In my last article, “The Making of a Chocolate Monster” (Purim issue), I briefly described my friend, 89-year-old Zechariah Nahari, and I was asked if I was willing to write a series of articles about interesting Chevron characters, beginning with Zechariah. Tentatively I agreed, and whatever else happens, here is my article about Zechariah.

Do you ever wonder what those men are thinking when they give out chocolates to your children in shul? Do you ever ask yourself if they are unaware of the cost of dentistry? As the grandson of a dentist, I have some notion of this, yet at the same time, I am one of those men. This is your chance to hear my side of things. A month before Pesach let me share with you a chad gadya story, a cumulative shaggy dog tale – or tail, if you prefer – about Chevron.

That fact is that today, I, Raphael D. Blumberg, am the self-proclaimed Chocolate Monster of Hebron. But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, it involved a long process going back to 2011, when I started going down to Chevron every day for Rabbi Uziel Nagar’s vatikin Daf Yomi inside Me’arat HaMachpela, the Tomb of the Patriarchs. I would like to describe that process to you, so that perhaps you can develop some compassion for us poor Chocolate Monsters, mere victims of circumstances, as you will see.

The last three articles that I have written have been about Israeli elections, and I have grown weary of that topic. Fortunately, living in Israel, there are always positive things to write about, and I am going to write about one of them now. We just enjoyed a very successful Shabbat Chayei Sara here in Kiryat Arba/Chevron, with almost 30,000 guests celebrating Abraham’s purchase of Me’arat HaMachpela, and there is no better time for this article than now. (Last year, the whole celebration was cancelled due to Covid-19.)

One final comment: The first 1,100 words of this 1,800-word article are really just a preface to the last 700.

As I write these words, Naftali Bennett is sitting with Yair Lapid and closing all the details to create a government consisting of all the left-wing parties in Israel, plus Bennett’s Yemina, plus Gideon Saar’s New Hope, plus the Arab Ra’am party of Mansour Abbas. And they’re all in a giddy mood. They’re “bringing new hope to the nation.” They’re “creating unity and ridding the nation of hatred.” They’re “restoring mature, statesmanlike leadership.” They’re “saving the nation from the calamitous specter of fifth elections.” Orwell would be thrilled.

The last 13 months, encompassing Corona and a third and fourth Israeli election, have been just plain creepy. Even the weather has been weird, with the coldest post-Pesach week I can remember in 35 years.

Well, thanks to the efforts of our excellent prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, we seem to have tackled Corona. Through his efforts at badgering the CEO of Pfizer, who received phone calls from Netanyahu 30 times, most Israelis have been vaccinated already, and our numbers have fallen from 70,000 actively sick Corona patients on February 10, to 3,300 as of yesterday (April 12). Most of the actively ill are people who refused the vaccination.

Israelis will go to the polls again on March 23. This is the fourth election in about two years, and we are getting really tired of this.

As in every election since 1967, the main issue people are voting on is “What should Israel do with Judea and Samaria (the West Bank)? The politicians don’t like to admit that. They don’t want to push themselves into a corner. They prefer to leave themselves open to receiving as many votes from as many constituencies as possible. But it’s a fact. All the elections are about that.