Over a Shabbat meal during our pilot trip, we had been talking with our hosts for a couple of hours about the community, their aliyah experience, the parshah, etc. Then my host asked me “sorry for asking, but what is your profession?”

He proceeded to explain that something that he found out soon after making aliyah was that people in Israel just do not talk about their jobs, especially not at the Shabbat table. The only reason he was asking me was because he wanted to talk about how getting jobs after aliyah. Indeed, aside from people asking us about what we do for a living in an aliyah-related context, we did not really have any work-related conversations.

On the other hand, in the US I can hardly remember any Shabbat meal I have had with other people (including some rabbis) where work was not mentioned in some way.

I had never thought about this before the comment was made to me, but now it make perfect sense. It seems like that both in the US and in Israel, people tend to talk about what they consider to be really important.