Have you ever been in a situation in which you were overhearing a conversation, discussion, or argument between two people, and you wanted to jump in, but you decided not to because you hadn’t been invited? Here is an argument that I was thinking about in the past weeks as the sirens blew in The Land first for Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron and the barbecues blazed for Yom Haatzmaut. In January 2006, Barbara and I were headed to Israel for what would be our “pilot trip,” our attempt to figure out where we wanted to live once we made aliyah. We were flying on Israir, a less expensive, fewer frills airline. This plane was quite small, with two seats on either side of the aisle. We were sitting all the way in the back, the next to last row before the toilets and the kitchen. Two men, not together, came aboard and sat down in the one row behind us. They looked at each other; both men were wearing black yarmulkes and were dressed similarly: white shirts and dark pants. They began a conversation, and it would seem that they would have a lot in common. Up to a point yes, but there was one enormous difference between them: one of them had been living in Beit Shemesh for many years; the other one considered his neighborhood in Brooklyn to be the center of the Jewish world. So what might have been an interesting discussion about Jewish law, something to pass the many hours on the plane, turned into a heated discussion about Zionism.
Now I have “this thing” about yeshiva education, or at least some of its products. Generally speaking, the specific focus in yeshivas around the world is a close examination of Jewish texts, concentrating on the Talmud Bavli. This massive work is a compilation of discussions held in the major academies in Babylon over a period of 300 years, which attempt to clarify and amplify what is found in the Mishnah, itself a compilation of the oral tradition which we understand was given to Moshe at Mount Sinai. The importance of this work in Jewish life cannot be overstated. But from any point of view, the Talmud Bavli must rank as one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments, perhaps the greatest sustained collective intellectual achievement in human history, in terms of its willingness to look at any subject dispassionately, exhaustively, and comprehensively, whether or not there seemed to be any immediate, practical application. It would be unrealistic to expect anyone who spent his years in such a study would be familiar with world literature, music, philosophy, or science. But to my jaundiced eye, it seems reasonable to expect that any yeshiva bocher, if nothing else, would be able to think his way out of a box, to present a cogent, coherent case for or against something, not one that a child could demolish in two minutes.
So what was I to do when I heard this Brooklyn bocher on the plane (remember the plane?!) presented this line of reasoning why Jews shouldn’t live in Israel. He asked the Beit Shemesh guy how many Israelis have been killed in wars or terrorist attacks since 1948. (The current answer is about 24,000, including chayalim and civilians.) That proves it! They would all be alive if they lived in Brooklyn! I had this sudden urge to shoot this fool and put him out of his misery. But I kept my piece; after all, it wasn’t my argument. Incidentally, after the plane landed, Barbara and I went over to the Beit Shemesh guy and congratulated him for the calm way he dealt with the bocher. He told us that it was very, very difficult for him to keep his cool.
How do you explain to a fellow Jew that, while losing 24,000 of our brothers and sisters over the 60 year period is horrifying, it pales in comparison with losing 6,000,000 in less than ten years because those poor souls had no place to run to or hide? How can you bring “up to speed” someone who is living in Brooklyn – which is theoretically in the continental United States – but who is clueless about American history, who Breckinridge Long (FDR’s reactionary Secretary of State, who singlehandedly prevented Jewish immigration) was? Especially when this self-styled expert on what the Jewish people should be doing probably didn’t have the mathematical skills to do a cost analysis: that were talking about 400 deaths a year as opposed to 600,000. And how do you suggest, without being overly insulting, that there is something dramatically different about dying in the process of remaking a Jewish homeland as opposed to standing naked in the snow, waiting to be led into a chamber from which there would be no return?
There is, however, another line of reasoning which is perhaps more subtle but equally as compelling. Take the number 100,000. That represents approximately the increase in the Jewish population in The Land last year. Maybe the number of Jews in America decreased by 100,000 last year. Maybe not; there is no longer any way to quantify the actual Jewish population in America because there is no longer agreement as to who qualifies to be counted. But it’s not just a race, whether the Jewish population in Israel will increase faster than the same population in America will decrease. Consider how many were born here after 1948, in the only country in the world which encourages the birth of Jewish babies. How many of those precious children would never have been born if their parents had lived elsewhere, perhaps in a land of fancy homes and demographic decline?
The same official statisticians are projecting (please remember that projections are based on the assumption that events will keep occurring as they are doing now, which kind of ignores the fact that G-d is in charge) that Israel’s total population will increase to ten million, meaning seven to eight million Jews, by the year 2030 of the Common Era. By then, G-d willing, the forty two percent of the world’s Jewish population currently living here will have, slowly but surely, edged up to at least fifty percent. We will have returned. For the first time since the destruction of the First Temple in the year 586 before the Common Era, the majority of the Jewish people will be living in The Land which was promised to us.
Maybe I will be alive twenty two years from today for the Yom Hashoah, Yom Hazikaron and Yom Haatzmaut in 2030; that would make me 89. Statistically, the two men on the plane have a better chance of making it; both of them were considerably younger than I am. When that day comes, when, somehow, someone figures that we have reached 50.1%, will either of those two men remember their argument on the plane? And will both of them join in the celebration?
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Three Days in Nissan (Day Three At the Army Base)
DAY THREE: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9 (NISSAN 4) A DAY AT THE ARMY BASE
We all have memories that are virtually indelible, part of our mental landscape, and more often than not, they involve our children. One of mine goes back to an autumn day several weeks after Natania had started Pre-K at the Yavneh Academy in Paramus, which as some of you know is a large, sprawling school with over 700 students. On that particular day, I had to drive Natania to school. I stopped the car at the designated place in the front and watched her get out and walk towards the entrance. Her book bag was almost as big as she was. She knew where she had to go and strode purposefully off, one tiny child in a sea of big kids. I imagine the emotion that overcame me at that moment could be described as a combination of pride and…. fear. She had just finished Day Care, and there she was, starting on the path to a PH.D! I also remember collecting my entire family (my mother, my brother and sister-in-law) and bringing them to her graduation ceremony ten years later. Somehow she and her classmates had grown imperceptibly year by year, and ten years of our lives had stolen by.
And now we were sitting on a bus heading up to Michve Alon, an army base located between Karmiel and Tiberias. Improbable as it would have seemed several years before, our darling Natania was now a chayelit in the I.D.F.. She had completed her tiranoot (basic training) and her kurs Ivrit, and we would be present at a tekas siyum (completion ceremony) for the eighty young women who started with our daughter two months ago, all of whom would be shortly going to their new assignments.
We had not been “up north” since 1980, long before Natania (or Tina, for that matter) was born. That was my first time here, and we had five weeks to tour most of the country. (Flashbacks to a brief stay in Tiberias: eating freshly caught fish at a restaurant so close to the Kinneret that I could have reached over the retaining wall and gotten my hand wet; wading in that same Kinneret at night; a real-life comedy scene at a kiosk at the bus station when the attendant told me they didn’t have orange juice and was absolutely uninterested in selling me anything else; meeting a young American woman who was teaching music in a completely out-of-the-way settlement town in which she was the only non-Moroccan; the pair of sandals made from the rubber of old tires which I purchased there and still have.) Now in 2008 we were traveling on route 6, the new toll road, with signs before each exit that you will be billed for your usage at the end of every month. (I don’t know how this is done: there are no toll booths; no one seems to have a transponder on the windshield. Modern Israel. Now if they could only get the lines at the bank or the post office to function as efficiently.) Route 6 goes north-south, winding past countless Arab villages. Many of these towns are Christian or Druse, so one feels reasonably safe. The bus made one full stop, at Afula, which is not as dreary as I thought it would be. If you need to use the facilities at the terminal, the attendant will collect one shekel, which entitles you to some toilet paper. Definitely Old Israel. The bus started again, and we got off in the most middle-of-nowhere tzomet (junction) you could ever find, where we would wait for another bus to take us to the base. Total travel time? Over three hours. We finally arrived, and followed a number of chayalim and chayalot off the bus and up the hill to the base, which would under normal circumstances be impenetrable, but because of the tekas, we were waved in with a smile.
Here, without the smile, was where our daughter had spent the last two months (except when she was home for Shabbat or when she was assigned to another base for shmirah, guard duty). Here she had been yelled at by mefakdot, argued with Russian recruits, and began to make friends. Here she had done pushups, learned to shoot and maintain an M-16, eaten her meals in less than eighteen minutes, and learned to keep that M16 with her at all times. In short, she had survived the experience, most of the time, wondering why she was doing any of it.
We took a short walk around the base, and then it was time for the ceremony to begin. We stood in a little grandstand area on one side of what passed for a “parade grounds,” along with a small collection of family and friends of the “graduates.” Many of the attendees were also in the military. I assume that they understood more than I what was going on than I did. The eighty young women marched down one side of the field, made a right turn, and made a formation near us. Finding Natania in this mass of women was not difficult: she was in the same unit as a six foot five blonde Russian who towered over everyone like an enormous antenna. My surmise is that the point of the exercise was to demonstrate that the chayalot could collectively follow instructions. There was a lot of “attention,” “at ease,” “left face,” “right face” – all in Hebrew, of course. Whenever I see this kind of stuff, I invariably think of my Mr. Autote, our fifth grade gym teacher at P.S. 80, who had us spend the entire semester marching around the gym, by which time, all of us Jewish kids could do a pretty snappy “left face.” I cannot say that the tekas was in and of itself very stirring to a bystander, but it was certainly meaningful to the participants, all of whom had finished what was probably the hardest two months of their lives. The strangest part of the ceremony was when the soldiers stood at attention in formation and their mefakdot walked through the ranks and, one by one, seemingly at random, went to each girl and cut off the “trainee” ribbon from her uniform, giving each girl a playful punch in the arm. All of a sudden, these same people-in-charge who had spent the last two months yelling at everyone and docking them time for seemingly minor infractions were trying to be friendly. (After the ceremony was over and we were walking around the base, a young woman who reached somewhere on my chest approached us and asked – in decent English – if we were Natania’s parents. She told us that she lived in Kfar Adumim, a small neighboring community. Only afterwards did I find out that she was an M.M. [a rank above a mefakedet.] We realized that all the women-in-charge were girls, younger than Natania and half her size.)
The ceremony was over. A few outstanding chayalot were honored; the obligatory “throw your hat in the air” was performed as well as the “let’s form a big circle and do some pushups.” One by one, we got to meet the young ladies with whom Natania had made friends on the base: a few Americans and others who spoke English as a second language. Each one was apprehensively waiting to hear where and to what she would be assigned. There was one tiny person from California, Shira, who was hoping to get into Search and Rescue. She had relatives here, but her family was back in America. She, like most of the women in the program, was a “bodedet” (lone soldier) who, for whatever reason, had chosen to come and join, as I so often describe it, the first Jewish army since the time of Bar Cochba. Two days earlier, I was helping assemble packages destined for Lone Soldiers, and here they were! Perhaps someday the socks that “Packages from Home” (project coordinator, Shira), sends out weekly will grace the feet of little Shira from California.
We walked around with Natania explaining what happened in each of the buildings on the base. Soon it was time to leave; we had wangled a ride back to the tzomet with a woman who was serving as temporary mom for one of the lone soldiers. We waited there for almost an hour for the bus back to Jerusalem, through Afula and the many Arab villages, now seen in the evening light. Total travel time both ways: over six hours. Total time at Michve Alon: two and a half hours. Amount of satisfaction: more than I could ever measure.
