightly against the pressure of his paunch. He welcomed us with a smile.

Daddy asked for two rooms, one for him and Mommy and one for “the boys and their nanny.”

The man at the desk leaned toward us and peered out the glass door at our car.

“We can’t take colored people,” he said courteously.

“But she’s the boys’ nanny,” Daddy protested.

“The law doesn’t allow it. Not even nannies,” he explained patiently.

“Do you expect her to sleep in the car?” asked Mommy. “She’s old and unwell.”

“Not at all,” the desk clerk said. “You can take her to a colored hotel. She’ll be more comfortable there anyway.”

Mommy was astounded and furious, Daddy, who’d been in the army and seen segregation up close, was upset but not surprised. When we got back to the car, Louella insisted that the desk clerk was right, that it would be much nicer for her at a colored establishment. Daddy explained segregation to Saul and me. He told us that the Jews had been slaves in Egypt and that God did not like people to own other people, so he freed the Jews. But, Daddy explained, just not being a slave wasn’t enough. It was a long and winding road from there to being a truly free and equal human being. The Children of Israel had wandered through the wilderness for 40 years, taking this wrong turn and that wrong turn, before they reached their Promised Land. It was taking America’s Negroes a lot longer, but their time was coming.

Then we drove into the black section of town and found a two-story rooming house that looked just fine to Louella. Mommy wanted us all to check in there, but the soft-eyed man at the front desk there said that that would be impossible. On the way back to the white hotel Mommy yelled at Daddy for not setting an example for us boys by forcing the white proprietor to accept this black woman who was, after all, a member of our family. Daddy said that, like it or not, this was a fact of life south of the Ohio River.

The next morning we picked up Louella and headed south through Tennessee and into Georgia. We arrived in Atlanta toward nightfall and again Daddy tried to find a motel that would let Louella sleep with us. We went from one to another but found none. Finally Louella convinced him to stop. She asked to be dropped off at the Greyhound station, where she’d sleep on a bench and catch the first morning bus to Columbus.

We all accompanied her into the station’s cavernous waiting room. There was a white section, and beyond a divider a back, less well-lit space where black men in threadbare suits were stretched out on chipped plastic benches, their hands gripping long, thin paper bags. Daddy set down Louella’s suitcase and she told us that she’d be just fine and would see us back in Cleveland two weeks hence.

We reached Miami the next evening. First we stopped by to see Aunt Lil and Uncle Sam, walking into a large, stuffy lobby furnished with faded plush settees and slowly circling ceiling fans. There was also an upright piano, on which Uncle Sam played us some ragtime. They offered us rooms for free, but Mommy and Daddy didn’t think we should be keeping company with jockeys, so we headed to the height of Miami Beach ostentation, the Hotel Fontainebleu, where the convention was being held.

Mayor Celebrezze didn’t like Daddy much. Like politicians from time immemorial, hizzoner thought he was doing the best job he possibly could given the myriad obstacles and constraints he had to navigate, and couldn’t understand why the headlines didn’t proclaim this to the citizens of his great but troubled city each and every morning. Since my father at times quoted other politicians who said bad things about the mayor, he believed that Daddy was out to get him. But he knew that if he weren’t gracious the coverage would be even worse, so he invited Daddy and the family for dinner in the hotel dining room. Daddy suggested quietly to the mayor’s sidekick, Joe “the Moose” Ventura, that the Fontainebleu’s cuisine would be wasted on a six and four year old, but there was no way out. We were seated at a round table covered with a pristine white tablecloth. A black-suited waiter brought us menus that were almost as long as Saul was. Daddy and Mommy considered the options. Mayor Celebrezze rubbed his moustache as he went over the wine list. The Moose stared at me as if he had never seen anything my size before.

When the waiter came to me and Saul, we ordered hamburgers and French fries. The waiter pointed out that this was not on the menu. Daddy and Mommy suggested we try any of a number of other dishes we had never heard of. Saul and I made it clear, loudly, so that everyone would hear, that we would eat nothing but a hamburger and French fries. Mommy appealed to the waiter and Mayor Celebrezze exerted his influence. The waiter finally agreed to ask the chef to accommodate us but only on condition that it was clear to all of us that this was against his better judgment. He eventually returned with two beautifully garnished chopped sirloin steaks surrounded by sautéed potatoes that didn’t look like any French fries we had seen. There were no buns and no ketchup, so we didn’t eat much.

