Where the Deer and the Kabbalists Play Pt. 3

(Before, I proceed, let me answer some questions I raised in my last article -- thanks to our good friend Jeff Glazer, who has just completed a tour guide course. Let's hope he passed the final examination! The Kabbalists of old did not go down to the fields west of Tzfat, which were filled with springs and where was located the old cemetery. To greet the 'Sabbath Queen,' they stood on the hillsides, looking for the sun to set over the nearby Har Meron -- at which point, for them, Shabbat would begin.)

WHERE A THOUSAND CONVERSATIONS BLOOM

Somehow a few weeks ago, a postcard, one sent by the former Barbara Cole to her family at South Goodman St. in Rochester, NY on May 1, 1968, managed to emerge from its hiding place in one of Barbara's old photo albums; although how it got back to my wife, the sender, is not clear. The message, written in green ink and visible through the tell-tale stain of a coffee cup, would be of little interest to the casual reader: Barbara and her roommate Elisheva have moved to new quarters for 80 lira (the old Israeli currency) apiece. More to the point, "I am BROKE, so please take money from my account and send it QUICKLY!" Any parent has gotten a similar appeal, although postcards have been twittered and tweeted out of existence.

The photo caption at the bottom reads in English:

SAFAD -- LANE IN THE OLD CITY

THE CAPITAL OF UPPER GALILEE FAMOUS

FOR IT'S (sic) ROMANTIC LANES AND ANCIENT SYNAGOGUES

The photograph on the front does match the Hebrew text: a simta, an alleyway, near the end of which is a solitary figure, a woman walking away, carrying a handbag. In the distance, there are some newer apartments; but here in this less-than-romantic 'lane,' even in broad daylight, the shops that line the simta are all boarded up -- complete and absolute desolation.

I have a similar mental image of Tzfat from 1980 -- although then there was a flourishing artists' colony which we didn't have the time to really explore. Now in 2011, we would be able to walk methodically through the old city to see what if anything has changed. It would be difficult to put into words what makes Tzfat seem so magical -- even if I thought I understood what it was. One thing that Barbara and I couldn't fail to notice though: the ease with which you could get into a conversation with a complete stranger at the drop of the proverbial hat, in English, no less.

After we settled in to our suite at the Olive Pelech Rimon, we decided to take a little stroll while it was still light, just to get our bearings. We walked a little way down the street, turned a corner, and there beckoning to us to enter was a gallery which by all rights should have been closed (at least according to the hours posted on the door) but wasn't. Neither Barbara or I had ever heard of Victor Halavani, although his statues graced a number of public spaces around the city. He and his wife Maggie welcomed us as we entered, and we spent a good hour in the gallery hearing stories about how they met (people who knew them warned that there was no way a marriage would work out between a nice Ashkenazic girl and guy whose family had fled from Egypt and who had been under her command in the Israeli army). It was understood that we were not about to buy anything; you don't walk in and purchase a five foot tall statue on impulse, and we were not there representing an American university looking for something to stick in front of their new library. Yet the couple graciously showed us photographs, sketches, and small models of his work until we were all exhausted.

Now, no one should assume from the above that we were too tired to worry about dinner. Oh no! Soon thereafter, Barbara and I were strolling along the main commercial drag, Rehov Yerushalayim (not that this street in any way leads to the Holy City) perusing the shop windows and checking out the restaurants. We wound up having a decent meal at a place called Café Baghdad and then, and only then, returning to our quarters for a good night's sleep.

The next morning after a lovely breakfast at a small café down the block, we began our exploration of the old city, taking no particular route and letting serendipity be our tour guide. After a while, we found ourselves in front of a multi-colored sign with the following inscription:

גלריה ימות המשיח

MESSIANIC ERA GALLERY

CLOSED

That stopped me in my tracks! Was it the Messianic Era that was out of business, or just the gallery? As I continued to photograph the sign and ponder its meaning for mankind, Barbara walked into the adjacent courtyard a few paces ahead of the current owner of the property. He gently reminded her that the gallery was indeed closed; to which Barbara responded that she was simply fascinated by the courtyard itself and came in to look at it. That exchange would normally prompt a two minute conversation, but, as I said, this is Tzfat where a thousand conversation bloom. Turns out that this fellow was from originally from Syracuse, and, being of a certain age, a number of kids he grew up with were in the same NCSY (National Council of Synagogue Youth) chapter as Barbara. After about ten minutes of standing outside and listening to their chit-chat from afar, I decided to join the conversation. It turns out that Reuven and his wife have lived in Tzfat for thirty some odd years, raising their family there and watching it "arise from the dust" of history before their eyes. So much to tell, but Reuven had things to do and we had places to see. So, half an hour later, we set off to continue our wanderings, not before being offered Shabbat hospitality -- which we could not accept, as we would be in Har Halutz, on top of another mountain.

As we learned from the Halavanis, a lot of the "art scene" in Tzfat is only a memory. Without much effort, you can be wading knee-deep in kitsch. But if one is discerning, there is still much of interest.. We peered around one corner into the doorway of one gallery that looked promising. The art work looked worthwhile, but as we entered, I was more taken by the music. I walked up to the guy whom I correctly suspected of being in charge and uttered two words: "Django Reinhardt," referring to the legendary Gypsy jazz guitarist. A minute or so later, another two words: "Stephane Grappelli," referring now to his one-time sidekick, the equally legendary French violinist.

Of course, if one person is causing such precious sounds to emanate from his computer (via YouTube), and another person correctly identifies it -- especially in Tzfat where conversation is common but this kind of music is rare -- a bond is formed at once. The fellow was originally from California (where else would he have been from?), and he was happy to sit in his gallery and watch the world go by. Don't get me wrong; he would have been happy to sell me something. One piece in particular, I would have been happy to buy: a large drawing which was in effect an homage to Vermeer's painting, "The Milkmaid." It was the kind of work that, if you didn't have a wall to put it on, you should build another one. The proprietor suggested that the price wasn't as high as I might have thought, but I stopped him. Whatever it was, it was less than the pleasure I would have had all my life looking at it, but more than it would have been prudent for us to spend. So we reluctantly left and turned another corner, coming onto another busy street.

Barbara decided to stop in a tourist information type place, of course getting into a conversation with the English speaking woman who worked there. The best bit of advice she had to give us was to go across the street and have lunch at the Yemenite Food Bar. What a business model! You start with a relatively small space on a well-traveled street. To attract attention, you have the proprietor dressed as a traditional Yemenite Jew with long payot, because he is a traditional Yemenite Jew with long payot. To cut costs, you simplify your menu. You have one main dish, called Lachuch, a Yemenite pizza (Let me explain: you make it with batter as you would a pancake in a crepe pan, adding vegetables and cheese; when it's done, you stick the concoction in the equivalent of a waffle iron to make it crispy. Oh was that good!).

We got there in time to secure a table in the front where we could people-watch to our hearts' content. Tour groups came by, and some of them, intrigued by what they saw, stopped at the Yemenite Food Bar for a quick lunch (Another part of the business model: get your customers in and out at lightning speed!). Within minutes, we were in another conversation with a Canadian who was part of a tour group. With the enthusiasm of a little kid checking out his Chanukah presents, he described his delight at being in The Land for the first time. Back home, he confessed, he is a self-described three days a year shul-goer. Here, he was at the Kotel, holding a Torah scroll, dancing with Israeli soldiers. Yup, that's what being in The Land can do to a man. Too bad I didn't have any containers labeled "Air from Tzfat;" he would have wanted a couple of cartons to take back to Toronto.

He left with his group, and we finished our meal cheered by his exuberance, which served us well the rest of the afternoon. We continued our wanderings, standing now at the bottom of the narrowest alley way in the city, at the exact spot where for many years a woman sat every day, waiting for Moshiach to arrive (I'm not making this up; that's what the plaque says); now in one of the several "Ari" shuls, watching the 'caretaker' drape shawls over the shoulders of the female Christian tourists whose attire did not meet his standards of modesty; now admiring the beautiful gates and doorways in newly renovated buildings, standing adjacent to other buildings which must be abandoned for at least half a century. It occurred to me several times that this city must be a real estate speculator's dream come true: so many shells of building to buy, so much potential, such a location!