We all have memories that are virtually indelible, part of our mental landscape, and more often than not, they involve our children. One of mine goes back to an autumn day several weeks after Natania had started Pre-K at the Yavneh Academy in Paramus, which as some of you know is a large, sprawling school with over 700 students. On that particular day, I had to drive Natania to school. I stopped the car at the designated place in the front and watched her get out and walk towards the entrance. Her book bag was almost as big as she was. She knew where she had to go and strode purposefully off, one tiny child in a sea of big kids. I imagine the emotion that overcame me at that moment could be described as a combination of pride and…. fear. She had just finished Day Care, and there she was, starting on the path to a PH.D! I also remember collecting my entire family (my mother, my brother and sister-in-law) and bringing them to her graduation ceremony ten years later. Somehow she and her classmates had grown imperceptibly year by year, and ten years of our lives had stolen by.
And now we were sitting on a bus heading up to Michve Alon, an army base located between Karmiel and Tiberias. Improbable as it would have seemed several years before, our darling Natania was now a chayelit in the I.D.F.. She had completed her tiranoot (basic training) and her kurs Ivrit, and we would be present at a tekas siyum (completion ceremony) for the eighty young women who started with our daughter two months ago, all of whom would be shortly going to their new assignments.
We had not been “up north” since 1980, long before Natania (or Tina, for that matter) was born. That was my first time here, and we had five weeks to tour most of the country. (Flashbacks to a brief stay in Tiberias: eating freshly caught fish at a restaurant so close to the Kinneret that I could have reached over the retaining wall and gotten my hand wet; wading in that same Kinneret at night; a real-life comedy scene at a kiosk at the bus station when the attendant told me they didn’t have orange juice and was absolutely uninterested in selling me anything else; meeting a young American woman who was teaching music in a completely out-of-the-way settlement town in which she was the only non-Moroccan; the pair of sandals made from the rubber of old tires which I purchased there and still have.) Now in 2008 we were traveling on route 6, the new toll road, with signs before each exit that you will be billed for your usage at the end of every month. (I don’t know how this is done: there are no toll booths; no one seems to have a transponder on the windshield. Modern Israel. Now if they could only get the lines at the bank or the post office to function as efficiently.) Route 6 goes north-south, winding past countless Arab villages. Many of these towns are Christian or Druse, so one feels reasonably safe. The bus made one full stop, at Afula, which is not as dreary as I thought it would be. If you need to use the facilities at the terminal, the attendant will collect one shekel, which entitles you to some toilet paper. Definitely Old Israel. The bus started again, and we got off in the most middle-of-nowhere tzomet (junction) you could ever find, where we would wait for another bus to take us to the base. Total travel time? Over three hours. We finally arrived, and followed a number of chayalim and chayalot off the bus and up the hill to the base, which would under normal circumstances be impenetrable, but because of the tekas, we were waved in with a smile.
Here, without the smile, was where our daughter had spent the last two months (except when she was home for Shabbat or when she was assigned to another base for shmirah, guard duty). Here she had been yelled at by mefakdot, argued with Russian recruits, and began to make friends. Here she had done pushups, learned to shoot and maintain an M-16, eaten her meals in less than eighteen minutes, and learned to keep that M16 with her at all times. In short, she had survived the experience, most of the time, wondering why she was doing any of it.
We took a short walk around the base, and then it was time for the ceremony to begin. We stood in a little grandstand area on one side of what passed for a “parade grounds,” along with a small collection of family and friends of the “graduates.” Many of the attendees were also in the military. I assume that they understood more than I what was going on than I did. The eighty young women marched down one side of the field, made a right turn, and made a formation near us. Finding Natania in this mass of women was not difficult: she was in the same unit as a six foot five blonde Russian who towered over everyone like an enormous antenna. My surmise is that the point of the exercise was to demonstrate that the chayalot could collectively follow instructions. There was a lot of “attention,” “at ease,” “left face,” “right face” – all in Hebrew, of course. Whenever I see this kind of stuff, I invariably think of my Mr. Autote, our fifth grade gym teacher at P.S. 80, who had us spend the entire semester marching around the gym, by which time, all of us Jewish kids could do a pretty snappy “left face.” I cannot say that the tekas was in and of itself very stirring to a bystander, but it was certainly meaningful to the participants, all of whom had finished what was probably the hardest two months of their lives. The strangest part of the ceremony was when the soldiers stood at attention in formation and their mefakdot walked through the ranks and, one by one, seemingly at random, went to each girl and cut off the “trainee” ribbon from her uniform, giving each girl a playful punch in the arm. All of a sudden, these same people-in-charge who had spent the last two months yelling at everyone and docking them time for seemingly minor infractions were trying to be friendly. (After the ceremony was over and we were walking around the base, a young woman who reached somewhere on my chest approached us and asked – in decent English – if we were Natania’s parents. She told us that she lived in Kfar Adumim, a small neighboring community. Only afterwards did I find out that she was an M.M. [a rank above a mefakedet.] We realized that all the women-in-charge were girls, younger than Natania and half her size.)
The ceremony was over. A few outstanding chayalot were honored; the obligatory “throw your hat in the air” was performed as well as the “let’s form a big circle and do some pushups.” One by one, we got to meet the young ladies with whom Natania had made friends on the base: a few Americans and others who spoke English as a second language. Each one was apprehensively waiting to hear where and to what she would be assigned. There was one tiny person from California, Shira, who was hoping to get into Search and Rescue. She had relatives here, but her family was back in America. She, like most of the women in the program, was a “bodedet” (lone soldier) who, for whatever reason, had chosen to come and join, as I so often describe it, the first Jewish army since the time of Bar Cochba. Two days earlier, I was helping assemble packages destined for Lone Soldiers, and here they were! Perhaps someday the socks that “Packages from Home” (project coordinator, Shira), sends out weekly will grace the feet of little Shira from California.
We walked around with Natania explaining what happened in each of the buildings on the base. Soon it was time to leave; we had wangled a ride back to the tzomet with a woman who was serving as temporary mom for one of the lone soldiers. We waited there for almost an hour for the bus back to Jerusalem, through Afula and the many Arab villages, now seen in the evening light. Total travel time both ways: over six hours. Total time at Michve Alon: two and a half hours. Amount of satisfaction: more than I could ever measure.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Three Days in Nissan (Day Two At the Airport)
DAY TWO: TUESDAY, APRIL 8 (NISSAN 3) A DAY AT THE AIRPORT
One of the many things I have to be grateful for is that over the course of my life, I – and now we – have made some amazing friends. Included in this ever-increasing list are Jeff and June Glazer. They made aliyah in grand style: they sold their house in Teaneck and took to the road, driving around the U.S., all the while regaling us with pictures and tales of their adventures, before boarding the Nefesh B’Nefesh winter flight last December. So when the next of the never ending stream of Teaneck olim, the Reubens, were set to arrive, of course, Jeff was the one to organize the trip to the airport to greet them. The plan was for the five of us (Jeff, June, Barbara, me, and Oriyah, the daughter of another of our Teaneck families) to meet at the very tall Sheraton hotel on King George St. near Agron St. and take the munit (taxi) which Jeff had hired to the airport. Barbara and I arrived a few minutes before nine; Jeff and June had already arrived, and – surprise, surprise – Jeff was engaged in a conversation with……..one of John Hagee’s entourage, the same group we had seen the day before. (It seems that the Hageeites were among the many, many tour groups staying at the Sheraton.) Soon the four of us were talking to several couples who were waiting to board their buses for yet another day of morning to night travel throughout the length and breadth of our admittedly tiny Land.
I am personally weary of the endless prattle about the motivation of these Christian individuals and groups that profess love for our people and our nation. That’s because I am a professional pragmatist. If the boat I’m on is leaking and I’m up to my skivvies in water, I would never question the motives of someone heaving a life raft in my direction. Perhaps it’s part of Hashem’s plan for me; leave it at that. However, when you engage in conversation with Christians who have taken their time and money to come here, you generally come away with a sense that, for whatever their reasons, they truly love our Land. They are truly interested in why one person authentically from The Heart of Texas or another who has spent his life leaving The Bronx would finally come to live near the Old City in Jerusalem. When you tell them that you have simply Come Home, they look at you with admiration, not with a blank look. I think that, somehow, they do understand.
Oriyah was slightly delayed, but she did show up, and the five of us got into our munit and off we went. Barbara had actually been back to the Ben-Gurion airport in order to meet her Sar-El group, but Jeff, June, and I had not been back since we arrived in Israel, they in December, me in July. And it is a strange sensation, going to an airport when you are not in fact going anwhere. It was only later that we all realized that we were having the same emotion: Thank G-d we don’t have to leave!!! We were not experiencing that feeling of loss that most or many Jews feel when their brief trip to Israel is coming to an end, and they are preparing to “go home.” We could stay! We could get back in a sherut, a cab, a bus and really go back home – to Jerusalem, or a Little Bit East thereof! What a glorious feeling! You will never know just how glorious until you can experience it yourself. For Barbara and me, we know full well that we will be back in The States sooner or later: to visit Barbara’s mother, to see family, friends and places, to go shopping. But not just yet. Right now, we are too busy living in the Land and experiencing the sensation of Being Home to get on a plane.
Planes! We were heading to Ben-Gurion to greet Hedda and Michael Reuben and Zaide, who is Hedda’s father. Now most Jewish men, if they live long and they have resisted the temptation along the way to murder their children, will arrive at that moment in time when they are grandfathers, sabaim, or zaides to their grandchildren. But this man had been, by general consent and acclimation, everyone in Teaneck’s zaide (you can’t “run” for this position, just as in American politics you can’t “run” to be nominated for Vice President. It takes a special person to be the Zaide for an entire community). But Zaide was not getting any younger, and he had been ill, and the Reuben’s aliyah had been postponed several times, until now, when they were at last on their way, they had become known as the “sof sof” (finally!) Reubens.
Because of the timing, the Reubens were not arriving on a Nefesh B’Nefesh charter flight, meaning a full plane of olim, NBN staff, and various and sundry dignitaries, with a small farewell ceremony and a HUGE welcoming ceremony upon landing. (I never got to write about our arrival because it was almost a month after we got here that we were successfully hooked up with a computer and internet access, and by then I was on to other matters.) In between these full flights, NBN has “group flights” on which they purchase fifty or so seats on a regular El Al flight. So while there are NBN personnel to assist the olim, most of the newbies don’t get the huge welcome which they richly deserve. But not the sof sof Reubens! What a reception they were going to get! In addition to the five of us, there were the Wimpfheimers, a Teaneck family who had made aliyah about three and a half years ago, and several other friends and old school mates of Hedda. Then there were the kids. Both of the Reuben’s children, Tehila and Yair, had previous made aliyah and they and Yair’s wife and baby were there……and all of Tehilla and Yaer’s friends, with banners and posters and smiles. The Reuben’s rooting section was probably larger than the contingent of olim getting off the plane!
We had at least an hour before the olim would complete their paper work and clear customs, time aplenty to have some coffee, chat with old friends, and make new ones. (Barbara discovered that one of Hedda’s friends had been in her youth group at Beth Shalom in Rochester forty five years ago.) Time aplenty for a flood of memories about what it was like to make aliyah the previous year: the packing, the moving, the trip to the airport, the flight, the reception, but mainly the emotion. We had done it. In fact, everyone in our group, young and old had done it: join the ever-growing but still small number of American Jews who had escaped the blandishments of Exile. So we all understood, and we all knew we understood what this moment was about.
