In these days of the end of 12/<>, my round face will look at you from the Keshet <> screen as part of the TV show "The Winning Kitchen", in which I competed together with my partner Haim Levinson, and we even achieved great achievements. It was excellent, hardworking, interesting, multi-watching, tasty and helpful.
Truth be told, in the two weeks that the show aired, I was surrounded by love and attention at an addictive rate. I won't be sorry to admit that I know that the main reason is that I'm a good guy, and that my partner's and my teaming turned out to be smart and that our other fellow participants are also good and pleasant and very famous and that I talked to the matter and cooked well (most of the time) and that the people who make and broadcast this series are TV geniuses. It's all true - but it's not just that.
What I discovered, for the millionth time or so, is that people in this country love to watch food shows on TV. There is no need to analyze ratings tables. Just believe the guy that what he's been doing for the last 20 years is broadcasting food shows on TV. Israelis are addicted to food shows.
Israelis are addicted to food shows. With Haim Levinson in "VIP Winning Kitchen", Photo: Channel 12
Over the years I've been hosting food shows on TV, not to mention the recent ratings craze week, I've received responses from men and women I never would have imagined could sit tensely in front of a screen and grade plates and looks, coherence and textures, and a fusion of flavors. When a car pulled up next to me this week and a Supreme Court judge made a comment about Kugel, I realized there was something here.
It doesn't take a great genius to interpret this popularity. Food is life. Food is culture, food is story, food is mother. Food is music, food is painting. But then came another floor: food is escapism in its purity. This whole world, of dealing with food and preparing food and competing for food, is essentially a distraction and a transition to a better world. It takes place in a nature-culture-personal pleasure triangle. It's completely disconnected from everything that is fighting and kicking and happening now.
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And this is interesting, because the truth is that there is another genre of TV shows that Israelis are addicted to, and that is, as we know, current affairs broadcasts. After all, even factually, when you turn on a TV in Israel from three o'clock in the afternoon, you can see only current affairs programs in which the presenters change and the content and interviewees remain exactly the same: news and current events, current affairs and news, in addition to radio broadcasts, pushes, breaking news and morning newspapers. All this creates the following impossible situation: Israelis are addicted to current events and escapism. For the news and distraction from the news. This is not normal. Admit.
It's called stability. It's called peace. I don't know if this is a Jewish, Israeli or universal issue, but it turns out that the ultimate generational aspiration is not joy, and certainly not that unclear word "happiness," but peace and stability. That's what people want. They want safe, peaceful and stable ground.
The yearning is for simple normalcy, which has a beginning and a middle and an end. Which is a bit boring, in the good sense of the word, but pulls strongly to the base in terms of permanence and stability. of the world behaving as it does. Food, I noticed, does this operation perfectly. Not necessarily the act of eating – which, of course, is also an immediate balm for any trouble – but the preoccupation with food and especially with the worlds of food. After all, dealing with food, even when it comes to professional and Michelin food, is not just an occupation of recreation and lifestyle and leisure. He touches on all of these, but he does it by dealing with the most basic, primordial and stable thing: food. This can be the composition of a sophisticated dish with rare ingredients, but in the end - it is food. And food soothes and stabilizes and erases wrinkles and pushes away trouble.
Do you know what else does this action? Current events, as a matter of principle. I have already described here before the moment of happiness I experienced when I discovered that a long and endless traffic jam was caused not by a demonstration but by road works. There is nothing like "what's happening now" to give a sense of normalcy and stability. As long as there is a pipe that bursts, it means that there is a system of pipes. As long as there is a traffic jam - it means that work is being carried out on the road.
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It's true that lately we've wisely taken pains to turn current events into a long series of chaos in which there is hardly a single latent anxiety disorder that doesn't arise in a panic, but that's what the food plans are for. Even those who are addicted all afternoon to intravenous anxiety-promoting news reports, who do not miss a single flash, need Haim Cohen and Ruthy Brodo to taste and correct, teach and enjoy. Because it screams stability and normalcy in every mouth. No matter what has happened so far, it restores sanity, stability. A world where people talk about veal almond textures (oh, that was awesome! thanks to Sapir and Lior Narcissus) is normal.
In fact, there are explicit lines in our rich heritage that speak to just that: "Next year we'll sit on the porch and count migrating birds." For years I've been obsessed with the meaning of this strange wish, which sounds like an explicit blessing for a stroke. On the balcony, with the dedicated foreign worker, an apron, Quaker porridge, migrating birds. Five. Six. Ten. Fifty. Come on, Dad. Go in to take a shower. What exactly is it? Isn't it better: "Next year we'll go to San Francisco and check out some restaurants there," or even "Next year we'll land on the moon and bring some samples from there"? Where did this strange aspiration come from, for the dreary sitting on a balcony, huh?
That's where she came from. From this absolute desire for quiet, tranquility, stability and normalcy. The truth is, as we know, that the late Ehud Manor originally wrote this song as a sad song for his fallen brother Yehuda, but here it was, it was stripped of it and turned into a song of happy hope and burning hope for endless balcony tranquility.
One of the highlights of the Rosh Hashanah prayer is the piyyut "And validated the sanctity of the day", which is very moving and also very not for the faint of heart. He talks about the fact that on this day, Rosh Hashanah, the fate of everyone is written: who will live and who will die, who will end and who will not end, and so on. At a certain point, after counting every kind of strange and cruel death, another detail, a little less threatening, appears, which speaks of less existential areas: who will rest and who will move. Who will be quieted and who will be devoured. Who will be deceived and who will be tormented.
In our version, the protector changes when this part comes. It's getting more businesslike. Less crying and less begging. And I always want to shout: Really? Do you think? "Move", "be devoured" and "tormented" seem less horrific to you than "strangled" and "stoned"? Are you really afraid to die this year from stoning or are you afraid to move and be eaten?
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So have a happy new year, here in the land of coveted ancestors. A sleep of peace and quiet, normalcy and stability. May we rest, rest and be dispossessed. Let us sit on the balcony. And if I contributed anything in the final days of the outgoing year to healthy escapism with a few bounces and some proper seasonings and some pretty good jokes - I'm proud and happy, and thank you for watching. A year and its bulletins will end, a year and its recipes will begin.
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