Soon thereafter, President Kennedy appointed Anthony J. Celebrezze to be Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. He served in that position for three years, and while historians say that he was not a particularly impressive figure nor the real power at HEW, he nevertheless played a role in the passage and implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial segregation and discrimination against blacks and women. He resigned the next year, claiming that he missed living apart from his family in Cleveland, but perhaps also because he heard that the Plain Dealer was assigning Daddy to its Washington bureau.

We, too, left Cleveland soon after that Florida trip. We moved to Columbus, Ohio, where we lived for three years before moving on to Washington. We left Louella behind. But she shows up every year at my Seder. And she sits with us at the table.

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Remembering Slavery

Haim Watzman — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:47:42 +0000

Haim Watzman

Adi Nes: Abraham and Isaac

Jews who grew up in the Diaspora and have raised children in Israel face a challenge at the Pesach Seder every year. The text of the Hagadah, and the spirit of the holiday, call on us to remember that we were slaves in Egypt, strangers in a strange land, outsiders. I grew up as a member of a minority. My children, on the other hand, have grown up as members of a majority that rules over a disadvantaged minority population. When I was a child, Pesach was my favorite holiday—its message resonated strongly with who I was. On Seder night, my own children clearly have a hard time seeing themselves as Others.

At this year’s Seder I’m going to focus particularly on this message. Fortuitously, I’ll have the help of a booklet of supplementary Hagadah readings published by Bema’agei Tzedek, an Israeli social and economic justice organization. Called Kriya L’Seder: A Call to Order! (and available only in Hebrew at present), the book let offers materials that seek to link the Jewish people’s experience of slavery and liberation to the injustices we see around us today.

Specifically, the booklet reminds us that slavery has neither vanished nor retreated to the far, benighted corners of the earth. As Israelis, we benefit from the labor of exploited foreign workers and maintain a law enforcement system that has allowed our country to become a world center for sexual slavery. Slaves, in short, are all around us.

Some of the most powerful illustrations in the booklet are from a series of images by the Israeli photographer Adi Nes. In his “Bible Series,” Nes photographed scenes in Israel and gave them biblical names. Two women scrounging for produce on the floor of an open-air market are captioned “Ruth and Naomi,” and a homeless man surrounded by ravens is labeled “Elijah.” The photographs shout the irony of how far Israel, the home of the Jews as a free nation, is from the ideals expressed by our sacred texts and how much we’ve failed to absorb the message of our seminal national experience as slaves ourselves. (Note that the page includes a link to a pdf file that contains a number of images from the series that don’t appear on the slide show.)

One of the readings the book offers is by Rabbi Yosef Sholim Eliyashiv, one of the leading halachic authorities for the Haredi community in Israel. Rabbi Elyashiv notes that when we read, at the beginning of the Hagadah, the passage that begins Kol dichpin—the invitation to the indigent to join us in the Seder—we are already sitting at our table. Logically, we should have made this declaration in public, in synagogue or on the street.

“The statement is not directed towards the poor,” he writes. “Rather, this is part of the precept of ‘telling your children’: “Know that the essence of Pesach is the concern that every human being have his needs provided for, and that no poor and hungry remain in at the time we are fit to be free people.”

It’s hardly surprising that for our children, who have grown up in their own country—one with real enemies—the part of the Pesach message that resonates most is the theme of freedom and victory over our oppressors. But the Seder needs to take them beyond what resonates naturally and to imbue them with an understanding that freedom isn’t free—it comes with an obligation to remember those who are still slaves, to help them achieve freedom, and to remember that it’s very easy for a proud and victorious majority not to see the slaves and the oppressed in its midst.

More of Haim’s thoughts for the Seder: Rav and Shmuel at the Gym: How Should We Begin the Passover Seder?

Rav and Shmuel at the Gym: How Should We Begin the Passover Seder?

Haim Watzman — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:41:44 +0000

Between sets of arm curls, Nahum walks over to me and says, “You’re familiar with the disagreement between Rav and Shmuel about the way the Seder should begin?”

Nahum doesn’t look like the kind who works on his biceps—he’s a slender guy in his mid-thirties who wears a black kipah and glasses. He resembles a teacher at a religious high school here in Jerusalem, which in fact he is.

But Nahum, like me, is a regular at the small weight room at the Jerusalem Pool on Emek Refa’im Street. We get a diverse crowd—men and women, jocks and schoolteachers, retired people and teenagers, Jews and Arabs, religious and non-religious; there’s even a macho ultra-Orthodox guy who lets out whoops when he lifts—but I’ll save him for another story.