Sof sof, the olim were starting to come through the exit. Sof sof, we could see the Reubens. They had so much luggage with them; had they left anything behind? They were remarkably cheerful, considering that they had not slept in several days, what with orchestrating an Open House on Sunday for their still unsold home and then getting ready for the flight. I am certain that having a welcoming committee waiting for you makes any such journey more rewarding. Zaide seemed to be OK; NBN had purchased an additional seat so he could have an oxygen tank on the plane with him. Many hugs, many digital pictures, many warm words of welcome, perhaps a few tears. And then, sof sof, it was time for Hedda, Michael, and Zaide to get into the munit (paid for by NBN) and head off to their new home in Beersheva. Thanks to their children, it was all set up, even having a phone and internet connection. I guess the secret is to have your kids make aliyah before you!
Thanks to my gregarious wife, we got a ride back to Jerusalem with a couple (the woman had gone to school with Hedda at Bar-Ilan) who needed to go to a specific supermarket in the Givat Shaul section which caters to an Ashkenazik crowd (Pesach!) On the way we got a fascinating tour of side streets that wend their way through the Jerusalem forests and somehow lead to Givat Shaul. We had left the airport as soon as the Reubens had departed, yet before we got dropped off, I could see Oriyah standing on Kanfei Nesharim St., using her cell phone. Maybe someday I will find out how she beat us back to Jerusalem.
One of the many things I have to be grateful for is that over the course of my life, I – and now we – have made some amazing friends. Included in this ever-increasing list are Jeff and June Glazer. They made aliyah in grand style: they sold their house in Teaneck and took to the road, driving around the U.S., all the while regaling us with pictures and tales of their adventures, before boarding the Nefesh B’Nefesh winter flight last December. So when the next of the never ending stream of Teaneck olim, the Reubens, were set to arrive, of course, Jeff was the one to organize the trip to the airport to greet them. The plan was for the five of us (Jeff, June, Barbara, me, and Oriyah, the daughter of another of our Teaneck families) to meet at the very tall Sheraton hotel on King George St. near Agron St. and take the munit (taxi) which Jeff had hired to the airport. Barbara and I arrived a few minutes before nine; Jeff and June had already arrived, and – surprise, surprise – Jeff was engaged in a conversation with……..one of John Hagee’s entourage, the same group we had seen the day before. (It seems that the Hageeites were among the many, many tour groups staying at the Sheraton.) Soon the four of us were talking to several couples who were waiting to board their buses for yet another day of morning to night travel throughout the length and breadth of our admittedly tiny Land.
I am personally weary of the endless prattle about the motivation of these Christian individuals and groups that profess love for our people and our nation. That’s because I am a professional pragmatist. If the boat I’m on is leaking and I’m up to my skivvies in water, I would never question the motives of someone heaving a life raft in my direction. Perhaps it’s part of Hashem’s plan for me; leave it at that. However, when you engage in conversation with Christians who have taken their time and money to come here, you generally come away with a sense that, for whatever their reasons, they truly love our Land. They are truly interested in why one person authentically from The Heart of Texas or another who has spent his life leaving The Bronx would finally come to live near the Old City in Jerusalem. When you tell them that you have simply Come Home, they look at you with admiration, not with a blank look. I think that, somehow, they do understand.
Oriyah was slightly delayed, but she did show up, and the five of us got into our munit and off we went. Barbara had actually been back to the Ben-Gurion airport in order to meet her Sar-El group, but Jeff, June, and I had not been back since we arrived in Israel, they in December, me in July. And it is a strange sensation, going to an airport when you are not in fact going anwhere. It was only later that we all realized that we were having the same emotion: Thank G-d we don’t have to leave!!! We were not experiencing that feeling of loss that most or many Jews feel when their brief trip to Israel is coming to an end, and they are preparing to “go home.” We could stay! We could get back in a sherut, a cab, a bus and really go back home – to Jerusalem, or a Little Bit East thereof! What a glorious feeling! You will never know just how glorious until you can experience it yourself. For Barbara and me, we know full well that we will be back in The States sooner or later: to visit Barbara’s mother, to see family, friends and places, to go shopping. But not just yet. Right now, we are too busy living in the Land and experiencing the sensation of Being Home to get on a plane.
Planes! We were heading to Ben-Gurion to greet Hedda and Michael Reuben and Zaide, who is Hedda’s father. Now most Jewish men, if they live long and they have resisted the temptation along the way to murder their children, will arrive at that moment in time when they are grandfathers, sabaim, or zaides to their grandchildren. But this man had been, by general consent and acclimation, everyone in Teaneck’s zaide (you can’t “run” for this position, just as in American politics you can’t “run” to be nominated for Vice President. It takes a special person to be the Zaide for an entire community). But Zaide was not getting any younger, and he had been ill, and the Reuben’s aliyah had been postponed several times, until now, when they were at last on their way, they had become known as the “sof sof” (finally!) Reubens.
Because of the timing, the Reubens were not arriving on a Nefesh B’Nefesh charter flight, meaning a full plane of olim, NBN staff, and various and sundry dignitaries, with a small farewell ceremony and a HUGE welcoming ceremony upon landing. (I never got to write about our arrival because it was almost a month after we got here that we were successfully hooked up with a computer and internet access, and by then I was on to other matters.) In between these full flights, NBN has “group flights” on which they purchase fifty or so seats on a regular El Al flight. So while there are NBN personnel to assist the olim, most of the newbies don’t get the huge welcome which they richly deserve. But not the sof sof Reubens! What a reception they were going to get! In addition to the five of us, there were the Wimpfheimers, a Teaneck family who had made aliyah about three and a half years ago, and several other friends and old school mates of Hedda. Then there were the kids. Both of the Reuben’s children, Tehila and Yair, had previous made aliyah and they and Yair’s wife and baby were there……and all of Tehilla and Yaer’s friends, with banners and posters and smiles. The Reuben’s rooting section was probably larger than the contingent of olim getting off the plane!
We had at least an hour before the olim would complete their paper work and clear customs, time aplenty to have some coffee, chat with old friends, and make new ones. (Barbara discovered that one of Hedda’s friends had been in her youth group at Beth Shalom in Rochester forty five years ago.) Time aplenty for a flood of memories about what it was like to make aliyah the previous year: the packing, the moving, the trip to the airport, the flight, the reception, but mainly the emotion. We had done it. In fact, everyone in our group, young and old had done it: join the ever-growing but still small number of American Jews who had escaped the blandishments of Exile. So we all understood, and we all knew we understood what this moment was about.
Sof sof, the olim were starting to come through the exit. Sof sof, we could see the Reubens. They had so much luggage with them; had they left anything behind? They were remarkably cheerful, considering that they had not slept in several days, what with orchestrating an Open House on Sunday for their still unsold home and then getting ready for the flight. I am certain that having a welcoming committee waiting for you makes any such journey more rewarding. Zaide seemed to be OK; NBN had purchased an additional seat so he could have an oxygen tank on the plane with him. Many hugs, many digital pictures, many warm words of welcome, perhaps a few tears. And then, sof sof, it was time for Hedda, Michael, and Zaide to get into the munit (paid for by NBN) and head off to their new home in Beersheva. Thanks to their children, it was all set up, even having a phone and internet connection. I guess the secret is to have your kids make aliyah before you!
Thanks to my gregarious wife, we got a ride back to Jerusalem with a couple (the woman had gone to school with Hedda at Bar-Ilan) who needed to go to a specific supermarket in the Givat Shaul section which caters to an Ashkenazik crowd (Pesach!) On the way we got a fascinating tour of side streets that wend their way through the Jerusalem forests and somehow lead to Givat Shaul. We had left the airport as soon as the Reubens had departed, yet before we got dropped off, I could see Oriyah standing on Kanfei Nesharim St., using her cell phone. Maybe someday I will find out how she beat us back to Jerusalem.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Three Days in Nissan (Day One Olam Hamitnadvim
DAY ONE: MONDAY, APRIL 7 (NISSAN 2) “OLAM HAMITNADVIM” There was a time back in Teaneck when Natania, like other kids going to Jewish Day Schools, was scrounging around for “chesed hours” (time spent on philanthropic projects required by the schools for promotion or graduation). We had to arrive at something which she would want to do (not a lot!) and that we could get her to. Our solution: Tomche Shabbos! This is an organization that arranges for discrete delivery of food for Shabbat to needy families in the Bergen County community. Every Tuesday evening, the packing, which took less than an hour, was done at a synagogue about a ten minute drive from our house. Perfect! So for several months, I schlepped Natania up to B’nei Yeshuran; and because it made no sense to drop her off, come home, and come back forty minutes later, and because I wanted to set a good example, I joined her for the project. The guy in charge, who was named Boris, supervised the six or eight youngsters and one or two adults who would take quantities of onions, fruits, vegetables, bread, grape juice, whatever was there, and drop them in baskets placed on shelves around the room. I admit to having a certain visceral pleasure in this activity. I was literally feeding the hungry. Somebody else may have donated a thousand dollars to the organization, but I was taking a cauliflower in my two hands and putting it in the basket which would be delivered to someone’s door to be cooked and eaten. The several months passed by and Natania had done her hours. We stopped going – I’m sure to be replaced by other “needy” kids – and I lost out on this visceral feeling.
Here in The Land, there seems to be even more of these Tomche Shabbos-type activities: volunteer projects to help the needy. And, thank G-d, here in The Land, there seems to be armies of volunteers to do the work – especially in Jerusalem. Yes, there are students from schools, yeshivas, and seminaries; but, in addition, there are scores of retirees, many of whom are Anglos, willing and able to help out.
Among the recruits to this force of mitnadvim (volunteers) are friends, Beth and David, who have been living a little bit east of Yerushalayim a year longer than us. Beth has learned zero Hebrew, but she has racked up more “chesed hours” than anyone else I know. Every Monday, they are working for an organization called “A Package from Home.” It appeared that more volunteers were needed on this particular Monday – the last effort prior to Pesach – so they recruited Barbara, who, always willing to share, asked me if I wanted to come along. Now Barbara, if I haven’t mentioned it already, spent three weeks volunteering on an army base – part of a program called “Sar-El” – on which she packed medical supplies and painted walls, while others cleaned out an underground hospital which hasn’t been used since the most recent military activity in Lebanon two years ago. She also has volunteered at a soup kitchen on recent Fridays (while I was home making Shabbat soup for us). So she had a certain amount of moral suasion to convince me to go with her. Besides, I was curious to see what the world of volunteers was like here in The Land. We agreed to meet our friends on a specified 174 bus, and we traveled together into Jerusalem where we got on another bus going to a neighborhood called Katamon. Along the way, I got a crash course on the organization I was going to help.
Like many things, there is a history here. And like many things, there is something I call a “moment of decision.” Some of you (at least the people in Teaneck) know about Clara Hammer, “The Chicken Lady,” a woman who was simply standing on line (for those of you who don’t appreciate the linguistic subtlety, while most Americans stand “in line;” because I’m from New York, I stand “on line.”) waiting to purchase her Shabbat chicken, when she realized that the family who was in front of her on/in that line in that butcher shop was getting almost inedible chicken scraps because they were too poor to buy a real chicken. Mrs. Hammer decided to pay for that family’s chicken for that Shabbat, the next Shabbat, and every Shabbat. And, because there were so many other families in similar situations, Mrs. Hammer decided to become “The Chicken Lady,” soliciting funds to provide chickens for hundreds of needy families in Jerusalem.
