Hannah and the Mixed Condition

This is the story of Hannah and her mixed conditional sentence, contrary to fact, thus bringing together the study of languages and Tisha B’Av.

It was time for us to return to Ulpan: Barbara had completed her five free months at Beit Am; Natania had continued pretty much until she joined the IDF in the beginning of February; I lasted until January when I decided that I had done as much as I could do. I wasn’t thrilled with our teacher, and I had reached a point where I couldn’t absorb anymore of what was going on. It was as if the rest of the class was motoring along in an air-conditioned tour bus, and I was stuck on the side of the road, riding a very reluctant donkey. For the next few months, I made it a point of trying to memorize at least one new word a day and somehow using whatever Hebrew I had learned to get around. Most of the time, I can get by. My favorite place of all is the Mahane Yehuda shuk, and I have no trouble getting what I need there, although dealing with Israelis can be frustrating at times. Example: I hand the guy my bags of peaches, apricots, tomatoes, whatever. He weighs it, does a quick heshbon (calculation), and mumbles into his sleeve, “shloshim v’arba shekel.” Should I reply “lo shamati” (I didn’t hear you) or “od paam” (again), he will turn directly to me, and in a voice which can be heard throughout the shuk, scream “thirty four shekels” as if I were not only stupid, but deaf.
But Natania, responding to my snail-like progress, began to noodge me: “Daddy, when are you going back to Ulpan?” And Barbara had already registered at a different Ulpan, Mila, so I assumed that the time was propitious. Now there are several differences between Beth Am and Mila: this is a private Ulpan, so we are now paying about $250 for a ten week course which meets, instead of five mornings a week, two evenings, which I figured would give me enough time to do the homework, review and prepare. I figured I would register for a class that met the same two nights as Barbara’s, but that was not to be. Here you couldn’t just talk your way into whatever class you wanted – resulting in a class of students on wildly different levels. Here they actually make you sit down and take a brief written test to determine your level. I did my best, handed it in, and the guy-in-charge graded it on the spot. He said “beit plus.” I said “gimmel,” hopefully. He gave me the equivalent of a finger wag and said “beit plus.” Beit plus, the level I began with at Beit Am, although I soon discovered that beit plus here is equivalent to gimmel there.(Official digression: In The States, one indicates a negative by a sideways shake of the head. Here, it’s done by taking a forefinger and wagging it sideways at a rate of about one second per rotation, usually three or four times. A classic example of its use: waiting for my appointment with a urologist at the Maccabi clinic in Maale Adumim. The office door was open and there was no patient inside. Did the doctor know I was waiting? I stuck my neck in expectantly. He did not raise his eyes from the computer screen; he did not say a word; he moved exactly one muscle, the one controlling the motion of his forefinger. I returned to my chair and waited.)
And so, with my new note pad and the second volume of “Hebrew from Scratch,” one of the dozens of workbooks I have used in my career as a Hebrew student, I was ready to begin. Our teacher is a tall bundle of energy named Inbal, who I discovered, in response to a composition I handed in, had been a Hebrew instructor at the same base where Natania completed her Kurs Ivrit. As is typical of Ulpans in Israel, there are students from all over with different mother tongues. Most of them speak more than one language, and, of course, almost everyone in the class speaks English, from passably to extremely well. Which leads me up to the story of Hannah and her conditional sentence.
Last week one of the students asked if there would be a session the following Sunday, Tisha B’Av. Inbal said that there would not, whereupon Hannah, a young woman (I’m guessing she’s in her mid-twenties, about Tina’s age) who sits near me, remarked that she was not planning to show up in any event. I agreed that I also wouldn’t be there (I hadn’t even made it for the half fast day in Tammuz, two weeks earlier.) But after I left the class, I began to roll over in my mind her elegant construction: “If they had scheduled it (the class), I would not have come.” To the best of my knowledge, having spent my entire life learning, teaching, reading, and writing English, that construction seemed 100% correct; but I could not remember what to call it. (There is an on-going debate as to whether a true subjunctive exists nowadays in English, but, in any case, that ain’t it) With a good deal of help from my friends at Google, I pinned it down to a conditional construction, a mixed one at that (the condition taking place in a different time frame from the result), and certainly contrary to fact: there was no class scheduled for Tisha B’Av. How did she know to use that construction? In The States, the young women who work at the malls, the ones suggesting that you “Have a nice day” would be hard pressed to say that; even American college students wouldn’t be so eloquent. Plus, despite her excellent English, when she says two words, you can tell immediately that Hannah is not a native English speaker, but comes from the east coast of the English Channel. (As I later learned, from Strasbourg.) I ran all this by my friends Joan and Jerry in Brooklyn, and they were likewise intrigued by this Gallic mastery of English grammar. Nothing to do but ask. So at Wednesday night’s class, I reminded Hannah of what she had said, and asked her where she learned such good English. She asked me, a little apprehensively if she “had said it right.” Absolutely, I replied, but how and where did she learn to say something which 99% of Americans couldn’t replicate? “At the university.” Simple enough! What would Americans say, she inquired. At that moment, I was reluctant to try and imagine what Americans would say. However, after having given the matter some thought, perhaps “I’m not coming on Tisha B’Av.” Or Natania’s suggestion, “I wouldn’t come anyway,” in which American frankness replaces Gallic subtlety.
When I am with people who have managed to master several foreign languages, I invariably think of my own adventures and mishaps in studying, in order, three years of Spanish, two years of French, two years of Latin, three terms of Ancient Greek, and one term of Anglo-Saxon (I’ll discuss Hebrew in a little while). There are people reading this blog who were in my Spanish classes at DeWitt Clinton H.S. in The Bronx, and who can verify that Mrs. Moscoso had an obsession that all of her students (it was an all boys school at the time) were interested in staring at parts of her anatomy. Maybe twenty five year and forty pounds before, yes. But even with the extremely high testosterone count of the Clinton lads, no one was interested. My old friends can also vouch for me that there was a Ronnie Y. and that he did engage in the following futile exchange with another of our teachers: teacher: Yo ablo (I speak); Ronnie: Yo haBLOW; teacher: Yo ablo; Ronnie: Yo haBLOW. This butchery of the language continued until no one in the class could keep a straight face, but has lasted longer in the collective memory of some of us; Ronnie’s verbal infelicity will be remembered until the last of us is muerto. With all this, I did learn some Spanish, and to this day, if you were to give me one of the newspapers prepared for the Hispanic population of New York, I could read a good part of it with little difficulty.
Next came French at City College. What stands out most in my mind is my first term with Mr. Nesselrod, a rather smug, well-dressed Belgian with an eye for the innocent freshman girls. His class began at 8AM and he had a simple policy, diabolical but effective, to make certain that his students came on time: at precisely 8AM, he would close and lock the door to his classroom. If you came later, you were absent. You might as well have stayed in bed! Of course, because we were only allowed a certain number of “cuts,” you can imagine the level of stress in the student body. At every class, you would see students gasping for air, having run the eight blocks from the subway up the hill to the campus. To make matters worse, every once in a while, some doofus would forget to unlock the campus gate nearest our building. It would have been impossible to go around to the other gate and get to class on time, so there was nothing else to do but to climb the ten foot high fence at 7:55 in the morning. Still, when we were in Hebron in 1988 and the only available brochures for Maarat Hamachpela were in Hebrew or French, you know which one I grabbed. I would make the same choice today!
Back in the days when I went to City College, if you planned to major in English, you had to take 18 credits of Latin. And so I spent the next two years puzzling through parts of Virgil’s Aeneid, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, the less bawdy verses of Catullus, and everyone’s favorite, Cicero’s First Oration Against Cataline. Next, a little bit of The Iliad in the original, and enough Anglo-Saxon to get through parts of Beowulf; and I was all set to graduate from City College and get on with my life.
More than a decade later, it was time for me to attend Ulpan in New York, part of a process of entering Jewish observance and re-learning the Hebrew that I had forgotten shortly after our (my fraternal twin brother and my) bar mitzvah. If nothing else, I met Barbara at 515 Park Ave., (then the Jewish Agency building) so I rank my experience there a huge success. I have many fond memories of the wild assortment of people who were trying to learn Hebrew right around the time when Menachem Begin was first elected Rosh Hamemshalah (prime minister). But the one incident that more or less sums up my experience in trying to learn Hebrew: in one of my classes were two young women, very close friends who always came together. In the middle of one of our classes, the two of them burst into laughter simultaneously for no apparent reason. When they calmed down, they explained what was going on. The two of them had been studying Hebrew for a number of years, and it reached a point where they would keep going over the same material without it ever sinking in. Our teacher had just taught something which these two girls realized that they had studied time after time and still hadn’t learned. Their laughter was simply a recognition of utter futility.
Futility: that’s a good way to express my feeling about learning the seven binyanim (verb constructions) in Hebrew: Imagine someone juggling balls. Almost anyone in good health can throw one ball in the air and catch it. Most people unless they are drunk can toss two balls in the air. Many people can handle three. Four becomes more difficult, and so on. Each binyan individually is easy, even with learning present, past, and future tenses as well as infinitives and participles, first person singular, second person singular masculine, second person singular feminine, and the rest. But trying to remember and use them all is like juggling three oranges, a pencil, a salami, an axe, and a hand grenade at the same time. Or so it seems. Perhaps our bright young friend from Strasbourg is correct: “It’s like learning Chinese.”
But there is one significant difference: we are not in China (although at this moment half of the planet is there for the Olympics!), and we have no particular reason to live there or learn its languages. We are in Israel, and there is a reason why we are here. Perhaps the following story will help explain my persistence in “breaking my teeth” to learn Hebrew.
Back in my glory days at City College, in addition to the foreign languages and the courses in English grammar and literature – from Chaucer to the 20th century – I also took a course in Linguistics. The textbook was Leonard Bloomfield’s “Language,” written in 1933, (many times reprinted but apparently never revised), probably the most influential work in its field at the time. Like many of the college texts I used, this book got shoved into a bookcase after the course was over. Many years later, I needed to look up something, and picked up Bloomfield’s book. Out of idle curiosity, I turned to the chapter where he was cataloging the various language families and came to the section on Semitic languages, and then to the subheading, Northwest Semitic Languages. There on the page for anyone to see was an unqualified statement that Hebrew was extinct as a spoken language.
As some of you know, I simply adore irony. On the same bookshelf, a few volumes away from Bloomfield, was my much used paperback Latin textbook. I had spent so much of my college days studying truly extinct languages, one of them being Latin, which while it morphed itself into several modern languages – including the ones that Hannah and Maribel speak – is itself as dead as the proverbial doornail. There are very few people today who can read Virgil, Catullus, Ovid, or Cicero in the original, let alone translate the simple inscription on the Arch of Titus in Rome, built to commemorate the destruction of the Second Beit Hamikdash and the triumphant return of Titus with the temple treasures:
SENATVSPOPVLVSQVE·ROMANVSDIVO·TITO·DIVI·VESPASIANI·F(ILIO)VESPASIANO·AVGVSTO"The Senate and People of Rome (dedicates this) to Titus Vespasianus Augustus, now-a-god, son of Vespasian, now-a-god." Kind of gets to you, doesn’t it?
Sitting here yesterday, keeping out of the afternoon heat on Tisha B’Av, and dealing with caffeine deprivation, I had this fantastical notion which I share with you now:It is about the year 80 of the Common Era. A group of Hebrew slaves is being marched in chains through Rome near where the Arch of Titus is being built and where this inscription is being carved. One of them turns to his Roman taskmaster and says something like this, “Today, anyone in Rome who can read and write will understand this inscription and will know the honor due to Vespasian and Titus. But there will be a time when no will be able to read it. There will be a time when only a handful of trained men will know how to read your poets, your playwrights, your statesmen. But we will never forget our sacred texts. Someday, everyone will howl with derision at your list of gods and deified men; but our One G-d will redeem us one day. When that happens, our people will return to the Land from which you have expelled us. And as your monuments to yourselves begin to crumble, our Temple will be rebuilt.”
As is done from time to time, the Israel Museum is displaying “The Great Isaiah Scroll,” the only complete manuscript found in the caves near Qumran in 1947. Many Israelis have gone to see it, and, according to the newspapers here, are visibly moved because they, modern-day Hebrew speakers, are able to read the prophetic message written on this scroll more than 2000 year ago. Much has been made of the idea that within a generation or two, a majority of the world’s Jewish population will live in The Land for the first time since the destruction of the First Beit Hamikdash. The obvious corollary to that is that within two decades the majority of Jewish people will speak Hebrew as their native tongue – even if half of the vocabulary will be borrowed from English!
So here’s to you, Leonard Bloomfield, wherever you are!!!! We, the Jewish people, have spent the last two millennia mastering every language and dialect on the face of the earth – even creating a few pastiches of our own. And now, Jewish children in The Old City are once again mastering “hitpael” without even knowing that they are doing it or how hard it is. So we in Ulpan muddle on. It may seem like “Chinese,” but it’s our own beloved “Chinese” in our own beloved Land.
Tisha B’Av has come and gone, and maybe we are coming closer to The Final Redemption. Is Mashiach on the way? Whenever he shows up, if he addressed the crowd in Hebrew, I want to understand what he is saying.

