JEWISH WORLD

26 JEWISH WORLD • APRIL 12-18, 2024 FREE For your FREE digital issue send an email to: lijewworld@aol.com me more than three decades to re- alize that cleaning the tiles in the shower has nothing to do with the Exodus from Egypt, and going through the stationery drawer is not connected to removing unleav- ened bread from one’s domain. In the past, both The Wife and I con- flated the two, to our detriment. Now we do so much less. I can clean the windows after Passover – in any event, every year there is generally a sharav (or chamsin , a dry hot local wind) ac- companied by a sandstorm right around the Seder, which pretty much nullifies any window-clean- ing benefit. That sandstorm often nullifies something else we, and much of Israel, do right before Pass- over: clean the car. The script is predictable: We procrastinate until the last week before Passover to get the car washed, forgetting that most of the rest of this country’s Jews are in the same situation. We then wait impatiently in a long line, overpay to have the car scrubbed inside and out, and then bring it home, only to have the sharav and sandstorm originating in Saudi Arabia render it all meaningless. Except it isn’t all meaningless because even if the outside of the car is filthy, with a layer of Saudi sand blanketing the roof, the inside of the car remains crumb-free for Passover. All this underlines the fact that spring cleaning and Pass- over cleaning are not the same. Truth be told, over the years I’ve also become mellower about spring cleaning. So much so that this year I will not spend hours rearranging my closet, moving winter clothes – sweaters, sweatshirts, flannel shirts, and the like – to upper shelves and bringing the short-sleeved summer shirts down to where they can be reached. I always found this chore cum- bersome and envied those with a closet big enough for all seasons. This was a biannual exercise, once in the spring, before Passover, to bring down the summer clothes, and once in the autumn, right after Simchat Torah, to switch the sum- mer clothes with the winter wear. This year, however, the war – which began on Simchat Torah – changed all that. It made me realize it was all unnecessary. With no pa- tience, energy, or desire to do any- thing after Oct. 7 beyond worry about my kids and the state of the nation, I let this ritual fall by the wayside. I just made do this winter with the summer clothes I never moved from the closet and a couple of long-sleeved shirts within reach. And it worked. This year, for the first time, I got by without spending hours moving clothes. Of course, it meant wearing the same few shirts all winter, since the rest remained tucked away on an upper shelf where I stored them the year before. Were my kids still living at home, I couldn’t get away with this, as they would complain that it was embarrassing that I always wore the same shirts. But not The Wife – she could care less, one of the secrets of our compatibility. “Our life is frittered away by de- tail,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his memoir Walden. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; in- stead of a million, count half a doz- en, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.... Simplify, simplify!” Those words, which I remember reading in college, have unexpect- edly come back to me now. Who would have thought that it would be within the context of closets... and Passover cleaning? Herb Keinon is a senior contrib- uting editor and analyst at ‘The Jerusalem Post.’ It took me more than three decades to realize that cleaning the tiles in the shower has nothing to do with the Exodus from Egypt. Cleanup continued from page 12 Good News continued from page 18 105, after showing consecutive quar- terly declines since the beginning of 2022, according to the report. Deal flow during the reported quarter was down about 9% compared with the first quarter of 2023, when 115 trans- actions were recorded. “After three consecutive quarters in which there were decreases in the volume and number of fundraising deals by Israeli tech companies, the figures for the first quarter in 2024 are surprisingly positive,” said IVC CEO Ben Klein. The ongoing fighting did not deter foreigners from investing in Israeli startups as their participation in in- vestments increased in the first quar- ter with a total of 316, up from 281 recorded in the previous quarter, the report said. Local investors were in- volved in 259 investments, up from 202 in the fourth quarter of 2023. Larger deals led fundraising in the first quarter with six transac- tions above $100 million adding up to $752 million, accounting for about 47% of the total. Cyber start- ups nabbed $620 million in funds, or 38% of the total capital raised. The number of early-stage or seed funding climbed for the first time in the first quarter of the year, compared with a continuing downward trend since the beginning of 2022, which is an “indication of investors’ confi- dence in new companies and their ability to develop,” the report said. “We are pleased to see the growth in the number of transactions among young companies, which represents a significant vote of confidence by in- vestors in Israeli entrepreneurs,” said Eisen-Zafrir. “Looking ahead, assum- ing that geopolitical or macroeconom- ic extreme scenarios do not material- ize, we hope that wewill see continued recovery in the next quarter as well.” ” Sharon Wrobel is a tech reporter for ‘The Times of Israel.’ The number of seed funding climbed for the rst time in the three months, an indication of investors’ con dence in new companies. Dvar continued from page 7 been forgotten, business would re- turn to usual, and the wicked queen could do whatever she wanted to Elijah with impunity. Her words ring so true that Elijah flees to the desert and begs the Almighty to take his soul. The Bible, as well as our own contemporary experiences, abound with supportive incidents to but- tress Jezebel’s insight. Only three days after the miracle of the split- ting of the Sea of Reeds, the freed slaves again complain about the bitter waters at Mara. Only 40 days after the phenomenal revelation at Sinai, the Israelites worship the golden calf – and the day after the miraculous Six Day War and the liberation of Jerusalem, the Jews in the Diaspora as well as in Israel largely returned “to business as usual.” Indeed, when Moshe Dayan first visited the Western Wall, he kissed its stones with such visible emotion that a reporter asked if he had become a “born-again Jew.” Dayan honestly responded, “I was not religious yesterday, and I will not be religious tomorrow. But at this moment, no one in Israel is more religious than I.” This is how Rabbi Naftali Zvi Ye- huda Berlin, famed 19th century dean of the Volozhin Yeshiva, an- swered our questions. Sadly, it is not within the nature of most people to sustain our feelings of thanksgiv- ing; we are generally only con- cerned with what God has done for us lately, now, today. We all too eas- ily forget God’s many bounties of yesterday – and certainly of last year and of five years ago. The of- fering for thanksgiving must there- fore be consumed on the day it was brought; by the next day, the feel- ings of gratitude will have dissipat- ed. And since the woman may not offer a Temple sacrifice after child- birth until the periods of her impuri- ty and purity have passed – forty days for a male child and eighty days for a female child – she cannot be expected to bring a thanksgiving offering such a long time after the birth. By then she may be so con- cerned with staying up at night and the vexations of a colicky offspring that the initial joy of birth may well have been forgotten. Shlomo Riskin is the founding rab- bi of Efrat, Israel, and the founder and rosh yeshiva of Ohr Torah Stone.