Let me now introduce you to Barbara Silverman, like Clara Hammer, an American olah. It seems that in 1985, she and her husband were driving past a roadblock near the Arab village of Ramallah. There are many, including some Israelis, who thoughts on passing such a roadblock, put up to prevent terrorists from gaining access to heavily populated areas, would dwell on the “plight” of the “Palestinians” (although, in truth, the roadblocks and road closings are a serious difficulty for many Arabs who are just trying to get through their day). Most of us would be grateful for the soldiers protecting our lives, but would leave it at that. But Mrs. Silverman took it one step further. It occurred to her that while she would be enjoying her Shabbat day of rest in the comfort and safety of Rehavia (one of Jerusalem’s nicest neighborhoods), a group of young men would be standing on duty at this machsom in the heat of the summer, making do with what passes for cuisine in the I.D.F. And so Barbara Silverman came back before that Shabbat to that machsom with enough home cooked food for six Shabbat meals. When she came back for the following Shabbat, she found out that there were more hayalim in another machsom just down the road. It wound up with her preparing and bringing forty eight meals every week for years, until the ID.F. asked her to stop because the trip had become too dangerous for unarmed civilians. But you can’t keep an intrepid soul like Barbara Silverman down for long! After a few year’s hiatus to take care of family matters, she began her current project: to provide every week “A Package from Home” for the many bodedim and bodedot, “lone soldiers”, young men and women who come on their own from across the globe to volunteer and serve in the first Jewish army since the time of Bar Kochba. She began this project in her apartment in Rehavia, only to have it overwhelm her living space and threaten to destroy her furniture. Recently, the project has been on the move, and Beth, David, Barbara and I were on our way to its most recent home, a matnas (community center) in Katamon, which we finally located by virtue of walking around the neighborhood.
Here in a small room was a table laden with merchandise, more boxes on the floors, plastic bags all around, packers and soldiers milling around, from which seeming chaos would come an hour or so later over 400 packages ready for delivery. The procedure was simple enough: take a plastic bag, put in it a package of socks, a package of underwear, a tee shirt, several kinds of snacks, some toiletries, and some sheets of paper containing messages of encouragement in at least three languages. How this was done reminded me of shul kiddushes I have witnessed: find a plate and a fork, reach over several people to spear a few pieces of herring, go around another mass of surging people to locate a piece of kugel, walk around the table to get some pastry, balance this carefully as you head over to where you think they might have some Scotch, find a napkin, etc. In our situation, a dozen or so people were performing a dance, weaving in and out around the small tables laden with stuff, sometimes improvising a relay where a bag might be handed from person A who was near the socks to person B who stood by the snacks to person C who would flip in some shampoo or a toothbrush to person D who had the letters to person E who would tie the bag and place it in one of several piles. How the counting as done, I couldn’t figure out, but finally we had packed the requisite number of bags, and we were done. People began to leave, stuff got packed up, the floor was swept, and the room became quiet.
At this point, I approached Shira Gilor, who has served as the program coordinator for the last several years. I told her that I had just finished a course in grant writing, and before I started charging for my services, I was willing to write a few proposals gratis to polish my skills. Well, did I feel like Santa Claus! Shira’s face lit up; she told me that she had wanted to apply for a grant, but she didn’t have the time, didn’t know how to do it, and didn’t know where to apply. So, in effect, I was “hired,” starting after Pesach.
Our farewells said, Barbara and I followed Beth and David out the door, down the block, through the neighborhood, to Beit Lechem Street in the German Colony. Our destination? A tiny (I mean tiny) shop that, according to David, makes the best falafel in town. One thing about David Gordon: he knows his falafel. We had a simple, inexpensive meal and continued our perambulation through the German Colony back to the center of town, where we stopped at the new Cup o’ Joe for an Israeli “Iced Coffee” (not the same as a plebian “kafe kar” [cold coffee]). At this point, none of us was in a hurry. David was considering a pre-Pesach haircut, Beth had a little time before her next tzedekah project, and Barbara and I had several hours until our next appointment: we needed to get pre-approval for a larger mortgage (the dollar has shrunk in value; the price of real estate throughout Israel has risen because the economy keeps growing). We ran a few errands and headed to our mortgage banker in the Bank Leumi on King George St. There in front of the Mashbir (Israel’s first “department store”) was an enormous contingent of Christians, mostly from America, supporters of Rev. John Hagee, who had come to The Land to show their support of our beleaguered country. Barbara spoke with a few of them briefly before we went in to see Dafna, our banker, who had our much larger request pre-approved on the spot.
Finally, it was time to head back to Ma’ale Adumim. We waited for our bus and headed off. But Jaffa Street ahead of us was blocked up. The large contingent we had seen before was now marching a thousand strong through the midrechov (promenade) on Ben Yehuda and on to I know not where. My initial reaction was one of annoyance. But as I watched this demonstration with its banners “Israel, we support you,” I had a change of heart. Usually, if traffic is stopped in Jerusalem, it is either because of a chefets chashood (a suspicious object; i.e, a bomb threat) or because some foreign dignitary – who is most likely here to convince us to divide our City and relinquish our land – is passing by. Here were a thousand people who have no direct stake in the outcome of our conflict with our neighbors coming to offer us their encouragement. Let them march. In fact, we would meet them again the next day, another day in Nissan.
Here in The Land, there seems to be even more of these Tomche Shabbos-type activities: volunteer projects to help the needy. And, thank G-d, here in The Land, there seems to be armies of volunteers to do the work – especially in Jerusalem. Yes, there are students from schools, yeshivas, and seminaries; but, in addition, there are scores of retirees, many of whom are Anglos, willing and able to help out.
Among the recruits to this force of mitnadvim (volunteers) are friends, Beth and David, who have been living a little bit east of Yerushalayim a year longer than us. Beth has learned zero Hebrew, but she has racked up more “chesed hours” than anyone else I know. Every Monday, they are working for an organization called “A Package from Home.” It appeared that more volunteers were needed on this particular Monday – the last effort prior to Pesach – so they recruited Barbara, who, always willing to share, asked me if I wanted to come along. Now Barbara, if I haven’t mentioned it already, spent three weeks volunteering on an army base – part of a program called “Sar-El” – on which she packed medical supplies and painted walls, while others cleaned out an underground hospital which hasn’t been used since the most recent military activity in Lebanon two years ago. She also has volunteered at a soup kitchen on recent Fridays (while I was home making Shabbat soup for us). So she had a certain amount of moral suasion to convince me to go with her. Besides, I was curious to see what the world of volunteers was like here in The Land. We agreed to meet our friends on a specified 174 bus, and we traveled together into Jerusalem where we got on another bus going to a neighborhood called Katamon. Along the way, I got a crash course on the organization I was going to help.
Like many things, there is a history here. And like many things, there is something I call a “moment of decision.” Some of you (at least the people in Teaneck) know about Clara Hammer, “The Chicken Lady,” a woman who was simply standing on line (for those of you who don’t appreciate the linguistic subtlety, while most Americans stand “in line;” because I’m from New York, I stand “on line.”) waiting to purchase her Shabbat chicken, when she realized that the family who was in front of her on/in that line in that butcher shop was getting almost inedible chicken scraps because they were too poor to buy a real chicken. Mrs. Hammer decided to pay for that family’s chicken for that Shabbat, the next Shabbat, and every Shabbat. And, because there were so many other families in similar situations, Mrs. Hammer decided to become “The Chicken Lady,” soliciting funds to provide chickens for hundreds of needy families in Jerusalem.
Let me now introduce you to Barbara Silverman, like Clara Hammer, an American olah. It seems that in 1985, she and her husband were driving past a roadblock near the Arab village of Ramallah. There are many, including some Israelis, who thoughts on passing such a roadblock, put up to prevent terrorists from gaining access to heavily populated areas, would dwell on the “plight” of the “Palestinians” (although, in truth, the roadblocks and road closings are a serious difficulty for many Arabs who are just trying to get through their day). Most of us would be grateful for the soldiers protecting our lives, but would leave it at that. But Mrs. Silverman took it one step further. It occurred to her that while she would be enjoying her Shabbat day of rest in the comfort and safety of Rehavia (one of Jerusalem’s nicest neighborhoods), a group of young men would be standing on duty at this machsom in the heat of the summer, making do with what passes for cuisine in the I.D.F. And so Barbara Silverman came back before that Shabbat to that machsom with enough home cooked food for six Shabbat meals. When she came back for the following Shabbat, she found out that there were more hayalim in another machsom just down the road. It wound up with her preparing and bringing forty eight meals every week for years, until the ID.F. asked her to stop because the trip had become too dangerous for unarmed civilians. But you can’t keep an intrepid soul like Barbara Silverman down for long! After a few year’s hiatus to take care of family matters, she began her current project: to provide every week “A Package from Home” for the many bodedim and bodedot, “lone soldiers”, young men and women who come on their own from across the globe to volunteer and serve in the first Jewish army since the time of Bar Kochba. She began this project in her apartment in Rehavia, only to have it overwhelm her living space and threaten to destroy her furniture. Recently, the project has been on the move, and Beth, David, Barbara and I were on our way to its most recent home, a matnas (community center) in Katamon, which we finally located by virtue of walking around the neighborhood.
Here in a small room was a table laden with merchandise, more boxes on the floors, plastic bags all around, packers and soldiers milling around, from which seeming chaos would come an hour or so later over 400 packages ready for delivery. The procedure was simple enough: take a plastic bag, put in it a package of socks, a package of underwear, a tee shirt, several kinds of snacks, some toiletries, and some sheets of paper containing messages of encouragement in at least three languages. How this was done reminded me of shul kiddushes I have witnessed: find a plate and a fork, reach over several people to spear a few pieces of herring, go around another mass of surging people to locate a piece of kugel, walk around the table to get some pastry, balance this carefully as you head over to where you think they might have some Scotch, find a napkin, etc. In our situation, a dozen or so people were performing a dance, weaving in and out around the small tables laden with stuff, sometimes improvising a relay where a bag might be handed from person A who was near the socks to person B who stood by the snacks to person C who would flip in some shampoo or a toothbrush to person D who had the letters to person E who would tie the bag and place it in one of several piles. How the counting as done, I couldn’t figure out, but finally we had packed the requisite number of bags, and we were done. People began to leave, stuff got packed up, the floor was swept, and the room became quiet.
At this point, I approached Shira Gilor, who has served as the program coordinator for the last several years. I told her that I had just finished a course in grant writing, and before I started charging for my services, I was willing to write a few proposals gratis to polish my skills. Well, did I feel like Santa Claus! Shira’s face lit up; she told me that she had wanted to apply for a grant, but she didn’t have the time, didn’t know how to do it, and didn’t know where to apply. So, in effect, I was “hired,” starting after Pesach.
Our farewells said, Barbara and I followed Beth and David out the door, down the block, through the neighborhood, to Beit Lechem Street in the German Colony. Our destination? A tiny (I mean tiny) shop that, according to David, makes the best falafel in town. One thing about David Gordon: he knows his falafel. We had a simple, inexpensive meal and continued our perambulation through the German Colony back to the center of town, where we stopped at the new Cup o’ Joe for an Israeli “Iced Coffee” (not the same as a plebian “kafe kar” [cold coffee]). At this point, none of us was in a hurry. David was considering a pre-Pesach haircut, Beth had a little time before her next tzedekah project, and Barbara and I had several hours until our next appointment: we needed to get pre-approval for a larger mortgage (the dollar has shrunk in value; the price of real estate throughout Israel has risen because the economy keeps growing). We ran a few errands and headed to our mortgage banker in the Bank Leumi on King George St. There in front of the Mashbir (Israel’s first “department store”) was an enormous contingent of Christians, mostly from America, supporters of Rev. John Hagee, who had come to The Land to show their support of our beleaguered country. Barbara spoke with a few of them briefly before we went in to see Dafna, our banker, who had our much larger request pre-approved on the spot.