Beginning with a Ball of Yarn

My wife, in a rare flight of fancy, said that this part of the story began with a ball of yarn. In fact, it began months earlier with a shopping bag – two of them, in fact. Our neighbor Yaffa, a rather imposing woman, was walking home from a shopping excursion at our local Super-r-r-r, carrying these same shopping bags laden with groceries. She stopped for a minute to rest, and a very tiny kitten ran up to her and jumped into her lap. She looked down at the kitten; the kitten looked up at her. Many people would have removed this small animal, stray cats being a dime a dozen in Maale Adumim (except that dimes are very scarce in our neck of the woods); but there are those who understand, that if there is a stray kitten in your lap, it must be part of G-d’s greater plan. Jaffa picked up this small creature, put him in her pocket book, and took him home, naming him, don’t ask me why, “Witty Kitty.”
Needless to say, as all baby animals do, over the weeks and months, WK began to grow, becoming quite the strapping young cat. Yaffa, meanwhile, had met an appropriate man and was about to get married. She realized that there were two things she would have to give up: her Sephardic eating habits over Pesach, and………her Witty Kitty. Finding a home for her rice and beans would not be a “biggie,” but her cat? There may be as many cats as people in Maale Adumim, and most of these felines depend on human throw-aways for their livelihood. I’m sure some of you are beginning to figure out what comes next, and you are correct. WK, now the size of a young deer, came to co-occupy a litter box with Mimi, our aged American cat, who is not used to sharing. There were quite a few verbal altercations between these two over the next week or so, so when we heard a ruckus in our pinat ochel (dining area) one evening, we assumed it was the two felines fussing. But Mimi was with us in the bedroom, so what could be going on? Barbara went to investigate, and so began the saga of the yarn ball.
A well-meaning friend, herself the manager of a herd of cats, had brought over a ball of yarn, lavender in color, for Witty to play with. In a matter of minutes, he had unwound the ball; and in a few more minutes had wound the yarn around himself and a dining room chair. If we had not intervened, he probably would have dragged the chair around the entire house in his efforts to escape. Barbara realized that we would have to assist in untangling him – which she did, in the process getting scratched and bitten in her thumb by this frantic animal.
The following day, Barbara was sitting at work (she is now employed part time as the Administrator of the Seniors Program, for which she gets paid almost as much as a cleaning lady), when she noticed that her thumb was beginning to swell. She left work at 2:30 and hurried over to the main Maccabi health center in Jerusalem (located in the Clal Building, which I have previously described as the ugliest building in town), waving her swollen thumb in the air so that she would get prompt attention. Her thumb, of course, was infected; so she was given a prescription for an antibiotic, which she got filled at the Maccabi pharmacy down the block. So far, so good, except that everyone, including Barbara, forgot Rule No. 1 about taking antibiotics, which is, DON’T take them on an empty stomach.
Now all this happened in time for Barbara to cross Agrippas St. at 4PM and meet me along with a lot of other people for a tour of the adjoining neighborhoods Mazkeret Moshe and Ohel Moshe (both built in 1883 and named for Moses Montefiore, their benefactor). About five minutes into the tour, Barbara, who had been standing, sat down on a stone railing. I walked over to her, and she told me that she did not feel good; she felt as if she were going to faint. If nothing else, my wife is a woman of her word: she promptly fell off the railing onto the sidewalk. I just stood there, looking down at the woman with whom I have been married for twenty nine years, my helpmate, the mother of my children, the love of my life, lying insensible on the ground. Fortunately, there was a doctor and a nurse in the tour group; both of these women took over and restored Barbara to full consciousness (if you are drawing the inference that I am not much good in medical emergencies, you are correct). After a decent rest, time to eat and drink (interrupted by the husband of the doctor, who had come back to alert her that the woman who had arranged the tour [Naomi from the OU Israel Center] had slipped and fell and herself required medical attention), Barbara was fine and was able to return home unaided. We were not charged for the tour.
A few days later, I did get a chance to participate in a tiyul in essentially the same area, this time with with my Ulpan class (I will discuss our return to Ulpan in another entry. Please be patient.). We left our class after taking a brief quiz and walked across King George St. to an area called “The Mashbir” (the name of the first “department store” in Jerusalem) where we met a young woman who served as our tour guide. She soon had us walking through the narrow streets and alleyways which collectively make up an area called Nachlaot, which I have described as a mixture of Mea Shearim and Rehavia. If you know Jerusalem, you probably understand what I’m saying. For the rest of you, here goes: we’re talking about an area in the middle of downtown Jerusalem, a few blocks from where they are tearing up the main street, Jaffa, to build a light rail system, and yet you might think you’re in a small village with tiny streets filled with trees, shrubs, and flowers and carefully preserved houses. The people who live here are a bewildering assortment of hareidim, artists, Bratzlever wannabes, and the usual mix of religious and secular people that you would find elsewhere in downtown Jerusalem. Here we were threading our way at twilight through pathways where I had never been – even though I know the area pretty well. Except for the low voice of our tour guide, who had urged us to be as quiet as possible not to disturb the residents, at times you could have heard a pin drop. The adjectives “calm” and “quiet” rarely seem to apply to anywhere in our ancient capital; it was more like we were in a village in a faraway land – except for the prevalence of synagogues and buildings of Jerusalem stone.
The tiyul ended, and we all went our separate ways. I walked across Agrippas and through the shuk, now closed for business and also strangely quiet (although if you listened v-e-r-y closely, you could almost hear an echo of the men who had been screaming a few hours before, “agvaniot [tomatoes] 2 shekel, kilo) in a never-ending cacophony). I caught a bus up Rehov Yaffa, and then my bus back to Maale Adumim, which, as everyone knows by now, is a little bit east of Yerushalayim.
A FELINE FOOTNOTE: Would that I could say that the two black and white cats, an arthritic old lady from American and a young Sabra, were getting along as well as the men in the competing stalls in the shuk, but they aren’t. More on this and other matters to follow.