Finally, it was time to return to our rental car,which was still parked outside the Olive Pelech Rimon. We needed to head to the place where we would be staying for our second night in Tzfat. In a city with so many conversations but so few street signs, it is best to travel to unfamiliar destinations while it is still light.

Where the Deer and the Kabbalists Play Pt. 2

WHAT FIELDS?

We left off last episode -- the one in which we heading up to Tzfat in a rental car to enjoy the short vacation that our kids were subsidizing -- at the point when we had arrived at our destination. It's as if we had hit the pause button to stop the movie on the DVD so we could get a snack or answer that annoying phone call, and the characters on the screen were frozen in place. Let's resume the action, or else the woman who was showing us to our suite in the Olive Pelech Rimon will forever be left bending over to put the key in the keyhole, trying to unlock the door. That's better; the door is opening, and we are let inside. Ooooooh! Very fancy!

We could see why this little apartment would cost about 1000NIS a night full price. First of all, there is a large combination living area and kitchenette (where there was a table with a half bottle of wine, two wine glasses, and a half dozen heart shaped pieces of chocolate just waiting for us). On our way to bring our suitcases into the bedroom, we peeked into the bathroom. Yes, the suite does come with a jacuzzi -- assuming we could figure out how to use it. Likewise, how to open the sliding door leading out to the merpeset. The view (from the balcony, not the jacuzzi) is alone worth the price of admission. The pension is on the west side of the city, just south of the artists' quarter and the oldest section of town, all of which we could see by craning our necks a little. As you might expect, there is a table and chairs on the balcony, the better to sit on a long summer evening with an appropriate beverage, watching the sunset over the nearby hills of Har Meron. That view and the following day's exploration of the old town started me on a train of thought about the Kabbalists of Tzfat and their activities on a Friday afternoon.

Since we've been here in The Land, I've had the opportunity to hear a number of people talk about and give examples of what can be called the Torah of Eretz Yisrael, which is a high-falutin' way of stating what should be obvious: when you're johnny-on-the-spot and see something with your own eyes you get a different slant on things than if you're far, far away-- which may be why they bothered to send men to the moon. (There's another wrinkle, that the air in The Land makes you smarter; but looking at the folks around me, I'm somewhat dubious about that explanation.) One example of T.E.Y. that had struck me a little while before was the business of 'The Four Species,' the lulav, etrog, myrtle, and willow that are taken together and 'waved' on Sukkot. A standard explanation -- beloved by one and all -- is that these four items represent four different types of Jews with different of Torah learning and good deeds to their credit, all of whom are needed to make a totality (tell that to some of the folks here!).

We were on an earlier tour (which I didn't get a chance to write about) during the intermediate days of Sukkot, down to the southwestern tip of Israel, where Gaza is right over there one way and Egypt is right over there the other. We were visiting a relatively new moshav comprised of Gush Katif expellees, and we were ushered into an area where vegetables were being packed for shipment. We were suddenly in a sea of yellow, amidst hundred and maybe thousands of etrogs, the ones which had not been sold in time and were now worth approximately nothing. Big, fat ones, much more zoftig than the one I had purchased two weeks before, along with the other three species, for 85 shekels (about $25). We were invited to take home as many as we wanted; and a few of these steroidal fruits are sitting in our kitchen in a jar of pure alcohol, soon, we hope, to turn into an etrog liqueur. Looking at these citric refugees, I remembered something our mentor, Nachum, had mentioned in a talk he had given a week or two before. The four species, what is so special about them? They are all easy to obtain here in The Land, BUT..........not in one place. That's the trick. Etrogs grow in certain places; lulavs, which are a part of a date palm, grow in others, usually where it's warmer; willows usually by the banks of streams and brooks; myrtles up north where it's cooler. If you want to collect all four, either you yourself will have to travel the length and breadth of Eretz Yisrael, or, more reasonably, the guys who have grown one of the species will have to trade with the guys who have the other three; which means they have to come together and engage in commerce -- which is what happened in The Land in days of yore when thousands of Jews would arrive in Jerusalem for the Holidays. In today's jargon, we can say that none of the twelve tribes was given a monopoly, allowed to restrain trade on the species. All of a sudden, wham bang, a metaphysical conception of togetherness, pleasing as it may be, has been replaced with some very wonderful facts on the ground. Something so simple and inspiring, but it wouldn't necessarily cross your mind or seem relevant in Minsk or Monsey.