Finally, it was time to head back to Ma’ale Adumim. We waited for our bus and headed off. But Jaffa Street ahead of us was blocked up. The large contingent we had seen before was now marching a thousand strong through the midrechov (promenade) on Ben Yehuda and on to I know not where. My initial reaction was one of annoyance. But as I watched this demonstration with its banners “Israel, we support you,” I had a change of heart. Usually, if traffic is stopped in Jerusalem, it is either because of a chefets chashood (a suspicious object; i.e, a bomb threat) or because some foreign dignitary – who is most likely here to convince us to divide our City and relinquish our land – is passing by. Here were a thousand people who have no direct stake in the outcome of our conflict with our neighbors coming to offer us their encouragement. Let them march. In fact, we would meet them again the next day, another day in Nissan.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Avraham, where art thou?
(Considering that I used to make my living “managing data,” this past week was not a good one in that department. First I dropped my Nikon. Loss: one roll of film. Cost to repair: about $100. Then my computer stopped working. Diagnosis by company: defective sectors on the hard drive [in simple English: dead as a doornail] Cost to repair: probably nothing, as it was seven months old and under warranty. Loss: a lot of work in progress, including the last 47 pages of Rav Aviner’s commentary to the haggada which I was editing from a rough translation. Also gone is the second part of my entry about Purim, entitled ‘And You Forgot to Remember.’ I will try, bli neder (no promises), to reconstruct it from memory. This third part was composed on Natania’s laptop, which has worked flawlessly for several years. All of the previous entries are available at www.alittlebiteast.blogspot.com)
It goes without saying that we were eagerly anticipating our first Purim in The Land, even though I hate it (hate, hate, hate!) when Purim is Thursday night and Friday. I definitely think the Rabbis dropped the ball on this one. Normally, you hear Megillat Ester in the evening and then again the next morning. After that, those wonderful people who lovingly prepare shalach manot for their friends have plenty of time to run around in the morning and give their packages away. (Also, in communities like our beloved Maale Adumim, there is always a Purim parade in the morning.) And there is still plenty of time to pray, to drink, and to have a leisurely seudah (festive meal) sometime in the afternoon. (And for those unfortunate people in The Exile who have to work on Purim, they can take at least take off a little early and get home in time for the meal.) But when Purim comes out on Friday, the overriding concern that these activities would impinge on preparations for Shabbat. So the seudah is pushed up to the morning, which presents certain obvious difficulties. First, you can talk until you are blue in the face, you will never convince me that scrambled eggs is a festive meal, nor that I am going to want pot roast at 9:30 in the morning. Second, my approach to my A.D.D. is to do only one thing at a time. So if you tell me that I should hand out shalach manot, go to a parade, and have my festive meal at exactly the same time, my response is to smile and tell you politely “No.” We simply do not multi-task. In my mind, there is no logical reason why the seudah is not put off to Sunday so that people can enjoy it.
Anyway, we were invited to our friends Ian and Thelma Reed for the seudah; they were going to have a bunch of people over for a buffet and to sample some of Ian’s single malts. We were definitely looking forward to that; until Wednesday morning, when we got a phone call from one of their friends that Ian’s mother just died, and they were on their way back to Manchester for the funeral. I guess we would be on our own for the Purim seudah. When you have a lemon, always, always make lemonade. I got on the phone and called some other friends, the Aarons, who are also here without extended family, and invited them to join us, which they happily agreed to do. Natania would be back from doing shmirah (guard duty) on Wednesday; she would make some of her delicious eggplant parmesan, and I – because summer seems to have arrived here in one day – would make some gazpacho and some cold pasta dishes. That and a salad, coffee and dessert, and you actually have something like a festive meal.
Then the phone rang – again. (Maybe we should stop answering it.) Our friend Avraham just died and his body was being flown in from Columbus, Ohio in time to be buried on Friday in Jerusalem. (I first met Avraham in Jerusalem in 1980. His wife, Varda, is one of eight siblings in the very large and ever growing Habshush family. He was then a successful lawyer who got into trouble with the Israeli tax officials because they refused to believe that he had not charged some of his clients. The family moved to America where, brilliant has he was, he was never able to pass the bar examination. His health ultimately failed him, partly because he was too stubborn to take care of himself. His son, then Udi, a boy of about five, now Rabbi Ohad Yishai, was accompanying the body)
Back in touch with the Aarons. Can they come over earlier, and do you mind if Barbara leaves in the middle so she can go to a funeral? So the Aarons came a little earlier and we sat down to a very delicious meal. There are a considerable number of gentlemen here in Maale Adumim with larger libraries of single malt whisky than I have, but I do have a few bottles, and it was Purim. In the middle of our tasting, I remembered that Ron had brought over the remains of a bottle of Arak. I told him we could put it on the table; just not too close to me. Otherwise I would need to get a cushion for my chair. Why would that be? Because without a cushion, I would be between Arak and a hard place. (It was Purim, after all.) At this point, our neighbor, Tzippi – one of Maale Adumim’s finer cooks – came over with some home baked pastries, just in time for dessert. Barbara left to go to the funeral; later, the Aarons left. It was time to clean up and get ready for Shabbat. So I began washing dishes; Natania began working on some chicken soup; then I began making some meat loaf. (In theory, some of the cooking could have been done earlier, but for many reasons it wasn’t.) I remembered reading some advice from someone that on Purim Friday, it would be good to take a nap before Shabbat. I was considering some choice remarks for this time management expert; maybe I could find fifteen seconds to rest when I wouldn’t be busy. I was also considering a more realistic seudah the next time Purim was right before Shabbat: how about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?
At this point, the phone rang. Should I even consider answering it? What new catastrophe might there be? It was Barbara on the line. “I’m on my way home. The funeral was canceled. They couldn’t find the body.” (Do you know the classic distinction between comedy and tragedy? Comedy is when somebody else slips and falls on a banana peel; tragedy is when it’s you.)
After Shabbat was over, Barbara got the word: they think that Avraham’s body had been located, and the funeral would be that night. (Only in Jerusalem are Jewish bodies buried at night.) So Barbara went, and, yes, the body had arrived on a subsequent El Al flight, and the funeral was held.
The next day was Shushan Purim, the day the holiday is celebrated in Jerusalem, and we went into the city to the home of Arleen and Yehuda, Avraham’s brother-in-law and sister-in-law, where Ohad would be sitting shiva for the one day before he returned to his wife and children in Toronto. I should add the following: Arleen Osband and Barbara were neighbors back in Rochester, New York. When Arleen married Yehuda Habshush, Barbara got to meet his family; and when she spent a year in Israel in 1968, she became the unofficial ninth child in the family. The eight official Habshush children have so far spawned more than thirty grandchildren and now a growing number of great-grandchildren. The only one who can keep track of who’s who is the matriarch of the family, Bracha Habshush, still going strong in her eighties.
Now it would be virtually impossible for all the Habshush clan to fit into one apartment (maybe the White House), but there must have been at least forty people – from Mrs. Habshush herself to the newest grandchildren– coming and going in Arleen and Yehudah’s small digs in Arzei Habirah. And they were all there to comfort Ohad and to celebrate Shushan Purim with the rest of the family – at the same time. We arrived after the family more or less had completed its seudah; and as there were almost ten men present, they decided to get a minyon for minchah. As we were waiting for reinforcements, I stood by a large open window, looking out at the neighborhood. I watched as throngs of people passed by on the street below, all coming and going to their Purim destinations. Even if I were not anywhere near the window, I would have heard the soundtrucks blaring away with festive music. One thing about the Hareidim in Jerusalem: they sure know how to party on a festive day! Nothing I can write could remotely capture the holiday freilichkeit that I have experienced over the years in these overcrowded neighborhoods, with huge families going this way or that, coming or going, Sukkot or Purim. It’s Yuntif! Ohad later related to us the surreal feeling he had the previous evening, watching his father’s body placed in the ground, and then seeing the celebration all around him. There are moments when the expression about not knowing whether to laugh or to cry becomes very real. I had been “bummed out” because I felt that my Purim had been diminished by its being squished together with Shabbat. Ohad had no Purim whatsoever. While everyone around him was experiencing simcha, he couldn’t even pray – let alone hear the Megillah – from the time his father died until the corpse was buried Saturday night. Maybe I should reconsider the idea of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich seudah.
A little while later, a few more men arrived, enough for a minyon for minchah. Afterwards, one of the new arrivals who seemed vaguely familiar began talking to me. (I’m beginning to notice an increase in the number of times when my Hebrew is better than an Israeli’s English.) He seemed to know who I was and began talking about our being with him for Pesach two years ago. I finally realized that he was talking about Tina and Natania being with him in Maale Levana. So I told him that Tina was living and working in Tel Aviv and that Natania was now in Tzahal (I.D.F.) – although Israelis just say tzavah (army). Now it was his turn to be confused. I figured out that he didn’t know that our family was now living in Israel, so I said proudly that my family had made aliyah. Whereupon he welcomed us to The Land.
Finally, it was time for us to leave. We declined the offer of more food and said goodbye to everyone there, cheerfully to the many people we knew, more somberly to Ohad, both because he was in avelut (mourning) and because it might be years before we will see him again. Barbara wanted to walk over to the midrechov (the promenade?) at Ben Yehuda because there were supposed to be activities there all day. And so we walked up the long, steep hill on Yehezkal Street until Meah Shearim where it becomes Nathan Strauss Street, past Bichor Holim Hospital and down to where the street becomes King George and the neighborhood changes immediately and markedly. We passed more families, more soundtrucks, increasingly intoxicated yeshiva boys, tourists staring in wonderment at this totally strange world. We finally did get to Ben Yehuda, but after the spiritual high of the Hareidim, this “more normal” area seemed a decided letdown.
I started to tell Barbara about my conversation with the vaguely familiar man with whom I had been speaking. He looked something like Moshe, but much, much older (we had met Miriam [a Habshush daughter] and [son-in-law] Moshe in Jerusalem in 1980 when she had just given birth to quadruplets [three of whom survived] and then in Maale Levana in 1988 when their sukkah was bigger than their caravan). I wondered if that could have been Moshe’s father? – although I don’t remember meeting any of his family. Barbara set me straight. “That was Moshe,” she said.
It goes without saying that we were eagerly anticipating our first Purim in The Land, even though I hate it (hate, hate, hate!) when Purim is Thursday night and Friday. I definitely think the Rabbis dropped the ball on this one. Normally, you hear Megillat Ester in the evening and then again the next morning. After that, those wonderful people who lovingly prepare shalach manot for their friends have plenty of time to run around in the morning and give their packages away. (Also, in communities like our beloved Maale Adumim, there is always a Purim parade in the morning.) And there is still plenty of time to pray, to drink, and to have a leisurely seudah (festive meal) sometime in the afternoon. (And for those unfortunate people in The Exile who have to work on Purim, they can take at least take off a little early and get home in time for the meal.) But when Purim comes out on Friday, the overriding concern that these activities would impinge on preparations for Shabbat. So the seudah is pushed up to the morning, which presents certain obvious difficulties. First, you can talk until you are blue in the face, you will never convince me that scrambled eggs is a festive meal, nor that I am going to want pot roast at 9:30 in the morning. Second, my approach to my A.D.D. is to do only one thing at a time. So if you tell me that I should hand out shalach manot, go to a parade, and have my festive meal at exactly the same time, my response is to smile and tell you politely “No.” We simply do not multi-task. In my mind, there is no logical reason why the seudah is not put off to Sunday so that people can enjoy it.