"Ambushed," or A Priestly Blessing on a Sunday Afternoon

“Anyone who lives in the Land of Israel should always be happy.” (Elazar Azkari, author of “Yedid Nefesh”)
I realized that it was time for mincha (the afternoon prayers) and I needed to get my rear end in gear and get to shul – something which I don’t always do. The occasion? It was Sunday, July 20, making it the 17th of Tamuz, commemorating the first breach of the walls of the second Beit Hamikdash and the first day of “the three weeks” leading up to Tisha B’Av. It is a (half) fast day, and, therefore, I had roused my body out of bed at 3AM to have breakfast: orange juice with all my pills, softboiled eggs, zucchini bread, and tea; and then just as readily resumed my slumbers. I had spent the entire day indoors. It was much too hot here to frolic outside when you can’t have anything to drink. But now it was time to walk v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y up the hill, around the bend, up the path, up the ramp, and around the bend to Mussar Avicha. Once mincha started, we would be almost at the end of the (non-eating) day; one could even entertain thoughts of dinner: in my case, left-over chicken from Shabbat preceded by some of delicious, cold gazpacho.
I didn’t even consider changing my clothes; it was just too hot. So I went to shul wearing exactly what I had been wearing all day: my knee-length beige shorts, an official t-shirt from the Derivatives Russia Conference [March 27 and 28, 2008, Hotel Baltschug Kempinski, Moscow] (there was a time when my t-shirts would come from my kids’ schools; now they come from Tina’s job) and my new crocs (on sale in The Land for 180 shekels; available on the Crocs website for about forty bucks, including shipping – in the US, only). My timing was good; I arrived just as they were taking out the Torah scroll. (Unlike a typical weekday mincha, on a public fast day, there are additions to the prayers as well as a Torah reading and a haftorah.) Having done this many times in The States, I thought I knew what was flying. But, after we said the Amidah, when the shaliach tzibbur (the guy leading the davening) began the repetition and we recited the communal kedusha, it occurred to me that the other cohanim were leaving the room. Then it dawned on me: We have to duchen??!!!! At mincha??!!!!!
If I wanted to describe all the differences, subtle and not so subtle, about living in The Land, I could spend the rest of my life giving examples. Birkat Cohanim (The Cohanic blessing, sometimes called duchening, after the Yiddish word for platform) would be a biggie for me, because it puts me to work. Among the ashkenazim in the lands of the exile, this is performed about twenty times a year – not counting the informal blessing that fathers give their chidren Friday nights: at mussaf (the additional prayers during the morning) on Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and the festivals. Why only then? Because our Sages decided by that only at these special times would a galut community be in the properly festive frame of mind to receive G-d’s blessing as transmitted by the cohanim. Here in the Land (as many of you are probably tired of hearing) at most batei Knesset (there are some which only do it on Shabbat) the birkat cohanim is done every day at shacharit (morning prayers) and at shacharit and mussaf on Shabbat, Rosh Hodesh, (the new moon) and The Holidays. The fact that we would also be doing it at mincha on this fast day somehow eluded me. Nothing else to be done: I ran after my cohanic brethren, washed my hands, and grabbed a tallit from the rack in the lobby, putting it on hurriedly so I would be ready. It happens that I have two talletot of my own – safe and sound at home: one old one of medium size and weight which I wear during the week, and a nice one, also medium sized but of light-weight “tropical” wool, which I wear on Shabbat. The off-the-rack model from the shul lobby was enormous on me. It was rather heavy – almost blanket weight – probably designed to keep one warm in an unheated shteibel in Vitebsk in the middle of January.

And so, along with a handful of “frat brothers,” I ascended the bima – in my shorts and t-shirt (at least it was white!) completely obscured under my borrowed prayer shawl, my bare feet sticking out from under. “YEVERECHECHA……” (May G-d bless you and keep you safe; may He make His presence seem bright and may He be gracious to you; may He turn his favor your way and create peace for you.) At some point, a thought crept into my head. It was very late in the afternoon on this brutally hot day; we were all very hungry and thirsty and perhaps somewhat fatigued – all because we are commemorating the beginning of the destruction of our Temple, which we have been waiting two thousand years to rebuild; and yet now there was – by definition – collectively more simcha here a little bit east of Yerushalayim than there would be on a Shabbat morning back in New Jersey – wearing our best clothes, anticipating our best food (and perhaps a wee dram of some single malt). How did I know that there was more simcha in this relatively modest beit knesset here in Maale Adumim? Because we were allowed to recite the cohanic blessing!
When the davening was over, Nachum (one of the shul leaders, a wonderful guy who gives wonderfully original and insightful shiurim in English) came over to me and said that he realized that he had not warned me about the duchening. “You looked ambushed,” he said. I admitted that, had I realized I would be “performing,” I would have at least changed my pants. I shared with him my thoughts about levels of simcha, here and elsewhere. His response was, “You don’t have to convince me!” We were waiting for the time to start maariv (evening prayers), after which we would be free, summoning our remaining energy, to race home and eat something. I went up to Baruch P., and repeated my thoughts about the relative levels of simcha here and in The Exile. He also was not taken aback by my idea. He added that there was more simcha in The Land on a typical Shabbat than there would be elsewhere during Neilah (the concluding prayers on Yom Kippur).
I thought about this concept as I walked back home, as I guzzled my gazpacho, and I am still thinking about it. The way I figure it, there are two possibilities: One. Talking about a higher, perpetual level of simcha in The Land is either a vague concept, or simply a vacuous, self-serving idea spread among “the faithful,” i.e.; those of us who have chosen to live here, a way of laying a guilt trip on friends and family who have decided differently where to live, something which the Exilic community needn’t act upon or take seriously. Two. Our Sages understood something of enormous profundity about the value – personal and collective – of living here, which The Galut is ignoring at its peril.
The more I thought about “simcha in The Land,” the more I realized that in discussing this level of abstraction I was out of my league. It’s been unusually difficult for me to explain what this is all about; but I could at least organize my thoughts. Question number one: what are we talking about when we use the word “simcha” in this context? We can’t be using the word as in “I’m going to a simcha tomorrow night, so I‘ll be home late.” We can’t be implying that a wedding or a bar/bat mitzvah in New Jersey is less joyful or meaningful to the participants than one in our neck of the woods (although an event here will be far less expensive and much less formal. There will be no “Black Tie” or “Black Tie Optional.” There will probably be “No Tie.” At one of the weddings we were invited to last fall, the officiating rabbi wore a sweater over his white shirt.) It can’t be that right now Jews in The Land are individually happier than Jews not-in-The Land. So I’m assuming that the simcha we’re after is something collective, affecting the entirety of The People Israel.
Perhaps the simcha we’re describing is related to the kedusha (holiness) that has always been present in The Land since G-d gave it to us, and perhaps it is related to our collective experience as a people. In this tiny corner of the world where we are always in need of more water, we have collectively experienced our greatest tragedies and our greatest times of joy. Now you could argue that the exilic agony of all the pogroms, the expulsions, the book-burnings, the forced conversions, and The Holocaust, is in total greater than the pain of the destruction of both Temples and our expulsion from our Home. And one could respond that without the expulsion of the Jewish people from The Land of Israel almost nineteen hundred years ago, none of the evils of the exile would have occurred.
But what about the simcha? There was also real joy here once upon a time. It would be almost impossible to imagine the mass enthusiasm when tens of thousands of people would arrive in Jerusalem to offer sacrifices at The Beit Hamikdash on one of the pilgrimage festivals. But in The Exile? Can anyone point to one moment of true joy for the Jewish people anywhere else in the world? Any time in the last 2000 years? (Yeah, once. In 1948. But that proves my point.) Creativity, yes. Learning, yes. Clinging to G-d, yes. Satisfaction, pleasure, or even prosperity in those periods between the pogroms, expulsions, book-burnings, conversions, or the threat thereof, yes. But joy? Explain to me how it would be possible for a humiliated People, scattered and adrift for close to two millennia to experience joy?
It would be a gross overstatement to suggest that there is now unceasing Joy in The Land. But it is fair to say that as the Jewish people continue to return there is now the possibility, or even a remez,(a hint) of joy from time to time – even with everything that is going wrong here, which I needn’t catalogue. The best analogy I can think of is this: you’re trying to download or install a huge piece of very important software on a very slow computer. It seems to be taking forever, and you’re worried the program might crash. But you’re certain that sooner or later, perhaps with a little bit of help from a friend, the program will be successfully installed.
Something very important is being “installed” here, even though it taking much, much longer to “download” than we’d all like, we seem to be getting constant, annoying “error messages,” and there are times when we are having difficulty contacting “tech support” which is supposed to be available 24/7. What is amazing is that there were men of great foresight like the aforementioned Rabbi Azkari, (part of the circle of kabbalists who lived in Safed) who somehow understood that this process would be beginning – in the midst of almost total desolation, which is what our Homeland seemed to be 500 years ago, and when it would have seemed impossible for anybody to be happy here.
So let’s leave it at that: the simcha that propels a heavenly blessing on a Sunday afternoon is based on a pain created two thousand years before, which we as a People have never forgotten. And it has been nurtured assiduously by our remembrance of a promise made even further back to our very distant ancestors that one day all would be good, and then it would really be good. And now, we can begin to imagine that this promise of Redemption might be starting to come true before our own eyes. So I am transmitting a blessing with the full expectation that there will be a time when that blessing will be repeated on the 17th of Tammuz – on a full stomach.