The conversation, like the crowd, can come from all directions. Nahum is referring to the two leading Babylonian rabbis of the third century CE, whose disputes form part of the first layer of the Gemara, the Talmudic discussions of the laws laid down in the earlier Mishna. The Torah commands the Jews to retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt at a discussion-meal conducted by families on the first night of Pesach (Passover). Rav and Shmuel disagreed on how to begin telling the story, and their disagreement is recorded in the Haggadah, the book forms the framework of the Seder night.

The Mishna rules that the story should begin by telling of the dishonorable events and end with the honorable ones. The two sages differed on which dishonorable event begins the story of the liberation from slavery and the formation of the Israelite nation.

I’m doing leg stretches, so I hace to crane my neck to look at Nahum.

“Rav says we should begin with ‘Our forefathers were idolaters,’” he reminds me, “and Shmuel says we should begin with ‘We were slaves in Egypt.’”

“Yes, I remember,” I say, wiping my face with my towel. “So, like usual, we do both.”

“But Shmuel actually won,” Nahum points out, beginning another set of curls. “We say both, but we say Shmuel’s first. Now, what do you think they were arguing about?”

I’m grabbing on to the bottom of one of the elliptical machines with my legs spread apart as far as I can, trying to force my tight leg muscles into some semblance of flexibility.

“I guess Rav is saying that slavery didn’t begin with physical slavery in Egypt,” I suggest. “There was also the intellectual slavery of worshiping false gods, generations before Pharaoh enslaved us.”

“Think of it this way,” Nahum says. “If God saved us because we were slaves in Egypt, that means he saw us suffering, had pity on us, and freed us. That’s a God who hears the cries of the oppressed and comes to their aid. Whoever is oppressed can count on God’s help. That’s why the black slaves in the U.S. sang spirituals about Moses and Pharaoh.”

“Okay,” I grunt.

“But if the story of our freedom begins with the fact that we were idol worshipers, then it means that God didn’t save us because we were oppressed. And he didn’t save us because we were any better than anyone else. Everyone worshiped idols back then. God chose us simply because he chose us, and he took us out of Egypt for his own purposes, not because we were oppressed. He saved us, but he wouldn’t save other slaves.”

By this time, we’ve stopped our respective lifting and stretching.

“That’s jives with something else I think of every year when I’m preparing for the Seder,” I tell Nahum. “Every year I’m struck by the fact that the passage ‘our fathers were idolaters’ is followed by one in which we, following the sages, deliberately misread a passage from the Torah. I mean the one that begins Arami oved Avi. In the Haggadah, we read it as a reference to Laban, the father of Leah and Rachel who cheats Jacob by forcing him to work for him for twenty years in order to receive Rachel as his wife. But the verse obviously doesn’t refer to Laban the Aramean. The grammar and the syntax are such that it must mean ‘my father was a wandering Aramean.’ In other words, it refers to Abraham, who was in Aram when God first spoke to him. Abraham was originally an idolater. That’s what the verse tells us to remember.”

“How does that fit in?” Nahum asks.

“It tells us that Abraham wasn’t chosen by God because he was intrinsically better than the other people of his time. He proved himself to God by his actions, not because he was born better or born with some special gift from God. It’s a message a lot of religious Jews today seem to forget. Why do we deliberately misread the passage?”

“Maybe the Jews needed to hear about Laban oppressing Jacob more than they needed to hear about Abraham beginning life as an idolater,” Nahum suggests. “After all, in Babylonia they were a minority and often oppressed. The same for generations and generations afterwards.”

“Maybe that’s why Shmuel’s opinion got accepted,” I say. “His message resonated better with reality.”

“We were slaves in Egypt and we were like slaves in the Exile,” Nahum agrees.

“But maybe that’s the wrong way to begin today,” I muse. “Today, here in Israel, we’re not oppressed. In fact, harping on our past oppression can blind us to the fact that we’re a majority here and that we haven’t proven ourselves to be much better than other majority peoples in other places. We’ve done our own share of oppressing.”

“Well, if you want to get political about it…” Nahum says warily.

“Today we need to be told that we’re not intrinsically any better than any other people. We need to be reminded that God measures us by our actions, not our origins. And maybe that’s why both opinions got preserved in the Haggadah. Shmuel’s version is for the Exile, and Rav’s for the Jewish polity. Don’t forget that you, too, were idolaters—no different from Laban, no different from Pharaoh.”

“Okay, I see it,” Nahum says.

“I think I’ll use that at my Seder,” I tell Nahum. “If you don’t mind me plagiarizing you. And if I can get a word in edgewise.”

Nahum goes to do some bench presses. I head for the shower. I’ve done my daily workout.