There's a demon within me

Let me tell you about a friend of mine. I hate him. He's so toxic.

~~~

Yoni Tzahal hates the english language. He really does not like activism. He hates the DSA meetings.

Yoni Tzahal misses the Israelis he went to yeshiva with. He wishes he could talk to them on the phone. He feels like they understand him better than these American activists he surrounds himself with.

He doesn't understand activists, especially in the U.S. All this time spinning their wheels, never getting anything done. Just whining about how bad things are in the world. When they very clearly have pathologies in their personal psychology. Running around collecting petitions, endlessly whining about all the helpless victims in the third world, never understanding that they are the broken ones. That the people they seek to save are infinitely more resourceful and happy than they will ever be. If they were ever willing to confront their own neuroses and complexes.

Yoni Tzahal really really hated being at Yale. He hates being on his laptop. He'd rather be blown up in an IDF tank than look at a fundraising spreadsheet for even one second.

He wishes he had stayed in Israel after yeshiva. Maybe gone to jail as a draft dodger, and then figured out what would be next. Anything to get out of America, and certainly to get out of Yale.

Yoni Tzahal was actually pretty happy at the bike co-op in New Haven. And at Wolf Creek, and at La Dolina. But Yoni Tzahal has no idea what he is doing in San Francisco. Staring at a screen all day. 

Doing little activism things for Palestine, even though they don't seem to accomplish anything.

Working on electoral campaigns for DSA even though there is nothing he hates more than knocking on doors.

I'm not sure if Yoni Tzahal wanted to serve in the IDF. But he definitely prefers the company of Israelis over Americans, who he finds neurotic, ego-centric, and allergic to literally everything.

Yoni Tzahal hates nothing more than white American leftists and liberals. At least the neurotic and ego-centric ones, which is most of them. 

What does Yoni Tzahal enjoy in San Francisco? Boxing. He only takes boxing classes from the black instructors at the studio. They just have a rhythm and style that the white instructors will never have. 

He loves his girlfriend. She's really hot.

The rest is fucking terrible. Maybe he should have stayed in Israel.

Yoni Tzahal loves it when he finds some hardcore communists. Especially communists from communities of color. The rest can fucking burn. The laptops, the spreadsheets, the plague of white activists.

~~

Yoni Tzahal is jealous of the camaraderie that his Israeli friends enjoy when they serve together in the IDF.

Yoni Tzahal is lonely. Yoni Tzahal cannot find his purpose. Yoni Tzahal is incapable of working hard because nothing seems worth it. Yoni Tzahal cannot find people he relates to. People who he connects with emotionally or energetically. 

Yoni Tzahal hates his current labor organizing job. He can't find the motivation to look at these stupid spreadsheets.

~~ 

Yoni Tzahal is jealous of the Israelis he knows. Jealous of their tans, their enhanced physical abilities compared to the neurotic, allergic and pale American Jews he grew up with.

Yoni Tzahal liked playing hockey when he was younger. School was fine, and he was pretty good at it. But he didn't love it. He liked playing hockey. And helping his dad grill steaks the one or two times per year that his Dad would quit whining about leaving Israel and do something helpful around the house.

Yoni Tzahal always enjoyed speaking Hebrew, and he felt very proud to be such a proficient reader and writer of Hebrew. No one in his grade, except for the Israelis, could speak and read Hebrew as well as he could. And he didn't have to try too hard either. That's his favorite thing. Being head and shoulders above others without breaking a sweat. The second something becomes too much of an effort he loses interest. What's the point in being great if you have to try. That's the definition of mediocre.

~~

I think about: what if I had decided to stay in Israel after the year I spent in yeshiva. I think that would have made my Dad and grandfather really happy. I think my Dad would have told me he was proud of me. And meant it. And asked me questions about how I was doing. And go out of his way to visit me. And bring me food. Pat me on the shoulder firmly and tell me he was proud of me. I never got that from him. Not at Yale not anywhere. Hardly. 

When I was at Yale, he would just message me once a week or so to ask whether I was sleeping well or eating well. Nothing else. I think he wanted to be in touch more at the time but I was too angry with him to indulge him. For moving back to Israel, for all the ways he'd been cruel to my mom over the course of 16 years prior.

~~

I remember my freshman year at Yale. I had this consistent pain in my chest. I remember it felt connected to a constant self consciousness. Always wanting to seem smart and sophisticated but never wanting others to perceive that that was something I wanted. Wanting to read lots of books and be in the know, and be seen for how well read I was. And that seemed to manifest in this chest pain that would not go away.

Except when I got high. And the pain in my chest would melt. As well as the self consciousness. And I could just space out and become completely absorbed in the music I was listening to, or natural beauty around me, or the humor in a joke someone told.

~~

There were a few things Yoni Tzahal enjoyed at Yale. Not much but a few. In terms of the classes, the only one that really stuck with him was his European Intellectual History class, especially the Heidegger lectures. Mostly he hated being at Yale. Everything filtered through laptops, iphones and apple technology. He missed being at yeshiva in Israel were there were no devices in the bet midrash, and study was considered holy, something done for it own sake, not because of the fellowships or awards that won would win. And all the CS majors holy crap. "Gotta grind, bro." 

At least if he had stayed in Israel he'd be around Hebrew speakers. And if people were going to slave away for the military industrial complex (a phrase he only learned in his sophomore or junior year but would immediately act like he'd known it forever) at least he would enjoy some camaraderie in the tank before being blown to pieces.

The Heidegger lectures were cool, though. In an austere lecture hall, the professor lecturing in a room filled with a few hundred students. You could take notes by hand, and imagine that you were Arendt or Levinas or Marcuse, studying in Heidelberg in the 1940s, sitting in rapt attention as the University descends into an orgasmic wave of pro-Nazi sentiment. You know, how college was in the good old days. The way it was supposed to be. Your professors lectures on the finitude of human life in the face of the imminent death we all face -- how all our human projects, language, culture, technology, make sense only against the horizon of death, which is not so much an event as the invisible screen that lurks behind every facet of our reality, a kind of invisible fourth dimension -- as the Nazis take power and the professor himself lurches into Nazism. If a university is going to be swept up into fascism, will you at least do me the courtesy of assigning me print copies of books and letting me take notes by hand, Yoni would sit and mutter to himself.