Anyway, we were invited to our friends Ian and Thelma Reed for the seudah; they were going to have a bunch of people over for a buffet and to sample some of Ian’s single malts. We were definitely looking forward to that; until Wednesday morning, when we got a phone call from one of their friends that Ian’s mother just died, and they were on their way back to Manchester for the funeral. I guess we would be on our own for the Purim seudah. When you have a lemon, always, always make lemonade. I got on the phone and called some other friends, the Aarons, who are also here without extended family, and invited them to join us, which they happily agreed to do. Natania would be back from doing shmirah (guard duty) on Wednesday; she would make some of her delicious eggplant parmesan, and I – because summer seems to have arrived here in one day – would make some gazpacho and some cold pasta dishes. That and a salad, coffee and dessert, and you actually have something like a festive meal.
Then the phone rang – again. (Maybe we should stop answering it.) Our friend Avraham just died and his body was being flown in from Columbus, Ohio in time to be buried on Friday in Jerusalem. (I first met Avraham in Jerusalem in 1980. His wife, Varda, is one of eight siblings in the very large and ever growing Habshush family. He was then a successful lawyer who got into trouble with the Israeli tax officials because they refused to believe that he had not charged some of his clients. The family moved to America where, brilliant has he was, he was never able to pass the bar examination. His health ultimately failed him, partly because he was too stubborn to take care of himself. His son, then Udi, a boy of about five, now Rabbi Ohad Yishai, was accompanying the body)
Back in touch with the Aarons. Can they come over earlier, and do you mind if Barbara leaves in the middle so she can go to a funeral? So the Aarons came a little earlier and we sat down to a very delicious meal. There are a considerable number of gentlemen here in Maale Adumim with larger libraries of single malt whisky than I have, but I do have a few bottles, and it was Purim. In the middle of our tasting, I remembered that Ron had brought over the remains of a bottle of Arak. I told him we could put it on the table; just not too close to me. Otherwise I would need to get a cushion for my chair. Why would that be? Because without a cushion, I would be between Arak and a hard place. (It was Purim, after all.) At this point, our neighbor, Tzippi – one of Maale Adumim’s finer cooks – came over with some home baked pastries, just in time for dessert. Barbara left to go to the funeral; later, the Aarons left. It was time to clean up and get ready for Shabbat. So I began washing dishes; Natania began working on some chicken soup; then I began making some meat loaf. (In theory, some of the cooking could have been done earlier, but for many reasons it wasn’t.) I remembered reading some advice from someone that on Purim Friday, it would be good to take a nap before Shabbat. I was considering some choice remarks for this time management expert; maybe I could find fifteen seconds to rest when I wouldn’t be busy. I was also considering a more realistic seudah the next time Purim was right before Shabbat: how about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?
At this point, the phone rang. Should I even consider answering it? What new catastrophe might there be? It was Barbara on the line. “I’m on my way home. The funeral was canceled. They couldn’t find the body.” (Do you know the classic distinction between comedy and tragedy? Comedy is when somebody else slips and falls on a banana peel; tragedy is when it’s you.)
After Shabbat was over, Barbara got the word: they think that Avraham’s body had been located, and the funeral would be that night. (Only in Jerusalem are Jewish bodies buried at night.) So Barbara went, and, yes, the body had arrived on a subsequent El Al flight, and the funeral was held.
The next day was Shushan Purim, the day the holiday is celebrated in Jerusalem, and we went into the city to the home of Arleen and Yehuda, Avraham’s brother-in-law and sister-in-law, where Ohad would be sitting shiva for the one day before he returned to his wife and children in Toronto. I should add the following: Arleen Osband and Barbara were neighbors back in Rochester, New York. When Arleen married Yehuda Habshush, Barbara got to meet his family; and when she spent a year in Israel in 1968, she became the unofficial ninth child in the family. The eight official Habshush children have so far spawned more than thirty grandchildren and now a growing number of great-grandchildren. The only one who can keep track of who’s who is the matriarch of the family, Bracha Habshush, still going strong in her eighties.
Now it would be virtually impossible for all the Habshush clan to fit into one apartment (maybe the White House), but there must have been at least forty people – from Mrs. Habshush herself to the newest grandchildren– coming and going in Arleen and Yehudah’s small digs in Arzei Habirah. And they were all there to comfort Ohad and to celebrate Shushan Purim with the rest of the family – at the same time. We arrived after the family more or less had completed its seudah; and as there were almost ten men present, they decided to get a minyon for minchah. As we were waiting for reinforcements, I stood by a large open window, looking out at the neighborhood. I watched as throngs of people passed by on the street below, all coming and going to their Purim destinations. Even if I were not anywhere near the window, I would have heard the soundtrucks blaring away with festive music. One thing about the Hareidim in Jerusalem: they sure know how to party on a festive day! Nothing I can write could remotely capture the holiday freilichkeit that I have experienced over the years in these overcrowded neighborhoods, with huge families going this way or that, coming or going, Sukkot or Purim. It’s Yuntif! Ohad later related to us the surreal feeling he had the previous evening, watching his father’s body placed in the ground, and then seeing the celebration all around him. There are moments when the expression about not knowing whether to laugh or to cry becomes very real. I had been “bummed out” because I felt that my Purim had been diminished by its being squished together with Shabbat. Ohad had no Purim whatsoever. While everyone around him was experiencing simcha, he couldn’t even pray – let alone hear the Megillah – from the time his father died until the corpse was buried Saturday night. Maybe I should reconsider the idea of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich seudah.
A little while later, a few more men arrived, enough for a minyon for minchah. Afterwards, one of the new arrivals who seemed vaguely familiar began talking to me. (I’m beginning to notice an increase in the number of times when my Hebrew is better than an Israeli’s English.) He seemed to know who I was and began talking about our being with him for Pesach two years ago. I finally realized that he was talking about Tina and Natania being with him in Maale Levana. So I told him that Tina was living and working in Tel Aviv and that Natania was now in Tzahal (I.D.F.) – although Israelis just say tzavah (army). Now it was his turn to be confused. I figured out that he didn’t know that our family was now living in Israel, so I said proudly that my family had made aliyah. Whereupon he welcomed us to The Land.
Finally, it was time for us to leave. We declined the offer of more food and said goodbye to everyone there, cheerfully to the many people we knew, more somberly to Ohad, both because he was in avelut (mourning) and because it might be years before we will see him again. Barbara wanted to walk over to the midrechov (the promenade?) at Ben Yehuda because there were supposed to be activities there all day. And so we walked up the long, steep hill on Yehezkal Street until Meah Shearim where it becomes Nathan Strauss Street, past Bichor Holim Hospital and down to where the street becomes King George and the neighborhood changes immediately and markedly. We passed more families, more soundtrucks, increasingly intoxicated yeshiva boys, tourists staring in wonderment at this totally strange world. We finally did get to Ben Yehuda, but after the spiritual high of the Hareidim, this “more normal” area seemed a decided letdown.
I started to tell Barbara about my conversation with the vaguely familiar man with whom I had been speaking. He looked something like Moshe, but much, much older (we had met Miriam [a Habshush daughter] and [son-in-law] Moshe in Jerusalem in 1980 when she had just given birth to quadruplets [three of whom survived] and then in Maale Levana in 1988 when their sukkah was bigger than their caravan). I wondered if that could have been Moshe’s father? – although I don’t remember meeting any of his family. Barbara set me straight. “That was Moshe,” she said.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Memories of You
Waking skies at sunrise, ev - ry sun - set too, Seems to be bringing me memories of you.Here and there, ev - 'ry - where, scenes that we once knew,And they all just re - call mem - o - ries of you.
How I wish I could forget those happy yes - ter - years;
That have left a ro - sa - ry of tears.
Your face beams in my dreams, in spite of all I do,And ev - 'ry - thing seems to bring mem - o - ries of you.
(Memories of You, music by James Hubert (Eubie) Blake, lyrics by Andy Razaf,from the score of Blackbirds of 1930)
A number of weeks ago, I don’t remember how many, as I was about to check my e-mail, I noticed an intriguing article on my Yahoo home page (one of those articles which appear for fifteen minutes, and, by the time you look for it later, it’s gone) about a man with perfect memory. Now I don’t mean memory as in the ability to memorize something ridiculous, like a string of 100 five digit numbers in the space of half an hour. This man – his name escapes me – remembers every moment of his life. Every detail. On a good day, I might remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. You might remember that you ran into your friend X at the bus station last Wednesday. This man could tell you what he had for breakfast on September 3, 1996. He would know who performed the ceremony when his friend Joe’s sister got married on June 22, 1989. And he’s not alone; there are a few others like him, and some others who can remember almost everything. Needless to say, scientists are examining this phenomenon.
My first reaction was: “that’s amazing!” Then, upon contemplation, I thought: “how awful.” We all know people who have had very difficult periods in their lives. But even for the Average Joe, everyone has had something happen that you’d definitely want to forget. Maybe even need to forget to retain your sanity.
Understanding the relationship between memory and personality is a fairly recent concept, I believe from around 1900. It is surely not a coincidence that the two greatest works of twentieth century literature, James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” and Marcel Proust’s “À la Recerche du Temps Perdu” (In Search of Lost Time) deal in very different ways with this phenomenon. It seems that René Descartes’ renowned notion “cogito, ego sum” (I think, therefore I am) was replaced by, as pithily described in one of Fred’s famous aphorisms, “You are what you remember.”
I have always been amazed by the many things that seemingly I should remember but I don’t, and the few things that for no apparent reason I do remember. Case in point: in the seven years I lived in Teaneck, almost every Friday evening, I walked to shul (Congregation Beth Aaron) taking exactly the same route: up the hill on Cranford Place to Red Road, turning left one short block to Grayson, making a right turn to Queen Anne Road, dodging traffic crossing the street and turning left to the shul. Depending on how late I was, it would take from seven to ten minutes, and fairly often I would run into somebody I knew. But most of these forays are just a blur in my mind. But on this specific Friday evening, as I was turning onto Red Road, I saw three people whom I did not recognize walking on Grayson Place, and for whatever reason, my antennas went up. I caught up with them, and they definitely needed my help. A college student was returning from a school project somewhere in New York or New Jersey to his home in Staten Island, taking with him a fellow student (whom at the time I thought was his girl friend, but was in fact just a passenger). They got terribly messed up in traffic, and there they were, close to an hour away from home, and it was, indisputably, Shabbos. (The nightmare that none of us who are “observant” ever want to be caught in.)The two of them knew that there were Jews in Teaneck, but they didn’t know any, and there were synagogues, but they didn’t know where. They just stopped the car, got out, and started walking – in their Friday dungarees. They chanced upon a fellow Jew who was not “observant,” but knew where Beth Aaron was. Then they saw me, and made the reasonable assumption that I was heading to shul. Now the young man was reluctant to go into Beth Aaron in his dungarees. So we agreed that the two of them would wait outside, and I would arrange hospitality for them. I ran up to Rabbi Kanarfogel, who directed me to … (anyone in Teaneck knows the answer!) Jeff Glazer, the local version of Avraham Avinu (the patriarch Abraham.) After the davening, Jeff and I left, looking for these two young souls. They were not near the synagogue, and we were about to give up looking for them when we found them wandering several blocks away. Jeff took them home, found them more appropriate Shabbat clothing, and they stayed with Jeff and June for Shabbat. And that was the last I saw or heard of that young couple, and I have no idea why this incident stuck in my mind, when so many things more critical to my life are totally gone. But it did.