A Dustup in Pottsville

I hope that none of you are thinking that, with all the excitement of living here a little bit east of Yerushalayim, we are not mindful of what is occurring in the rest of the planet – affectionately known as chutz l’aretz. Six days a week, The New York Times, masquerading as the International Herald-Tribune, arrives at our door, and, because that newspaper undiluted would cause serious brain rot, we also get the European edition of the Wall Street Journal. My favorite newspaper, The New York Sun, is only an internet click away from my computer screen, as are any number of other sources of information. So, if something interesting is going on wherever you are, we’re on top of it, whether it’s political, topical, or gastronomical. Which reminds me: can anyone explain how tomatoes get salmonella? I think of this whenever I am standing at my favorite stand at Mahane Yehuda, picking out luscious, ripe, healthy agvaniot, which sell here, depending on the time of year, for as little as twenty five cents a pound. It makes up for the totally tasteless corn which is being peddled around. Speaking of the totally tasteless, the internecine struggles for the presidential nomination in America are, if nothing else, a lot more entertaining than anything the Kadima group and their Knesset allies could ever put together. I’ve been considering which American politician most closely resembles Ehud Olmert, Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton. But both of these were semi-tragic figures, talented men brought down their own personal demons. A better comparison would be Spiro Agnew, a man who might have tried to sell you your own used car.
And from the totally tasteless, we can neatly segue into another zone of discomfort which we can entitle “Am I, or am I not in Chelm” (to paraphrase something in a letter which one of our friends had published in JPost). She was referring to a recent bizarre event here in The Land with a rather tragic ending. An East Jerusalem Arab was working at a construction site near the Central Bus Station, and for reasons not quite clear, drove his tractor onto Jaffa Road, going against traffic, smashing into cars and buses, resulting in the death of three Jews. This madman was finally stopped when a young soldier who had just finished his army basic training killed him with a borrowed revolver. A subsequent police investigation exonerated one of their officers who had failed to stop the terrorist. The report “explained” that when the policeman arrived on the scene, the construction vehicle had stopped, and the Arab was seemingly dead. However, shortly after that, a Hareidi man hurled a rock through the vehicle’s window; whereupon the Arab suddenly regained consciousness and then continued on his rampage, causing the death of the three innocent bystanders. The soldier was appropriately celebrated, but no one mentioned the identity of the Hareidi rock thrower. My personal feeling is that if this man can truly raise the dead, he may well be the Messiah we have been awaiting these thousands of years.
A situation back in The States which I have been following with similar not-to-be-believed features is the on-going desecration of G-d’s name by Agriprocessors, Inc., “the nation’s largest kosher meat producer,” the Rubashkin family which owns the company, as well as the company’s detractors and supporters. (And if you are patient and read until the end, you will figure out why I am taking up your precious time in discussing this particular train wreck.)
Several years ago, somebody employed by PETA managed to get into their main plant in Postville, Iowa and surreptitiously videoed scenes that seemed to document their allegations of animal abuse. Now my take on that is this: it takes a special bit of genius to make PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a group on the extreme lunatic fringe of the “animal rights” movement) appear to be the “good guys” in a dispute. How the Rubashkins managed to do that, I’ll never understand, but they pulled it off.
When one was disposed to forget about all that, with assurances that the abuses had been corrected, in May of this year, Federal immigration officials raided ther Pottsville plant and arrested 390 employees who were “illegal aliens.” Not surprisingly, allegations followed of labor abuses, other mistreatment of these workers, sexual abuse, even that illegal drugs had been manufactured in situ. The Rubashkins and their supporters were “shocked, shocked” to find out that so many of their employees (ten percent of the population of Pottsville) were working illegally. They had simply not noticed that three quarters of the almost 1000 employees had suspicious social security numbers (according to an affidavit filed by federal agents).
As a consequence of these events, labor unions and organizations which focus on specialized “human rights” issues have joined the “animal rights” people in attacking AgriProcessors. The ranks of these critics also include Jews, including leaders of the Conservative and Reform movements. . One Conservative group has called for the creation of an “ethical standards-based certification of kosher food.” Here are religious leaders who normally would not be called upon to certify bottled water – and a majority of whose members are not concerned with issues of kashrut on a daily basis – suddenly injecting themselves into the discussion. The story just gets weirder and weirder.
To make matters even worse, several representatives from various Orthodox groups have chosen to write articles defending Agriprocessors. For example, Rabbi Avi Shafran, the director of public affairs for Agudath Israel (and someone who should know better) wrote an article which I saw in the JPost several weeks ago, in which he summarized the sordid recent events and then asked, “Where’s the presumption of innocence…?” He quotes from a statement from the Rabbinical Council of America (failing to mention that the RCA is the rabbinical arm of the Orthodox Union, which is responsible for providing the certification of kashrut to Agriprocessors) “in the absence of hard facts” one shouldn’t “rush to premature judgments… or impute guilt…” Rabbi Shafran does not understand “…why so many Jewish groups, clergy, papers and pundits are so energetically railing against Agriprocessors in the wake of the recent government raid. The righteous indignation has the smell of adolescent excitement at the discovery of a new ‘noble’ cause.” (In listing the “adolescents” involved in this crusade, he mentions “well-known ‘activists’ like Ruth Messinger, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and Rabbi Avi Weiss” as signators to a boycott petition.)
Rabbi Shafran forgot to mention that, among other things, the company paid a settlement of six hundred thousand dollars to the E.P.A. for wastewater pollution in 2006 and was assessed one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in fines this year by state officials for various health, safety, and labor violations. You can keep your family well supplied with rib steaks for a long time with that kind of money. He also did not mention that KAJ, an agency which also certifies kosher foods, withdrew its certification of Agriprocessors in April. So, if I am permitted a response to the good Rabbi Shafran, as well as the esteemed rabbis who comprise the RCA, it is simply: G.M.A.B., which stands for “give me a break.” (I do not know if Rabbi Shafran has any experience in the field of law; if he does, he might want to consider joining the legal team for Ehud Olmert, who will need all the help he can get for quite a while.)
One might think that this can’t get any sillier. One would be wrong. Last week, I read another column, also reprinted in JPost, by a rabbi from Orange County, NY, who basically repeated the same defense of Agriprocessors. However this rabbi pointed out that Rabbi Riskin had nothing to do with the campaign against the meat packer. This is simply too delicious. The director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America writes an article about the “presumption of innocence,” in which he inaccurately (until further notice, I am accepting the Orange county version) attacks another rabbi for violating “Jewish ethics.”
In regurgitating the same talking points about Agriprocessors, our second rabbi referred to Rabbi Riskin as “Steven,” even though Rabbi Riskin has called himself “Shlomo” for at least thirty years. I am reminded of a mental game Barbara and I have enjoyed playing, which we call “The name on the checkbook.” Many of the people we know in our Jewish world were given an “American” name on their birth certificate, but have chosen to use their “Jewish” name with family and friends – retaining their original legal name. So if you are trying to find “Dovid” in the phone book, remember to look for “Bernard.” And if you call “Eli” at work, remember to ask for “Elliot.” Surely, our second rabbi knows Rabbi Riskin’s name. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what this little dig is all about.
Believe it or not, all this examination of human folly was simply a prelude to my main point, which goes back to Rabbi Shafran’s attack in which he referred to Ruth Messinger and Rabbis Riskin and Weiss as “activists.” Now I have a lot of trouble with that terminology, going back to my days as a caseworker and supervisor in what was then called the NYC Department of Social Services. We had a union which had elected officers and paid staff. In addition, each work location elected shop stewards. Then there were “activists,” people who were somehow “involved” in the union, but were not authorized by anybody to do anything. To put it simply, if you were an “activist,” you were a nobody. You might think you “counted,” but you really didn’t. Don’t agree with my definition? How would you use the term, and to whom would it apply? Would anyone call the late Lubavitch rebbe a kiruv activist? Former Vice President Al Gore an anti-global warming activist? So why would you denigrate Ms. Messinger, a former Manhattan Borough President and current CEO of American Jewish World Service? And why would you insult Orthodox rabbis, even if you don’t agree with them?
Is it merely a coincidence that Rabbi Shafran and his colleague repeat the same lame arguments in defending a company as problematic as Agriprocessors, and, at the same time, find it necessary to belittle as prominent a person as Rabbi Shlomo Riskin? Many of us are aware of his work at Lincoln Square Synagogue which started the revival of Orthodox Jewish life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Anyone who has stood on the hills of Efrat and looked out at the surrounding communities in the Gush Etzion bloc must be at least dimly aware of his role in its development. My hope is that some day, Rabbi Shafran will use his considerable gifts to defend Rabbi Riskin and the tens of thousands of Jews who live between Jerusalem and Hebron.
Yes, we have many things here in The Land as troublesome as the controversies surrounding Agriprocessors, and, unfortunately, we are in the front seat when it comes to corruption. But, ultimately, our struggle will of necessity revolve around our continued right to live in Efrat, Maale Adumim, and even Tel Aviv. There is a certain nobility, an honoring of G-d’s name to this cause. Most of us would rather in this Land engage in this battle, rather than in a dustup with no dignity in Pottsville, Iowa.

The Man Who Might Not Have Been.....

