Double Life – Commute

By Daniela Fubini*

Commuting by train gives undeniable advantages. Even on the Israeli railways, where the longest possible ride is about four hours long, in the complete absence of fast trains, and with a route map as simple as the drawing of a stick man made by a four year old. First of all, there is a strong chance you’ll be able to sit. And that means you can relax, take a nap, enjoy the scenery, read a book. Of course the vast majority of the commuters spend the entire ride playing with their cellphone: watching videos and exchanging messages on WhatsApp. In the early morning you will see people praying – usually on their cellphone through an app like “Tfilon”, “Smart siddur” or “Siddur to go”. Men and women alike, wearing a kippa or a skirt or not, some in perfectly hiloni (non religious) attire. This never ceases to surprise me: also on buses in Tel Aviv it happens a lot to see the most randomly looking people reading Psalms during the commute. You would think that we are a very religious country, but we are not in fact. What happens less and less is the conversation with complete strangers that would end close to hundred per cent of the times with a shidduch proposal. Even elderly ladies, sure source of these conversations until a while ago, are now perfectly at ease with their cellphones, need no reassurance on which is the right stop or the scheduled arrival time. True, we don’t all always need a shidduch, but I kind of miss that slightly intrusive and purely Israeli way of saying “we care about you”. Now it’s simple commute, too bad.

*Daniela Fubini (Twitter @d_fubini) lives and writes in Tel Aviv, where she arrived in 2008 from Turin via New York.