Fast forward five or six years. A few weeks ago, Barbara and I were having dinner with Jeff and June Glazer in a little restaurant in the basement of Heichal Shlomo, a facility next to Jerusalem’s “The Great Synagogue” on King George St. We were planning to attend the taping of “Tuesday Night Live,” a new program which can be seen on Arutz 7 internet “television,” hosted by two of the station’s internet radio broadcasters, Ari Abromowitz and Jeremy Gimpel. As we were eating, Jeff began to tell us an “amazing story” about a young man whom he had met through Rabbi Kanarfogel. I interrupted Jeff and asked him why he was telling me the story; I knew all about it because I was the one who found this young man wandering the streets of Teaneck. Jeff had absolutely no recollection of my admittedly limited involvement in this incident. But why was Jeff telling us this story now? Jeff and June had gone to a previous taping of “Tuesday Night Live” and found this same young man, Yosef Adest, now also an oleh, playing the keyboard in the house band for this show. (After the show, we went over and Jeff introduced me to Yosef, who also had no recollection of my admittedly limited involvement in the affair! A few years later, still wearing jeans, Yosef realized how foolish it was of him to have been afraid to enter our synagogue that Friday night. As I put it, “Better to wear the wrong clothes in the right place, than to have on the right clothes in the wrong place.”) Come to think of it, that could apply to where you live, not just where you pray.
HAFSEKAH
(INTERMISSION)
How I wish I could forget those happy yes - ter - years;
That have left a ro - sa - ry of tears.
Your face beams in my dreams, in spite of all I do,And ev - 'ry - thing seems to bring mem - o - ries of you.
(Memories of You, music by James Hubert (Eubie) Blake, lyrics by Andy Razaf,from the score of Blackbirds of 1930)
A number of weeks ago, I don’t remember how many, as I was about to check my e-mail, I noticed an intriguing article on my Yahoo home page (one of those articles which appear for fifteen minutes, and, by the time you look for it later, it’s gone) about a man with perfect memory. Now I don’t mean memory as in the ability to memorize something ridiculous, like a string of 100 five digit numbers in the space of half an hour. This man – his name escapes me – remembers every moment of his life. Every detail. On a good day, I might remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. You might remember that you ran into your friend X at the bus station last Wednesday. This man could tell you what he had for breakfast on September 3, 1996. He would know who performed the ceremony when his friend Joe’s sister got married on June 22, 1989. And he’s not alone; there are a few others like him, and some others who can remember almost everything. Needless to say, scientists are examining this phenomenon.
My first reaction was: “that’s amazing!” Then, upon contemplation, I thought: “how awful.” We all know people who have had very difficult periods in their lives. But even for the Average Joe, everyone has had something happen that you’d definitely want to forget. Maybe even need to forget to retain your sanity.
Understanding the relationship between memory and personality is a fairly recent concept, I believe from around 1900. It is surely not a coincidence that the two greatest works of twentieth century literature, James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” and Marcel Proust’s “À la Recerche du Temps Perdu” (In Search of Lost Time) deal in very different ways with this phenomenon. It seems that René Descartes’ renowned notion “cogito, ego sum” (I think, therefore I am) was replaced by, as pithily described in one of Fred’s famous aphorisms, “You are what you remember.”
I have always been amazed by the many things that seemingly I should remember but I don’t, and the few things that for no apparent reason I do remember. Case in point: in the seven years I lived in Teaneck, almost every Friday evening, I walked to shul (Congregation Beth Aaron) taking exactly the same route: up the hill on Cranford Place to Red Road, turning left one short block to Grayson, making a right turn to Queen Anne Road, dodging traffic crossing the street and turning left to the shul. Depending on how late I was, it would take from seven to ten minutes, and fairly often I would run into somebody I knew. But most of these forays are just a blur in my mind. But on this specific Friday evening, as I was turning onto Red Road, I saw three people whom I did not recognize walking on Grayson Place, and for whatever reason, my antennas went up. I caught up with them, and they definitely needed my help. A college student was returning from a school project somewhere in New York or New Jersey to his home in Staten Island, taking with him a fellow student (whom at the time I thought was his girl friend, but was in fact just a passenger). They got terribly messed up in traffic, and there they were, close to an hour away from home, and it was, indisputably, Shabbos. (The nightmare that none of us who are “observant” ever want to be caught in.)The two of them knew that there were Jews in Teaneck, but they didn’t know any, and there were synagogues, but they didn’t know where. They just stopped the car, got out, and started walking – in their Friday dungarees. They chanced upon a fellow Jew who was not “observant,” but knew where Beth Aaron was. Then they saw me, and made the reasonable assumption that I was heading to shul. Now the young man was reluctant to go into Beth Aaron in his dungarees. So we agreed that the two of them would wait outside, and I would arrange hospitality for them. I ran up to Rabbi Kanarfogel, who directed me to … (anyone in Teaneck knows the answer!) Jeff Glazer, the local version of Avraham Avinu (the patriarch Abraham.) After the davening, Jeff and I left, looking for these two young souls. They were not near the synagogue, and we were about to give up looking for them when we found them wandering several blocks away. Jeff took them home, found them more appropriate Shabbat clothing, and they stayed with Jeff and June for Shabbat. And that was the last I saw or heard of that young couple, and I have no idea why this incident stuck in my mind, when so many things more critical to my life are totally gone. But it did.
Fast forward five or six years. A few weeks ago, Barbara and I were having dinner with Jeff and June Glazer in a little restaurant in the basement of Heichal Shlomo, a facility next to Jerusalem’s “The Great Synagogue” on King George St. We were planning to attend the taping of “Tuesday Night Live,” a new program which can be seen on Arutz 7 internet “television,” hosted by two of the station’s internet radio broadcasters, Ari Abromowitz and Jeremy Gimpel. As we were eating, Jeff began to tell us an “amazing story” about a young man whom he had met through Rabbi Kanarfogel. I interrupted Jeff and asked him why he was telling me the story; I knew all about it because I was the one who found this young man wandering the streets of Teaneck. Jeff had absolutely no recollection of my admittedly limited involvement in this incident. But why was Jeff telling us this story now? Jeff and June had gone to a previous taping of “Tuesday Night Live” and found this same young man, Yosef Adest, now also an oleh, playing the keyboard in the house band for this show. (After the show, we went over and Jeff introduced me to Yosef, who also had no recollection of my admittedly limited involvement in the affair! A few years later, still wearing jeans, Yosef realized how foolish it was of him to have been afraid to enter our synagogue that Friday night. As I put it, “Better to wear the wrong clothes in the right place, than to have on the right clothes in the wrong place.”) Come to think of it, that could apply to where you live, not just where you pray.
HAFSEKAH
(INTERMISSION)
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
A Letter to THE Editor
“But you know – everyone knows – that the army is everywhere in Israeli society.”“I know no such thing. I went out into the Israeli street and did not see what you are describing. And if it were the case, so what?”
It would be fair to ask me why I have this obsession with the newspaper, Haaretz, and especially with its weekly magazine: is it masochism on my part to read it, a need to know what the fringe-left is thinking, or simply morbid curiosity – the kind that impels people to tie up traffic for miles to get a glance at a multi-car pileup on the side of a highway. With all the good stuff I hardly have time to read, why did I take the time to go through very carefully an article entitled “Battle Dress” which appeared on Feb. 15, and then take even more time to respond with a Letter to the Editor?
Let me at least explain what I am talking about. Some months ago – I am not sure when because I wasn’t paying attention at the time, and because the article does not say – an enormous controversy arose here in The Land. A twenty-eight year old student, Eyal Cohen, who was then doing his miluim (army reserve duty), left his army base and went to attend his class in filmmaking. It was alleged that the teacher, a noted director of documentary films, Nizar Hassan, ejected the student from class because he was still in his army uniform. The Student Union became involved and issued a press release demanding “justice.” (This was apparently not an isolated situation: the article notes the activity of another fringe-leftist, Dr. Shlomit Tamari who “told a Bedouin student to remove her head-covering because it is an element of suppression…….’I told the student that I hadn’t intended to insult her,’ Tamari says. I told the college that I have academic freedom, and I can talk about that subject and I am continuing to do so.’”) The response from Israeli society was as you might expect: senior IDF officers became involved, and Hassan was denounced in the Knesset. Ultimately, when Hassan refused to apologize, a process was initiated to terminate his employment.
As you might expect from LeftLand, the article “Battle Dress” begins as a defense of Nizar Hassan, but – and this is why defense lawyers try not to put their clients on the witness stand – in the process, the filmmaker manages to destroy his own credibility. He categorically denies ejecting the student from his class. Instead he simply told him “I am absolutely unwilling to have people bearing arms and in uniform – whether of the police, of Fatah or of Hamas – come into my class,” in effect, creating an atmosphere of non-tolerance for this individual student-soldier as well as for the army in which he serves. When he was asked, “You made the decision to work in an Israeli academic institution -- you know the rules of the game.” “No.” “Can you lay down rules in the classroom even on a nonacademic matter?” “First of all, I have every right to argue with every rule and fight for rules that are appropriate for me.” And, of course, he denies “that the army is everywhere in Israeli society.” But what I love most of all is the false bravado often employed by people who are teetering on the brink: “I will not apologize. I prefer to beg in the streets of Nazareth and eat crumbs.” As if adding another family to the poverty roles would solve anything, or that a filmmaker with his credentials – especially now that he would be considered a “martyr” – would ever have to beg for bread.
Lest anyone misinterpret Hassan’s position that students should “not bring the war into my class,” as one of overzealous naiveté, consider the following sequence of events: this article appeared on Friday, Feb. 15. Two days later, I wrote my letter to the Editor, because this fake issue of “academic freedom” is one of my pet peeves (and thank G-d, while we had to pay $200 to transport our cat Mimi on the Nefesh B’Nefesh flight, I was not charged anything at all for bringing along all my pet peeves). That Wednesday night, we received a call from Haaretz that they were planning to print my letter. It did not appear that Friday; in its place was a different letter with a point of view that, I must admit, I would never have thought of. Nizar Hassan was obviously insecure as the only Arab member of faculty; the solution was to apologize to him and hire more Arab professors. My letter did finally appear in Haaretz magazine the Friday after that, Feb. 29. However, by that time, events of the day had overtaken this war of words. (It is often the fate of words to be overwhelmed by reality.)
Up to this point, I have deliberately omitted one significant piece of information. You see, the events we are discussing took place in Sapir College in Sderot. And as many of you are aware, during the week in question, kassam rockets launched by Hamas from Gaza landed on that college campus, killing a forty-seven year old student, and injuring many others. One of the newspapers had a photograph of a female Arab student with most of her face covered, a victim of shock, being carted off on a stretcher. My first reaction was to wonder if she was one of the students insulted by Shlomit Tamari. (By the way, I get absolutely no pleasure in seeing Arabs victimized because their own leaders choose death over life.) A number of students coherent enough to be interviewed by the media indicated that they knew it was only a matter of time before the campus was struck. So much for the notion of keeping the war away from the classroom.
An interesting bit of information: a recent poll, for whose accuracy I cannot vouch, indicated that about two thirds of Israelis favored negotiating with Hamas for a cease-fire. Now I have no idea what exact question was asked, or how it was asked. And, as a new immigrant, I do not pretend to be an expert on what your random Israeli – with whom I can barely communicate – is thinking. But I’m guessing the following: this is simply another vote of no-confidence in the current government, a belief that Olmert and company will continue to be unwilling or unable to prevent the terrorists from victimizing our people in and around Sderot. And it also indicates that your man on the street assumes that Olmert and his rag-tag crew will remain in power – even though virtually nobody in Israel who does not sit in the Knesset, or work for somebody sitting in the Knesset, wants this government to survive.
The government continues to survive because the religious Sephardic party, Shas, refuses to quit. I am somewhat reluctant to criticize this group; its spiritual leader, Ovadiah Yoself is a rabbi revered by many here and rightly acclaimed as a Torah scholar. However, their conditions for remaining in the government seem as shifting as the sand in the dunes that surround my home here in Maale Adumim. It has something to do with not negotiating with Abbas on dividing up Jerusalem. What is strange is that they are probably the only people in the country who do not believe that these negotiations are already taking place.