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away
(Attributed to many sources, but copyrighted [1939] asTHE LITTLE MAN WHO WASN'T THEREBy Harold Adamson / Bernie Hanighen)

One of the difficulties of being a “newbie” in a new land is getting the “how, when, and where” straight. There were a lot of things that I had read or heard about before we made aliyah that I want to do; the challenge is getting the details straight so that we would be able to. For example, every Lag B’omer there is this HUGE festivity in Meron (a small town near Tzvat where the great kabbalist R’ Shimon Ben Yochai is buried), but I could not figure out how to get there. So we hung out in Maale Adumim and watched kids (and their wanna-be-kids dads) make bonfires so big it would have scared the pants off Smokey The Bear (Remember, Only you can prevent forest fires!).

I was determined to do better for Yom Yerushalayim, which occupies a strange and precarious place in the Israeli calendar. Unlike Yom Haatzmaut, which is celebrated throughout the land – except in Arab villages and Mea Shearim – Yom Yerushalayim is wildly celebrated in the city itself and in the areas liberated from Jordanian rule in 1967 and ignored in certain other places. This is to be expected: those people who want to give away our land are hardly likely to celebrate the day when we obtained it! Plus there is the theological element. If we consider the victory in 1948 to be a miracle, what are we to make of the events in 1967? All the Arab armies had to do was keep on marching and the Jewish state would have been history. Instead, we won an impossible victory AND gained control of the Temple Mount, Ir Atika (the Old City), and a few minor areas like the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and the sites of the tombs of Rachel and Joseph. In addition, our country stopped being nine miles wide in its center, and we had defensible borders. So why would a current generation of politicians who act as if there is no G-d in history want to make a big deal of this day?

Nonetheless, while our secular leaders avoid the Kotel like the plague, thousands of Yeshiva students dance through the Old City to the Western Wall. At least that was what I had always been told. Now that we are here, I needed to find out when and where all of this was going to happen. According to R’ Mordechai Friedfertig’s schedule of events, the bochrim were supposed to start gathering at around 3:30PM at Kikar Tzion (where Ben Yehudah connects to Jaffa St.) and at some point thereafter head down to the Kotel. Now I’m not such a freier that I would show up at 3:30. I figured 4:30. But when I arrived at Rehov Yaffo at that time, I could see that the streets were blocked off, the sound stages were being set up, and there were a few hundred random students milling around. I walked around for about half an hour and took some photographs. Nothing much seemed to be happening, so I decided to walk down through the Old City to the Western Wall. I had no idea how much activity there would be there, but, if nothing else, I would at least be at the Kotel. I took my standard route: through the Jaffa gate, stay on the main road until you get to a small street which I believe is called St. Andrew’s, take a left there and proceed more or less on a straight path until the steps leading down to the Cardo, keep going straight until you get to the series of steps leading down to the Kotel plaza. Sure enough, there wasn’t much out of the ordinary happening there either, but it took me no more than eleven seconds to locate a minyan for mincha. A soundstage was being set up, but after listening to the interminable “ehad, shteim” into the microphone, I realized that nothing was going to happen here for quite a while, so I decided to head back to Jaffa, grab a quick bite, and somewhere catch a bus to the Nefesh B’Nefesh office, where I was supposed to meet Barbara for a seminar on budgeting your money in Israel. I retraced my steps: up the stairs, past the shops, past the reconstruction of the Hurva synagogue, past the Cardo, up the winding streets in the Jewish Quarter, and finally out onto the thoroughfare which leads to the Jaffa Gate. Along the way, I ran into a family I knew from Maale Adumim; the woman told me that the yeshiva kids had finally assembled at Kikar Tzion and were headed towards the Old City. OK: I’ll take that into consideration.

Needless to say, I was completely unprepared for what I saw as I came out of the Jaffa gate. Within no more than an hour after I had left a fairly empty Kikar Tzion, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people had assembled there and had begun heading towards the Old City. But for now, this huge throng of people had gathered around a soundstage set up in Kikar Tzahal (the renovated and renamed plaza where Bar-Lev and Rehov Yaffo come together) and were singing, waving flags, dancing with flags, dancing with each other.
People who know me long and well know that I am not a stranger to rallies, marches, demonstrations, and picket lines. The fact that a large number of people have gathered in one place does not automatically excite me. There is no automatic wisdom in numbers; the size of a gathering bears no relationship to its virtue or merit. Even a good cause does not guarantee a sense of urgency: many of the Soviet Jewry rallies held in New York in the seventies and eighties seemed like giant picnics (unlike the actual situation on the ground in Moscow or Leningrad).

But there was no question that I was now witnessing the real thing, a sense of joy and urgency coming together into a kind of ecstasy which is very hard to describe (and also next to impossible to photograph). No question: I had to stay a while to witness this.

Then the mass of people began moving, but weren’t they heading the wrong way? I had assumed that they would go more or less as I had done, the safe way through the Jaffa Gate. Instead, they were heading down Bar-Lev. Could it be? Yes! They were heading towards the Damascus Gate! I hadn’t been there since 1980!

Many of my audience will have no idea what this is all about; so let me digress and explain. The Damascus Gate is itself in a part of Jerusalem heavily populated by Muslim Arabs, and it leads into the so-called “Arab Quarter.” When I first visited Jerusalem in 1980, there was no problem walking anywhere in Jerusalem and the Old City. Unlike the “Jewish Quarter,” which had been more or less turned into rubble during the years when it was under Jordanian rule, and which is being lovingly restored and rebuilt, the rest of the Old City looks exactly the way it was for hundreds of years. In 1980, Barbara and I had spent many hours walking through the incredible alleyways, past the hundreds of stalls selling either foodstuffs or Arab versions of “tchochkeles,” savoring the ambience and taking photographs (the amazing contrast of light and dark in these narrow streets is unmistakable). The Arab areas are still filled with tourists, especially Christians looking for the Via Dolorosa – essentially a series of narrow streets like many others, but with a street sign saying “Via Dolorosa.” But by the time we returned to Jerusalem in 1988, things had changed markedly. Most of the Arab shopkeepers were “on strike,” and their stalls were shut tight. One felt less comfortable just strolling around these areas, and it seemed less important to do so. The fewer Jews walking around the Arab areas, the less safe it seems for other Jews – even though there are lots of people there and the area is guarded by police and soldiers. Until recently, my buddy, R’ Mordecai Friedfertig, used to walk through the Damascus Gate on his way to his job at Rav Aviner’s yeshiva, but one day, one of the teachers there was slightly wounded when an Arab attacked him with a knife. Now Mordy goes the longer and safer way to get to work.

But there is safety in numbers – especially really big numbers. Thousands and thousands of mostly young people – escorted by a full complement of trained army personnel – were going to “take back” our streets and go to the Kotel through the narrow streets where we almost never, ever go. As this enormous throng of people headed down Rehov Bar-Lev, all thoughts of my meeting up with Barbara vanished from my mind (there was so much noise that I couldn’t have called her on my cell phone). This was too good to pass up! I joined the line of marchers, of course taking pictures as I went.

Those of you who are familiar with the Damascus Gate realize that it’s much narrower than the entrances at the Jaffa Gate, and it certainly wasn’t designed to accommodate a huge throng (in fact, on the contrary, it was built to prevent an invading army from entering except in small, “defeatable” numbers). And you get to it by going down a series of steps which bring you to a large open area. So try to imagine the following scene: you’re standing at the top looking down. Behind you are thousands of people trying to get to where you are. Ahead of you, the steps are filled with people, the plaza is filled with more people, all waiting to get through this narrow entrance way. While they are waiting, these thousands in the plaza are singing, dancing, and waving their Israeli flags. You might describe it as a Shlomo Carlebach concert from 1975 morphed into an army of Jewish Crusaders.

Finally, it was my turn to enter the Old City. I had not remembered this, but, not only is the Gate itself narrow, but it opens into a dark, narrow alleyway (as opposed to the Jaffa Gate, which opens into a large, open area filled with stores of all kinds). As I entered the Gate, looking at the closed stalls of money changers and at dark, gloomy walls, hundreds of people around me were singing “YERUSHALAYIM” as loudly as they could, with an unmistakable certitude that, with G-d’s help, our eternal capital will remain undivided and that the light of true shalom will penetrate these forbidding alleys. Minutes later, the crowd began singing Hatikvah, but in a way I had never heard before. This was no longer the Hatikvah of the Exile, sung sweetly and piously in conjunction with The Star Spangled Banner at school dinners or the like. This Hatikvah was sung as a war cry: Lihiyot Am Chofshi b’ ARTZEINU (To be a free nation in OUR LAND, where “our” is possessive, not relational.)

And so, we began a slow walk down to the Kotel. All of the Arab shops were closed, their shutters locked tight. Dozens of elite troops trained for this kind of detail guarded the way, their eyes looking everywhere for the slightest sign of trouble. For here were an enormous number of Jewish youth caught in a bottle neck; anything thrown from a second or third floor window could have caused an indescribable panic. Further along, I would see more soldiers on the roofs of the several yeshivas in this area, in buildings which certain people had the foresight to re-purchase. There were barriers set up blocking the side streets, keeping small groups of Arab youth and some elders away from the marchers. Methinks they had a “mean and hungry look,” not that I blame them so much. Ultimately, it will either be Artzeinu, or it will be their land. There simply isn’t enough room in those narrow alleyways for them and us.

