 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here bringing you today's video from my lovely home office as usual in the lovelier city of Jerusalem Jerusalem and I thought it cover a entertaining facet of Israeli culture today from my viewpoint as an immigrant here as an Oleh Adash of seven years vintage now I am a huge fan of a YouTube channel called peace of Hebrew It's really it's run by Doron and Elsa Doron is like the only Israeli You will ever find who will actually speak Hebrew at a comprehensible pace. It's an amazing channel Whether you're learning Hebrew for the first time or you've been here like me for a while and you're Hebrew Rustified is that a word rustified got rusty. I like rustified if you're Hebrew rustified over the COVID period Then their channel is so so good in my opinion the state of Israel instead of putting money into these Old-fashioned olpan programs where they still use cassette tapes or at least it was back in my day in 2015 they should be funding creators like Doron and Elsa helping them make more videos because their content is so useful For Oleh and so many more people could be benefiting from it So I'm doing what's called in Hebrew another word another Hebrew slang is called fear goon Fear goon is an unusual word and it means like what I'm doing when you really sort of get into something somebody else's Content or just what they do when you try to share it with people that you care about So I'm doing for goon. I recommend at their YouTube channel highly. I'll put a link in the description What I wanted to talk about though in today's video was Friar culture So I looked on YouTube I put in what what does Friar mean to see if anyone had tried to kind of explain the What what it is and I find a couple of short videos giving very sort of dictionary Descriptions, you know, which is very easy to do right a Friar and that's my attempt to roll my Rs like an Israeli Friar It means a sucker and that's basically we can end the video here if we're just talking about the definition, right? It means someone who is I guess gullible They get scooped into like bad deals not the most discerning person you get the idea, right? And it doesn't just mean in deals It just means in general a Friar is a sucker now But that doesn't really do justice to the pervasive fear in Israeli culture of being a Friar and how far reaching that is It's one of the strangest facets of Israeli culture versus the culture of Ireland Where I grew up. So let me try to just explain it a bit more. There's this expression in Hebrew called low Let's say it Friar. It means low let's say it not to Leave and in this case it means to like emerge from a situation Friar low. Let's say Friar and that explains what Friar culture is Israelis are always worried that they're gonna be screwed over or get some kind of a bad deal and that fear is firstly this kind of weird National fear and it causes people to proactively put their guard up now. I'm not a Anthropologist. I'm not even really. I'm not a sabra a born Israeli So originally born Israelis can comment on my observations of this culture So it's a national fear and I know when everyone is worried that they're gonna be Screwed over for for good or for worse now I think there is good and bad aspects to this cultural aspect of Israeli culture much as if you critiqued any Culture you'd find good and bad things about it But in the case of Israel, it's kind of particular. There's something vaguely comical about this fear Particularly if you didn't grow up grow up from it. It's used for instance You'll see it in Israeli ads right when you're watching Hebrew TV and the ads come up. You'll sometimes see marketing saying like don't be a don't be a sucker like You know I'll be a Friar and do and buy our product right and I think that's a very strange form of advertising that wouldn't really connect with People in other countries where that's not sort of this entrenched norm now I would say the bad side of not not wanting to be a Friar is I don't know firstly really where it comes from. So if you Know where it comes from or you have thoughts about where this strange mentality stems from really? Please leave them in the comments. I'd be very interested to have a To hear from Israelis as in native-born Israelis about this because I find it very interesting And I think a lot of all him had a shim do as well But wherever this trade originates, I think the bad side of it is that people can Be sort of harsh to other people because they don't want to be a Friar So you might for instance see this on the roads and the roads in Israel are absolutely Chaos I hate driving in Israel. I've said that many times. I love the public transport I think it's good. It could of course be better But I choose generally to take the train or bus where I can just to not get behind the wheel here because it's so stressful And why is it so stressful? Everyone's being hyper hyper aggressive everyone's Everyone's honking. It's like people liken it to driving driving in other Mediterranean countries. So coming from Ireland We have a whole different driving culture It's very much a considerate manner Lee culture let people go ahead of you and it's the 180 degree opposite of what it's like in Israel So when people are driving and they're driving like maniacs and they're cutting people off and they're not letting this guy into The lane and they're being very strong. I think what's underlying that is the fear of being a Friar No one wants to let the first guy into the lane because the second guy and third guy and fourth guy are gonna come and then you're gonna be You're gonna miss your meeting. So you're gonna end up a Friar. You see the connections now. I Think another strange cultural dynamic of Israel that's connected to this strange Friar culture is something called she thought the matzliah she thought the matzliah literally translates to Trying the successful method and it means basically trying your way Hoping the other hoping the other party doesn't say no, right? So you ask for 30 days vacation if you're negotiating a job contract and you hope the employer says, oh, that's fine Again, my understanding as a non-Israeli Looking at this culture and sort of making my own notes about it So I think Friar culture and she thought the matzliah are connected one example of what I consider a bad sort of outcome of Friar culture is I'll give it. This is this is a sort of cultural Example here is when is ready when Israel was having the Covid the outbreak of Covid the government had very strict laws about don't visit other people for a while It was really crazy for a period and a lot of people were Flouting this law people were very openly visiting their family members Even though they weren't supposed to and there was no enforcement of the law really the police said we're gonna have these checkpoints But everyone knew there's no way the police are gonna be able to police the entire population and prevent Someone in this neighborhood from going to dinner in this person. So that's an instance where Friar culture would say You don't don't it would be like a Friar move to play by the rules because everyone knows you can get away with it So that's where I see the bad side to Friar culture I think Israelis will share my amusement at Friar culture when we discuss it And I think most people would also probably agree that it's generally Not so nice feature of the Israeli culture and I didn't by the way make this video to criticize Israeli culture as a newcomer It's not my place. I just think that this is sort of a funny dynamic But at the same time it can have negative repercussions stemming from it So those are my thoughts if you have other opinions about Friar culture what it means to be a Friar what why Israelis are so worried about being a Friar if you think it's a good There's other good aspects. I didn't touch upon other harmful aspects. I didn't touch upon I'd be interested to hear your views. Please leave me a comment Thank you for watching if you want to get more videos about life in Israel my observations I do have a living in Israel playlist on this YouTube channel and I post the Israeli related videos under that playlist Thank you for watching and Speak to you soon