The plain truth is that if you asked a broad sampling of people here – young secularists sitting in a coffee bar in Tel Aviv on a Saturday morning, cab drivers waiting for your arrival at Ben-Gurion airport, religious moshavniks in the Galil – why Shas remains in the coalition, you would probably get variations on the same harsh and devastating answer: blackmail. That Shas is simply using its position as power maker (we can bring down the government if you don’t do what we want) to get its people into key positions (like chief rabbi of Jerusalem), or to get support for legislation that ordinarily wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in you-know-where of passing.
While people in Sderot, and now in Ashkelon, are living in fear of rockets, the Shas delegation in the Knesset was rounding up support for a bill that would require Bezeq – the phone company and provider of our internet connection – to provide every user with a filter that would block out violence and pornography coming over the internet; if you didn’t want it, you would have to opt out on your own.
Now, I am, in general, opposed to pornography and violence, and in favor of devices that keep them away from children and from the rest of us. In fact, I am surprised that there aren’t such devices commonly available for television, which could certainly use some supervision. But there are plenty of effective filtering devises for the internet already on the market, with more on the way. My philosophy is that it’s a bad idea to force people to do what they would probably do on their own – if they thought it was their idea. I am also a political conservative from America who believes that he can do a better job of running his life than the government can. If this bill were to pass – unlikely, but possible – the Knesset member in charge of this project (and who would decide the definition of pornography) could easily become someone who believes that men should never see any pictures of fully-dressed women, and that men and women should walk on opposite sides of the street.
Meanwhile, life goes on in Sderot and environs, and the folks around the world are taking umbrage at even our half-hearted attempts at self defense. What I have decided to do – now that I have caught the attention of the editor of Haaretz magazine, and in my never ending effort to make the world a better place to live – is write a letter to THE Editor, The Ultimate Decision Maker, The One to Whom we address our supplications and requests. With your permission, I will share it with you:
Dear Ultimate Decider of My Fate; I know that You have a lot to accomplish, so I will keep this missive as brief as possible. It seems to me that You are forced to remind us every once in a while who is in charge – You – and who is not in charge – Us. Even as someone who just recently arrived in The Land You promised us thousands of years ago, and to which You are graciously allowing us to return, some things are fairly obvious, and one of them is that You are in the “I’m reminding you” mode. Israel has never been stronger, economically, technologically, and, yes, even spiritually. Yet there is an obvious inverse relation between the strength of the nation and the weakness of resolve and narrowness of spirit of our leaders – even some of those who claim to represent You. And the more numerous we become, the more determined our enemies are to destroy us. (Didn’t we play this scene out before?) So what are we left with? Your eternal mercy and our own resolve to live in The Land. May I humbly offer up the follow requests for Your consideration: Confound our enemies, give our leaders a little backbone once in a while, and remind our extended family still living in Exile – oblivious to the physical dangers some of them face and the real threat of decimation by assimilation that all of them face – that You would like them to come Home. And allow us to go from strength to strength.
Sincerely,Fred CasdenHamitzadim 33Maale Adumim, 98420Israel
It would be fair to ask me why I have this obsession with the newspaper, Haaretz, and especially with its weekly magazine: is it masochism on my part to read it, a need to know what the fringe-left is thinking, or simply morbid curiosity – the kind that impels people to tie up traffic for miles to get a glance at a multi-car pileup on the side of a highway. With all the good stuff I hardly have time to read, why did I take the time to go through very carefully an article entitled “Battle Dress” which appeared on Feb. 15, and then take even more time to respond with a Letter to the Editor?
Let me at least explain what I am talking about. Some months ago – I am not sure when because I wasn’t paying attention at the time, and because the article does not say – an enormous controversy arose here in The Land. A twenty-eight year old student, Eyal Cohen, who was then doing his miluim (army reserve duty), left his army base and went to attend his class in filmmaking. It was alleged that the teacher, a noted director of documentary films, Nizar Hassan, ejected the student from class because he was still in his army uniform. The Student Union became involved and issued a press release demanding “justice.” (This was apparently not an isolated situation: the article notes the activity of another fringe-leftist, Dr. Shlomit Tamari who “told a Bedouin student to remove her head-covering because it is an element of suppression…….’I told the student that I hadn’t intended to insult her,’ Tamari says. I told the college that I have academic freedom, and I can talk about that subject and I am continuing to do so.’”) The response from Israeli society was as you might expect: senior IDF officers became involved, and Hassan was denounced in the Knesset. Ultimately, when Hassan refused to apologize, a process was initiated to terminate his employment.
As you might expect from LeftLand, the article “Battle Dress” begins as a defense of Nizar Hassan, but – and this is why defense lawyers try not to put their clients on the witness stand – in the process, the filmmaker manages to destroy his own credibility. He categorically denies ejecting the student from his class. Instead he simply told him “I am absolutely unwilling to have people bearing arms and in uniform – whether of the police, of Fatah or of Hamas – come into my class,” in effect, creating an atmosphere of non-tolerance for this individual student-soldier as well as for the army in which he serves. When he was asked, “You made the decision to work in an Israeli academic institution -- you know the rules of the game.” “No.” “Can you lay down rules in the classroom even on a nonacademic matter?” “First of all, I have every right to argue with every rule and fight for rules that are appropriate for me.” And, of course, he denies “that the army is everywhere in Israeli society.” But what I love most of all is the false bravado often employed by people who are teetering on the brink: “I will not apologize. I prefer to beg in the streets of Nazareth and eat crumbs.” As if adding another family to the poverty roles would solve anything, or that a filmmaker with his credentials – especially now that he would be considered a “martyr” – would ever have to beg for bread.
Lest anyone misinterpret Hassan’s position that students should “not bring the war into my class,” as one of overzealous naiveté, consider the following sequence of events: this article appeared on Friday, Feb. 15. Two days later, I wrote my letter to the Editor, because this fake issue of “academic freedom” is one of my pet peeves (and thank G-d, while we had to pay $200 to transport our cat Mimi on the Nefesh B’Nefesh flight, I was not charged anything at all for bringing along all my pet peeves). That Wednesday night, we received a call from Haaretz that they were planning to print my letter. It did not appear that Friday; in its place was a different letter with a point of view that, I must admit, I would never have thought of. Nizar Hassan was obviously insecure as the only Arab member of faculty; the solution was to apologize to him and hire more Arab professors. My letter did finally appear in Haaretz magazine the Friday after that, Feb. 29. However, by that time, events of the day had overtaken this war of words. (It is often the fate of words to be overwhelmed by reality.)
Up to this point, I have deliberately omitted one significant piece of information. You see, the events we are discussing took place in Sapir College in Sderot. And as many of you are aware, during the week in question, kassam rockets launched by Hamas from Gaza landed on that college campus, killing a forty-seven year old student, and injuring many others. One of the newspapers had a photograph of a female Arab student with most of her face covered, a victim of shock, being carted off on a stretcher. My first reaction was to wonder if she was one of the students insulted by Shlomit Tamari. (By the way, I get absolutely no pleasure in seeing Arabs victimized because their own leaders choose death over life.) A number of students coherent enough to be interviewed by the media indicated that they knew it was only a matter of time before the campus was struck. So much for the notion of keeping the war away from the classroom.
An interesting bit of information: a recent poll, for whose accuracy I cannot vouch, indicated that about two thirds of Israelis favored negotiating with Hamas for a cease-fire. Now I have no idea what exact question was asked, or how it was asked. And, as a new immigrant, I do not pretend to be an expert on what your random Israeli – with whom I can barely communicate – is thinking. But I’m guessing the following: this is simply another vote of no-confidence in the current government, a belief that Olmert and company will continue to be unwilling or unable to prevent the terrorists from victimizing our people in and around Sderot. And it also indicates that your man on the street assumes that Olmert and his rag-tag crew will remain in power – even though virtually nobody in Israel who does not sit in the Knesset, or work for somebody sitting in the Knesset, wants this government to survive.
The government continues to survive because the religious Sephardic party, Shas, refuses to quit. I am somewhat reluctant to criticize this group; its spiritual leader, Ovadiah Yoself is a rabbi revered by many here and rightly acclaimed as a Torah scholar. However, their conditions for remaining in the government seem as shifting as the sand in the dunes that surround my home here in Maale Adumim. It has something to do with not negotiating with Abbas on dividing up Jerusalem. What is strange is that they are probably the only people in the country who do not believe that these negotiations are already taking place.
The plain truth is that if you asked a broad sampling of people here – young secularists sitting in a coffee bar in Tel Aviv on a Saturday morning, cab drivers waiting for your arrival at Ben-Gurion airport, religious moshavniks in the Galil – why Shas remains in the coalition, you would probably get variations on the same harsh and devastating answer: blackmail. That Shas is simply using its position as power maker (we can bring down the government if you don’t do what we want) to get its people into key positions (like chief rabbi of Jerusalem), or to get support for legislation that ordinarily wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in you-know-where of passing.
While people in Sderot, and now in Ashkelon, are living in fear of rockets, the Shas delegation in the Knesset was rounding up support for a bill that would require Bezeq – the phone company and provider of our internet connection – to provide every user with a filter that would block out violence and pornography coming over the internet; if you didn’t want it, you would have to opt out on your own.
Now, I am, in general, opposed to pornography and violence, and in favor of devices that keep them away from children and from the rest of us. In fact, I am surprised that there aren’t such devices commonly available for television, which could certainly use some supervision. But there are plenty of effective filtering devises for the internet already on the market, with more on the way. My philosophy is that it’s a bad idea to force people to do what they would probably do on their own – if they thought it was their idea. I am also a political conservative from America who believes that he can do a better job of running his life than the government can. If this bill were to pass – unlikely, but possible – the Knesset member in charge of this project (and who would decide the definition of pornography) could easily become someone who believes that men should never see any pictures of fully-dressed women, and that men and women should walk on opposite sides of the street.
Meanwhile, life goes on in Sderot and environs, and the folks around the world are taking umbrage at even our half-hearted attempts at self defense. What I have decided to do – now that I have caught the attention of the editor of Haaretz magazine, and in my never ending effort to make the world a better place to live – is write a letter to THE Editor, The Ultimate Decision Maker, The One to Whom we address our supplications and requests. With your permission, I will share it with you:
Dear Ultimate Decider of My Fate; I know that You have a lot to accomplish, so I will keep this missive as brief as possible. It seems to me that You are forced to remind us every once in a while who is in charge – You – and who is not in charge – Us. Even as someone who just recently arrived in The Land You promised us thousands of years ago, and to which You are graciously allowing us to return, some things are fairly obvious, and one of them is that You are in the “I’m reminding you” mode. Israel has never been stronger, economically, technologically, and, yes, even spiritually. Yet there is an obvious inverse relation between the strength of the nation and the weakness of resolve and narrowness of spirit of our leaders – even some of those who claim to represent You. And the more numerous we become, the more determined our enemies are to destroy us. (Didn’t we play this scene out before?) So what are we left with? Your eternal mercy and our own resolve to live in The Land. May I humbly offer up the follow requests for Your consideration: Confound our enemies, give our leaders a little backbone once in a while, and remind our extended family still living in Exile – oblivious to the physical dangers some of them face and the real threat of decimation by assimilation that all of them face – that You would like them to come Home. And allow us to go from strength to strength.
Sincerely,Fred CasdenHamitzadim 33Maale Adumim, 98420Israel
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