Now comes the interesting part: Somewhere along the way, I glanced to my right and noticed an older man with one of those small lapel pins with the Israeli and American flags. He looked at me and struck up a conversation in English. (I wonder how he knew I was an American. Maybe it was the NJ Blood Bank cap I was wearing.) He reached out and held onto my arm, and we walked together to the Kotel. If I was in the upper one percentile age-wise in this gathering of young people, he must have had a good fifteen years on me. He was wearing the mainstream religious outfit: a white shirt and a dark suit, neat and presentable, but one that had been several shades darker when it was new (perhaps at the first inauguration of Bush II, or perhaps at the first inauguration of Clinton,) Likewise his hat. (official digression: almost any type of hat ever worn by gentiles was given a name: the stovepipe hat worn by Lincoln, the top hat worn by Fred Astaire, the campaign hat worn by Smokey the Bear, the Stetson worn by any cowboy who ever rode the range, the bowler or derby worn by Churchill, the porkpie hat worn by Buster Keaton, the homburg worn by Edward VII, the trilby worn by Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther movies, the fedora worn by Indiana Jones and, for reasons I have never been able to fathom, by many Orthodox Jews today. There are other kinds of black hats besides the fedora, mostly with flatter tops. But try to find out what they are called! As far as I can tell, they are simply part of the uniform.)

My new acquaintance told me that he had been in Israel for many years and that his whole family lived in Jerusalem. He had been coming on these Yom Yerushalayim walks to the Kotel for many years. I never got his name. As we walked, he pointed out to me a number of things I might not have noticed, all of which pointed to a Jewish presence in what is now called “The Arab Quarter”: certain architectural details, magen davids on archways above the door, carved out places on doorposts where mezuzot had been placed, buildings which had been synagogues. You see, we lived here too! As we got nearer to the tunnel which would lead us out to the Kotel plaza, we began going slower and slower and it became hotter and hotter because of the press of bodies close together and the lack of ventilation. I looked at this old man, and I thought to myself, “He’s not going to make it.” I was certain that any moment he would pass out. Ma l’assot (what to do)? The answer was obvious: I had been in Israel for over nine months; time to act like an Israeli. And so, making certain that my charge was firmly attached to my arm, and with a giant SLICHA (excuse me), I began to propel us through the crowd, in the same way as someone who has just arrived at a bus stop will, without giving it a thought, enter the vehicle before fifteen people who have been standing there waiting patiently for twenty minutes. We made it through the last hundred yards in about five minutes, although it seemed like forever. Finally we had reached the plaza, now completely packed with people; I kept on going, pushing our way through until I located a vacant white plastic chair so that the man could sit down. When I was reasonably sure that he would be OK, I left him and surveyed the action. The sound stage which only hours before had been the scene of desultory “echad, steim”s was now center stage for the world’s greatest party: Yom Yerushalayim at the Kotel! It is unlikely that we will ever reach the level of simcha that occurred during the reign of David Hamelech or during the water gathering at Sukkot during the Beit Hamikdash. But in today’s world, this is probably as close as we will get. Thousands of men are their side, thousands of women on their side, dancing, dancing until……. By this time, I was too tired (and I hadn’t eaten) to partake more fully in the festivities. So I have no idea what time the party ended.

I began the ascent back, this time taking the familiar route to the Jaffa Gate, thinking about the elderly gentleman I escorted to the Kotel. What was he doing there? Why would a man well into his eighties, who needed help traversing the very slippery stone paths, subject himself to this ordeal? He didn’t say anything about meeting anyone there; and, frankly, his appearance made him stand out in this dati leumi (religious Zionist) crowd. There must have been a reason why he was there, and why he chose to participate every year. The answer was obvious, even if you refuse to believe or accept my explanation. For an hour or an hour and a half, I was walking to the Kotel with Eliyahu Hanavi.

And the More We Retell the Story

Sing for your supper,And you'll get breakfast.Songbirds always eatIf their song is sweet to hear.(refrain from “Sing for Your Supper,”from “The Boys from Syracuse,”music and lyrics by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart)
It’s good to have friends. It’s better to have good friends. It’s best to have good friends who have good friends, as you will shortly see.
Yom Hatzmaut (Independence Day), in fact the sixtieth Yom Haatzmaut, was fast approaching, along with its twin, Yom Hazicharon, the day of remembrance for Israeli Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism (whose number is approaching 24,000.) This being our first year here, we had no idea what to expect, except I sensed that it would seem more real, more urgent than these days would be back in The States. In many communities, there is always some kind of event, a commemoration/celebration, as the two days are smooshed into one event. In Passaic, where we lived for nine years, the event took place at “The Adas,” an older, mainstream Orthodox synagogue eschewed by the newer, more Yeshivish crowd that now dominated the community. You had to show up, if for no other reason than to be seen, to reaffirm your place as a “Zionist.” The evening service seemed perfunctory, even interminable, and there was a modest spread afterward. Whereupon, we would get in our car and drive back to our side of town, and that would be that. In Teaneck, I also had to show up for this event if for no other reason that I was always on the planning committee, which meant attending one meeting and coming early to the celebration to help set up. Usually, my job included putting out the chips and the pretzels and several thousand individual packages of an Israeli snack food called “bamba,” which were vacuumed up by hundreds of children, seemingly before the packages hit the table. There was a real attempt to make the event meaningful, and appropriately festive, but it never quite made it. It was always held in the largest, fanciest synagogue in Teaneck, and one could opine that the money poured into that building could have built a primary care facility in the Negev. (There seemed to be a subtle, unstated message: “We love Israel; but we’re staying HERE.”) Again, when the event was over, we got back in our car and drove to our more modest side of town. In Teaneck, there was at least one additional wrinkle. My buddy Arvin would pull together a minyan in the morning using the special Yom Haatzmaut service found in most Israeli prayer books. Of course we had to hurry through it, because we were all expected to get to work.
Here, a little bit east of Yerushalayim, as in most places in The Land, a week or so before the Big Day, Israeli flags began appearing – from windows, flagpoles, and streetlights, on balconies, fences, and cars. On the Friday before the Big Day, we received two polyester flags: a medium sized one with our Haaretz-International Herald Tribune, and a larger one with our Jerusalem Post. They were courtesy of Bank Hapoalim, which was giving out flags at all its branches throughout the country. The medium sized one fit perfectly on our gate, and was duly hung there, where it remained until we took it down, somewhat torn and tattered, after Yom Yerushalayim, (the topic of my next post, please be patient!) several weeks later.
Tina had asked us to join her in Tel Aviv for Yom HaZicharon. Two years before, she had been at the large, annual commemoration held in Kikar Rabin; now she is living on Rehov Mendelsson, a ten minute walk from where the event would take place, and she wanted to share this emotional experience with us. Barbara, Natania, (off from the army), and I hustled into Tel Aviv a few hours early in order to get some dinner (we had been warned that during the evening hours of Yom Hazicharon, everything, everything, is shut down [I don’t know about places like Mea Shearim] all across the country). We got to Kikar Rabin a little before 8PM when it was scheduled to start. Thousands of people were already there, with enough benches to hold the many thousands more who would keep drifting in. At exactly 8PM, the sirens went off for a minute or so, just as they had on Yom Hashoah. It was definitely becoming night, and the mournful sounds of remembrance coming from loudspeakers all around us contrasted with the lights from the large, new buildings surrounding us in this modern, Jewish city. As we are getting used to expecting, very little in Israel starts on time. Tina and Barbara wanted to stay at Kikar Rabin for the ceremony; but by 8:45, Natania and I were getting antsy, so we went back to Tina’s apartment and watched the event on TV (the only thing being show on local Israeli channels). I hope I’m not belaboring the obvious, but there is a substantial difference between having Teaneck children read out the names of Israeli men, women, and children who died in the last year – and whose names remain only names – and seeing the faces of their bereaved survivors, parents, spouses, friends – who are now our neighbors – on national TV, along with tributes by national leaders and music by the biggest stars in popular entertainment.
The next morning, Natania headed back to Jerusalem, and Barbara and I decided to take a short, self-guided tour of some of the Bauhaus buildings in central Tel Aviv, thanks to a local bookstore which, for a modest fee, would give you a set of earphones, a map, and some directions (more about this some other time). After this, we too headed back to Jerusalem and from there to our headquarters a little bit east thereof.
It would soon be time for Yom Haatzmaut. Preparations had been going on for several days for the really big celebration in Kikar Tzion at Ben-Yehuda St. Barbara wanted to join the fun; I just wanted to go to our beit knesset and thank Hashem for sixty good years for our State and ten good months for us. (It occurred to me later that I could have done both: gone into Jerusalem, davened there, and then gone to the celebration. Next year.) There was a larger than usual crowd at Mussar Avicha for the Yom Haaztmaut davening. No speeches, no refreshments; none were required. We were home. We are home. We are very grateful.
The shacharit service the next morning was at some semi-normal time, late enough for me to get there. Thanks to Arvin’s minyans in Teaneck, I was able to follow the special service. The difference was that we were not in any hurry to finish because in The Land, everyone is off from work on Yom Haatzmaut, and almost nothing is open.
Now would come the real test: if we were going to be authentic Israelis, we would have to participate in a barbecue. (I’ve heard unconfirmed rumors that anyone who didn’t smell of charcoal was liable to have his citizenship revoked.) Now it is true that American Jews have barbecues on Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day, but these backyard affairs cannot match in scope or zeal what the Israeli collective will undertake whenever the opportunity presents itself. Like ants scurrying about, tens of thousands of families will take over any available space in parks or by the side of a road or highway. Each man of the house will commence a virtuosic performance over his grill or mangol, fanning the flame with a makeshift cardboard device just so, as an orchestra conductor would wave his baton to get exactly the right sound from his musicians. After witnessing this passion for grilling and the over-the-top enthusiasm for bonfires on Lag b’omer, I have an idea (which I cannot prove) that this pyromania stems from an unquenchable, if subconscious, national longing for the restoration of our Temple and the prescribed daily sacrifices – the barbecue of all barbecues.
On our own, we would have been left out of this national experience (probably having spaghetti for dinner). But once again, our friends Jeff and June came to our rescue. They had been invited to “Israeli friends” in Rosh Ha’ayin, and a phone call by them later, we were invited as well. The only thing we had to know was that we would be asked to “sing for our supper.” Everyone present was expected to speak for a few minutes about their experience in Israel. Well, you know me: I can always be called upon to offer a few thousand well-chosen words on virtually any topic. So this would not be a problem.
With difficulty, Barbara and I made it into Jerusalem, after waiting an hour for a bus (we were slowly getting the picture of how little was working on this day) where we met the Glazers in their rented car, and we headed out to Rosh Ha’ayin to their “Israeli friends.” As with most things with Jeff and June, there is a story involved. It seems that they were living in San Antonio at the time, where they were allegedly the only “observant” family in the city. They got a phone call from someone in the community, asking them to host a religious Israeli family who was visiting Texas. So June got on the phone and invited them for Shabbat, but with the following caveat: she was seriously pregnant; if she went into labor and Jeff had to get her to the hospital, Avi and Rivka would have to take care of the Glazer’s two sons. Somehow, everyone agreed to this arrangement, and, sure enough, June and Jeff had to leave for the hospital, leaving Avi and Rivka with the two boys. From this rather odd beginning, a twenty plus year friendship developed. When the Glazers moved to New Jersey, Jeff was always available to pick up the Ginsbergs from any local airport, day or night. The Glazers had visited their friends in Rosh Ha’ayin several times, and, in fact, all of their three sons had been there for a Yom Haatzmaut barbecue at different times, but this would be the first time the parents were there.
As we drove on the highway going to Tel Aviv, we began discussing an article I had seen in one of the English language newspapers about Israeli flags. There is one local company which makes real flags, I assume, out of cotton. Of course, their business is not helped by their synthetic competition, polyester flags which last as long as a “truce” with Hamas. Then, there is the protocol of the magen David on a flag which can be hung horizontally or vertically. Take an American flag, with its stripes and its fifty five-pointed stars. It’s good to go whether you hang it horizontally on a flag pole, or vertically draped, say from a window. The Israeli flag is different. Stop for a minute and think about how it looks: the two blue horizontal stripes on a white background with a six-pointed star in the middle. Now turn it on its side, so it’s now vertical. The magen David is now sitting on its side! To hang the flag vertically, you need a different configuration, one with the star turned around. A company which makes real flags has this all figured out, and they are, justifiably, upset with imitations made in Asian sweatshops where such niceties are not observed. We had a grand time looking at all the flags and pendants hanging either horizontally or vertically along the way, seeing which ones had the star rotated correctly – much as you would play “let’s find the out-of-state license plates” with your kids on a long trip.
With only a few missteps along the way, we arrived safely in Rosh Ha’ayin. Hooray for the Ginsbergs, because otherwise we might all have lived out our lives in Israel and never visited this community. Simply put, olim don’t live there. (There are sixty one listings in the Kehilot Tehilla community guide and forty two in the NBN listings, but you will not find Rosh Ha’ayin in either one). Not that there is anything wrong with this town; on the contrary, it is one of Israel’s successes. This was one of the many places in which Ben-Gurion’s Labor government dumped North African refugees (in this case, Yeminites) during the early 1950’s. It could have remained one of the country’s economic basket cases, but because of good fortune, good planning, and especially good location, is now a thriving community – about as big as Maale Adumim – with lots of Israelis who do quite well, thank you very much.

