Most things about Israeli culture I find myself adjusting to comfortably. I've been here for a while, and with my religious approach of "negation of the galut", I try to make myself feel at home.
But there are still a few things that bug me. They're minor things, so I imagine they'll be hard to describe, but described they will be. Here are two:
- Rhythmic Clapping. I'm talking about when audiences start clapping with the exact same beat. When it would happen on David Letterman's show he would get a hypnotized look on his face. But there it would either happen coincidently, or at most an intentional "gag" by the audience to get at Dave. But here, they seem to think that it is the proper way to clap. One of Israel's more moronic TV shows - Dudu Topaz - would always start that way. I'm not sure which I hated more...
- Rhyming. In America, rhyming is reserved for nursery rhymes, limericks, and some songs. For some reason, in Israel when you want to say something serious in public - you'd better do it in rhyme. You see this at school/kindergarten parties, goodbye parties at work, etc. The main "speech" is always written in rhyme, and has the same dull rhythm. Now what really gets me, is that in English, it takes some skill to rhyme. (If you recognize the title of this post from the Princess Bride movie, then read the book to see just how Fezzik got to his rhyming skills and how difficult it was for him.) But in Hebrew, it takes no effort to rhyme at all! Both nouns and verbs have such standard suffixes, that rhyming happens without intent. After a recent such "rhyming speech" at my son's school party, I had to wonder if Ariel Sharon also gave a rhyming speech at the cabinet meeting when he fired the ministers of Mafdal or Shinui...
|