בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם, שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה
There’s a Jewish prayer called Shehecheyanu, that we say when we reach a special moment for the first time. Shehecheyanu v’kiyemanu v’higiyanu lazman hazeh. Blessed are you our lord… Who has given us life, sustained us, and brought us to this moment. My mom (of blessed memory) used to cry whenever she said the prayer.
I said a shehecheyanu and I cried as I cast my ballot in my first election as an Israeli citizen. It was all very simple and yet elegant. This morning I got yet another text message from the department of elections reminding me of where I was scheduled to vote. It was at a local school 5 minutes away from my home and the hardest part was finding a parking spot. It was jammed.
In some ways it was like festival. Most of the parties had booths or tables with pictures of their leading candidates and the little slips of paper (with a letter or two from the Hebrew alphabet) that you need to make your selection. (fun fact – Israel apparently began the system of using a slip of paper with a single letter signifying the party the voter chose because at the time of the first national election in 1948 most of the Israeli citizens were displaced persons from Europe and survivors of the Holocaust who did not yet speak or read Hebrew)
I made my way to the entrance to the school and after asking someone for assistance learned that the “polling station” number that was in my text message determined which door I was to go in and what line I needed to get on. I went in the door that I was pointed to and then learned that there were two separate lines and I was helped to get in the right line. From that point it took about a 25-minute wait in line. I was already crying with joy and excitement.
When I got to the end of the line the person at the door verified that I was in the right room (by looking at my text message) we went in one person at a time. (Most people had a post card that had arrived in the mail weeks ago. I still have not gotten any mail at my new address but that’s another story) I showed my Israeli ID and the worker looked it up in the book and checked that I had had appeared and he handed me a small blue (self-sealing) envelope. He kept my ID card until I got back and put my ballot in the box.
I went behind a curtain to the private voting area and said my Shehecheyanu prayer out loud for everyone to hear. In the booth (behind the curtain) there was a tray with the little slips for each of the parties. I picked my slip and put it in the envelope and sealed it and brought it back outside to be deposited inside the big ballot box.
That was it. There were no electronic software that could have a glitch. No punching a whole that could leave hanging chads and no confusion with the ballot because of how the parties were listed. No possibility that the mark was outside the lines or not dark enough and might be rejected for an unintentional error.
Counting these ballots will be very simple and exact.
Exit polls will be released at 10 PM (after the voting ends) and people say they are usually pretty accurate and then by tomorrow morning there will be an announcement of the totals including how many seats in the 120-member Knesset go to each party.
I will explain my vote in a subsequent post. Please stay tuned.