One of the first things I learned (the hard way) when we moved to Israel seven years ago is that if you read the newspaper everyday and listen to the news every hour like real Israelis do, you will go nuts. I am not joking. You won't recognize the symptoms immediately but slowly you will notice that you are dragging yourself around and feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders. It happened to me. I couldn't figure out what was bothering me so much until one day a friend asked me if I read the newspaper everyday and when I said "absolutely" she told me to stop immediately.
For a news-a-holic like me that was like giving up cigarettes or coffee cold turkey. The mere suggestion sent me into a full-fledged panic. However, I was curious to see if she was right, so I reluctantly (if you have read my previous posts, you will notice that I have a life history of reluctant behaviour) decided to try it.
Oh Lord I hate when people say things that I think are stupid and they turn out to be right.
I was raised on reading the paper. My father had a rule when I was a kid that no one was allowed to dismantle the newspaper until he got home in the evening and had the first turn reading it. I used to bend back the pages delicately trying to grab whatever I could from the page segments, without disrupting the paper one iota.
Later, when I went to work, reading the papers in the morning was part of my job (how convenient). Keeping an eye on the business and political world was actually expected of me.
And then I reached the pinnacle of Newsville when we moved to Israel where, in many cases, life pretty much comes to a grinding halt when the hourly news reports come on the radio. Just try to speak out loud on a city bus when the bus driver (and most of the riders) are listening to those hourly reports. You can try it -- if you don't mind walking the rest of the way after the driver and the riders scream at you and throw you off the bus. I am only exaggerating very slightly here.
We also have good friends from Jerusalem who won't visit us for a Jewish Sabbath because they know we don't use electricity during the Sabbath and the husband of this couple can't imagine 25 hours without the news. The thought of it literally leaves him speechless. My son Zeve -- who is only 11 -- follows the same rules on weekdays.
This simply doesn't happen in Canada. And I don't say that lightly. I read the Toronto papers every day hoping to find some real news. (This does not include the daily shootings -- which have become so routine that I don't consider them newsworthy anymore.) According to my non-scientific study, real news occurs approximately once a month and Canadians, as a result, are not news sensitive. Who can hold their breath to see what is going to happen next, when "next" could easily be 30 days away????
Here, the next crisis is usually about 20 minutes away. Either someone new hates us, someone wants to threaten our very existence, someone managed to try to threaten our very existence and therefore all traffic to Tel Aviv is at a standstill..... you get the idea. Living in Israel means never relaxing and forgetting where you are.
And don't underestimate what this does to a person. Spend a week telling yourself that the better part of the entire world's population blames everything from world hunger to nuclear proliferation to the world economic crisis on you. I'[m telling you.... it wears you down.
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