One look at the Ginsberg’s home and you know that they are part of that group of very middle class Israelis. Despite the fact that we arrived considerably later than we had planned, we were easily the first guests there. We met Avi and Rivka, their son Yoni (the grill master) and their daughter Achinoam, and thanked them from saving us from a spaghetti dinner in Maale Adumim. We insisted on helping them set up, and I got to put out forty plastic chairs in the front yard. (I kept thinking, “How many people do they expect to show up?”). But sure enough, slowly but surely, people began to show up. There were some of Yoni’s and Achinoam’s friends, but we discovered that most of the people who came were friends that Avi and Rivka had made during their stay in America and who over the years themselves had made aliyah. (Our hosts are among the certain wonderful people in this world who collect friends and maintain those friendships over the years.)
And so we ate, made some new acquaintances, ate some more, talked some more, and (I’m embarrassed to say) ate some more. Finally, as afternoon clearly was becoming evening, It Was Time….. We were all asked to congregate outside, take one of the chairs, and get ready to “repay” our hosts. We were all going to “sing for our supper.” Say something about why we came to Israel, how life has been here, something, anything appropriate for Yom Haatzmaut. Most of the former Americans had mastered the native Semitic tongue and many gave their remarks in Hebrew. For some of us, unfortunately, our eloquence (even our full comprehension) still remains uni-lingual. So I listened politely and absorbed as much as I could. I am proud to report that June did us proud by reading a statement in Hebrew which she had written (and had corrected first by her ulpan teacher). If you are wondering what I said: I never speak from notes, so weeks later, I do not remember exactly what I said. But if you are part of my audience, I think you have some clues about what I was talking about. I must have received a passing grade, because we have already been invited back for next year! We “benched,” (recited the blessings after the meal) convened a minyan for maariv, and finally people headed to their cars (we would not get beakfast!). The Glazers kindly drove us back (we only got slightly lost) to Maale Adumim, and our first Yom Haatzmaut was over.
It was a week or two later that something “struck me.” I was working on one of my projects, editing the English language version of R’ Aviner’s commentary on the Haggadah (which I am relieved to say I have finished), when I re-read the following fairly familiar lines, “So even if we were all wise, all clever, all old, and all expert in the Torah, it is incumbent on us to discuss the Exodus from Egypt. And the more one talks about it, the more praiseworthy one is.” Then it occurred to me that the Ginsbergs and those of us assembled in their home were following some very good advice in expressing their thoughts and gratitude for this miracle in our lifetime, the creation of our Medina and our return to The Land. Even though I lived for sixty six years in America, my circle of friends and acquaintances remained fairly narrow; so I have no idea how many people in Middle-America gathered around a Thanksgiving dinner or Memorial Day/ Fourth of July picnic would think about asking their guests to say something about the bounty of their life. I must admit that I do not know if this is at all common here; I am sure that there are many Israelis who never get beyond waving a piece of cardboard over burning charcoal. But what an introduction to this wonderful day in Jewish life! My own personal assignment is that when, please G-d, we return next year, I will understand a little more of what is being said, so that I can report back to my faithful audience.

"Lifnei Herodion

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal Wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.
(from “Ozymandias” by Percy Byshe Shelley)
Smola. Lifnei Herodion. There are occasions when we take a munit (taxi) back from the center of town, usually with our groceries, or, on rare occasions, get a ride with a friend. When we get to the top of our street, and we need to give specific directions to find our house, invariably one of us will say “Smola. Lifnei Herodion.” Our little section of Maale Adumim is known as Hamitzadim. It consists of one main horseshoe shaped street, called for convenience sake Hamitzadim, and two intersecting streets, first, Horkania and then, Herodion. And there we are at number 33, on the left side as you are going down the hill, right before Herodion.
One thing I have noticed about street names in general. People accept them as identifiers, but rarely consider their meaning. Some places, like New York City, use numbered streets. It’s hard to quarrel with E. 208 St, where I grew up in the Bronx (even though it was nowhere near E. 207 St. or E. 209 St, and I don’t think there was ever a W. 208 St; but we’ll ignore that). The other streets in my neighborhood, the ones with names, were familiar to us from American history: Rochambeau, Steuben, Kossuth, Hull Ave., all named for heroes in the American Revolution or the War of 1812. But as I moved away from my childhood home, the connections to the street names became less and less clear. The first apartment of my own, still in The Bronx, was on College Ave., but there was no institution of higher learning anywhere near where I lived (unlike University Place, which was near the Bronx campus of NYU). In Passaic, we lived on High St., which was higher up the hill from Main Ave., but lower than the next street, Pennington, which was in fact on the top of the hill. In Teaneck, many of the streets seemed to be named for families that lived there long ago: Churchill, Winthrop, Garrison, Grayson, Carlton, Cranford. I had no idea who these people were or when they lived there; nor can I imagine how I would have done any research. But after a while I realized that even when I did know (for example, that Votee Park was named after Milton Votee, a long-deceased former mayor) it added no meaning to my life. And I don’t think I was alone. I suspect that for Congregation Beth Aaron as a group, both the old-timers who had been living there for twenty or thirty years or the younger crowd moving in, Queen Anne Road was simply where the shul was, with no connection to any royal family or personage.
Here a little bit east of Yerushalayim, most of our streets have some connection to The Land or The Torah. Now when I walk to my current synagogue, Mussar Avicha, which is in the neighboring Clei Shir (musical instruments section), I go past Hagittit (“a musical instrument named after the town of Gath,” according to Rashi). Psalm 81, which is said every Thursday, sounds like a street map of that area: Hatof (drum), Hanevel (lyre), and of course Hashofar, names which any schoolchild here can identify. Nonetheless, I hadn’t given much thought to Herodion, named for the fortress south of Jerusalem built by Herod “The Great,” that same Herod who, despite his ignoble lineage, ruled over Judea for thirty four years, expanded the Temple Mount, rebuilt the Second Beit Hamikdash, built cities, excavated harbors, and remade a mountain to house this grand complex. I should add that he also murdered most of his family.
My ignorance would soon come to an end. We had signed up for a tiyul to Herodion for Sunday, April 27. We here in The Land were through with Pesach, while those of you still in Exile were sentenced to one more day of chewing matzoh, with its concomitant damage to one’s intestines. To be fair, we too had an ordeal, undergoing a surreal sharav (heat wave) during most of the intermediate days. The temperature in Jerusalem at several times reached close to 100° F., not hot enough to stop sundry Hassidim from sporting their shtreimels, but beyond the comfort zone for most of us. Nonetheless, schools were closed, many people were off from work, and it was time to travel the Land. Barbara and I had taken a number of tiyulim, of which I remember precious little because of the heat, but we could see everywhere we went how many Israelis, by car or by tour bus, were visiting the parks, nature preserves, or historic sites that cover our tiny country. I read later that an estimated two million Israelis visited one of the sixty three national park and reserves during these intermediate days. That’s a third of the country! That would be like a hundred million Americans visiting Yellowstone, Yosemite, etc. the week of July 4th.

Fortunately for everyone, the sharav finally broke as Pesach ended, and it would be perfect weather to visit Herodion, fifteen kilometers from the southern edge of the city. The tiyul we were going on was sponsored by an organization called Tanachtiyulim, and therein lies one more story. Ezra Rosenfeld is one of the many Anglo-Israelis I have met who have reinvented themselves in The Land. For many years he was part of the administration of Tzomet (or Zomet), an organization which, among other things, uses scientific knowledge to provide technological solutions to issues of Jewish law (like running a hospital on Shabbat). One day, Ezra decided that he had spent too much time behind a computer and decided that he wanted to get out into the fresh air. He had seen over the years the creation of several organizations which gave tours visiting sites of historical and Biblical interest and decided to see if there was a market for these tours, catering to an Anglo crowd. He had been in business for less than one year, and was working hard to make these tours as exciting and factual as possible.

The guide for this tiyul was his neighbor, Aryeh Routenberg, another man who had reinvented himself. He had started out in life as a New Englander; once he moved to Israel, he decided that he was now an official Israeli, and for all intents and purposes spoke only Hebrew. Ezra had practically begged him to conduct tours in English for him. He was touted as the best tour guide in Israel, and, in a crowded field, he is at the top.

And so we were on our way, a mixed group of part time and full time Anglo-Israelis and some tourists, one young man studying in yeshiva, another having made aliyah, and one elderly couple that no one thought would make it through the day, but who held up surprisingly well. As promised, we arrived at Herodion on the new road in about fifteen minutes from the southern part of Jerusalem, passing Beit Lechem – where no Israeli citizen is allowed to go – along the way, and disembarked at a parking lot in the lower part of this national park. There we were, standing in a flat field where the lower part of this enormous complex had stood: the large pool used for swimming and boating, the bath house, (both requiring elaborate systems to bring in water, a rare commodity in the desert), the large area in the distance on which Herod’s elaborate funeral procession had been staged. Aryeh was continuing his running commentary, giving us some needed historical background, and explaining what these glorified piles of rocks had once been. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed some activity in what seemed to be an abandoned structure right off the main road. No, it was not abandoned; there was a Bedouin family living in this hovel. I began to think of Ozymandias and the ephemeral nature of monuments to oneself.

Of course, Ozymandias did not have Ehud Etzer at his disposal. This eminent Israeli archaeologist has spent the last thirty years excavating at Herodion (taking over from a French team which was digging when this area was under Jordanian control), all the while looking for the long lost site of Herod’s tomb. If you are up on your archaeology, you will, of course, remember that Etzer’s team stumbled upon it – half way up the mountain, not where anyone had thought to look – just about a year ago. To see what all the fuss is all about, we got back on the bus and were driven to the upper parking lot. Before we began our short journey to the remains of Herod’s palace and the site of his tomb, most of us stopped to admire the view, looking down and around at the surrounding countryside, a patchwork of barren land, Bedouin homes, and a little bit southwest of us, the community of Tekoa with its red roofs, distinctive of Israeli homes. Two things crossed my mind: a recent discussion and an obscure board game that I used to watch thirty five years ago.

Directly after the expulsion of the people from Gaza and the attendant discussion of how this fiasco could have occurred, there was an idea that the National-Religious community had spent insufficient resources in a dialogue with the rest of the Israeli community to explain the importance of a Jewish presence in Gaza and the futility of abandoning land to the PLO. One of my friends in Teaneck had for many years taken the position that by not directly confronting ideologically the political Left and focusing instead on settling empty hilltops, the religious Zionist forces were sowing the seeds of its own destruction. His point of view has much to recommend it; but looking down at the Bedouin homes in the valley, it occurred to me that there was one consideration his point of view could not take into account.

Are you at all familiar with a game played in China, Japan, and Korea called Go (or Goe)? I had the opportunity to witness this arcane game being played when I was still working as a caseworker in a social service center in New York. Late in the afternoon when all the clients who had shown up had been serviced, one of the supervisors would pull out the board (a rectangular grid) and begin a game with one of his workers (he subsequently left his wife and moved in with the young lady, but that’s not relevant to our story). The idea of the game was to continue placing your markers (black or white pieces each the size of a “mento”) one at a time on the board in such a way as to surround and thus capture some of your opponent’s markers. Exactly how you did this, I never understood, and thus, much of the strategy of the game eluded me.

But what I was witnessing below in the area known as “The Gush” was fairly straightforward. No Bedouin who had built a structure had obtained or sought a “Permit.” Almost all of the housing built recently by and for the Arab population anywhere in Israel is “illegal” under the law, none of which is any concern of the United Nations, the European Union, Haaretz and the Israeli Left, or Condoleeza Rice, as it would be if some religious Jew – under the impression that G-d had given us The Land to settle – was camping out in a tent next to an Israeli flag on a desolate hilltop somewhere in Samaria. It is essential to realize that our Go grid will not stay empty forever; the situation on the ground is not static. If we do not continue placing our human markers on The Board we have been given for an eternal inheritance, the other guys will not wait around. They will keep on Go-ing until they, G-d forbid, by intent or by circumstances, surround us. And if someone suggests that we don’t have enough human markers on The Board to win The Game, I say that we do, and I know where to find plenty in reserve.

After these rapid ruminations, we joined the others, climbing through the (now empty) water tunnels, and, at last on the top of this leveled off high hill, we could see what was left of this imperial palace that Herod built to glorify himself. And we could take pride in a poignant postscript. In the year 66 of the Common Era and again in 132, this pleasure dome became a fortress for the “Zealots” who fought the Romans. (It’s important to get our terminology straight: if you were or are a Jew fighting to preserve our monotheistic religion, you are a “Zealot.” If you are a human hand grenade today, you are a “militant.” Please keep the distinction clear in your mind.) And so, the water tunnels became an assault network to attack our persecutors. In addition to the hot and cold bath houses, a mikvah was added. And yes, in one corner of what had been the palace, we could stand in the ruins of a first or second century synagogue. I thought I could make out in faint Hebrew letters on one of the walls the inscription “No talking during davening,” but I might have been imagining things.

Before returning to Jerusalem, we made a little detour and to eat our lunch in the pretty community of Tekoa, near but not on the site of its ancient namesake. A few local families had joined together and opened a shop in which they manufactured and sold olive oil, where one could buy hot and cold drinks, and, in the near future, sandwiches. We got to sit and chat with some of the fascinating people with us and then to get a tour of the olive oil making facility, after which, many of us bought some oil, although I was careful not to buy the harif (spicy) variety. I figure that life in these environs can be harif enough, without adding it to one’s oil. Earlier, Ezra (remember Ezra?) had mentioned to us that because of the new road, the travel time from Jerusalem to Tekoa had been reduced by two thirds. And, not surprisingly, real estate value in this sleepy little town had sky-rocketed. All this, despite the fact that the current government could well try (they will not succeed!) to give away this part of our inheritance.

There are those today who, perhaps because they are overly focused on the here-and-now and not on the big picture, or perhaps because they do not take to heart how we fared in The Land when we had Kings, take an overly pessimistic view of the current Situation. Then, we had a brilliant leader, a courageous warrior, an orator, a master builder, and a delusional psychotic who murdered many people, including some near and dear. Now, we just have an inept, possibly corrupt, mediocrity, whose boldest action to date has been to stop combing his hair over his bald spot. (Maybe he took all that money for some unsuccessful hair transplants?) But his wife is alive and well; in fact, she is a successful artist, whose reputation will outlive his. His sons are also alive and well, living………outside The Land. It is unlikely that I will be tortured for writing this critique. All we need are enough hands raised during the next election – assuming he makes it that long – to get rid of him. (Your hands could be the deciding votes!)

So while physically Barbara, Natania, and I are living “before Herodion,” time-wise we are living and thriving after that structure and so many like it: the Parthenon, the Colisseum, the Aztec temples have all fallen; unlike the “Sukkah of David,” their civilizations will not rise again. It is now almost four weeks after this tiyul. We began counting “sefirat haomer,” the fifty days between Pesach and Shavuot. We have commemorated Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazicharon and celebrated Yom Haaztmaut (the subject of the next post, G-d willing). Day #33 meant Lag B’omer (still another topic). The counting continues. I am getting up early now to get to the morning minyon; I am saying Kaddish for my cousin Hank (no closer family member available) who died last week at the airport on his and Jane’s way to visit The Land for the first time. As I walk up Hagitit at 5:30 in the morning, the sun is rising to the east. If I return for the afternoon prayers, the sun will be dipping behind the hills between us and Jerusalem, no longer a painfully desolate city. There is nowhere I would rather be.