Back to our balcony in Tzfat...... Pick up a siddur, any one with an English commentary, and turn to the beginning of the Friday night service. You will find some variant of the following theme, regarding the Kabbalists of Tzfat in the late sixteenth century: "Dressed in white, they would go out into the fields as the sun set, singing psalms and songs to the Shabbat bride" (from R. Jonathan Sack's commentary in the Koren siddur). But standing and surveying the landscape, one might pause to wonder, "What fields?" What fields are we in fact talking about? Let's begin with the assumption that, generally speaking, if you want to see the sun set, you will have to look towards the western horizon. When you are in Tzfat, it's hard not to notice that you are on top of either a very big hill or a very small mountain, depending on how you want to describe it. If you want to go out to "the fields" west of Tzfat, you would have to go down the mountain to the adjacent valley. (Barbara imagines that there might have been terraced farming on the slopes; even so, that's not the same as going out to "the fields.) Of course, once you have arrived down in the valley where there could well have been the fields in question, there's no way you could ever see the sun set because the next mountain, Har Meron, would be blocking your view. You could possibly walk in one of the other directions to watch the sun descend towards the horizon, but what would be the point? You might as well stay where you are. It would be great if there were a monument inscribed, "On this spot, Rabbi Elazar Azikri first recited Yedid Nefesh;" or a plaque with a similar inscription, "Here is where Rabbi Shlomo Alkabets composed Lecha Dodi." Nothing like that exists, and so my question still stands, where did these rabbis go? I keep looking at the photographs I took of the view from the merpeset, hoping to locate some likely location, but to no avail.

It might not be the most earthshaking question, and it might even seem trivial or irrelevant to some. After all, we know the rabbis were in Tzfat during that all too brief renaissance of Jewish life before the Druze and then a plague destroyed everything in the Galilee. The Kabbalists obviously wrote the liturgical poems that are still used today. I'm sure they prepared for Shabbat by dressing in white, greeting the Shabbat Queen, an image as real to them as the piece of chocolate I'm munching on is to me. Did they stand and face the door to the shul, as men do today for the last stanza of Lecha Dodi, all the while imagining they were out of doors? That sounds a little too weird, even for a bunch of Kabbalists. Perhaps there is a simple explanation, one which has eluded me, as to where they stood and prepared for The Holy Sabbath. It's not that I'm skeptical, just curious and a little annoyed. Here in The Land we can look around and try to make sense of our collective past, find out what really happened and where. It's not as easy as sitting halfway around the world, facilely repeating what we thought we knew, but it's sure a lot more interesting.

Where the Deer and the Kabbalists Play Pt. 1

PLAYING "FIND THE HIGHWAY"

This saga began, in case you are interested, aaaaaaaall the way back in January when our two daughters, momentarily flushed with money or with gratitude for the splendid job Barbara and I did in parenting, chipped in and purchased for our anniversary -- half priced of course -- a night at an exclusive pension in Tzfat.  However, when we received the joyful tidings, we were already planning our trip to The States (well documented in previous articles; in fact, Barbara had to make two trips to The States).  My thoughts, therefore, were "Not now, later; maybe after the Holidays."  Of course, the thing about "later" is that it always shows up, sooner or ...................

So, anticipating "later's" arrival, Barbara got to work sometime around Sukkot to arrange our journey up north to that spot where the deer and the kabbalists play.  We would pick up a rental car on a Wednesday morning, head eastward to route 90, up to Tiberias, then westward towards our destination.  We would cash in our voucher for one night of luxury, hang out in Tzfat Wednesday and Thursday -- spending the second night in less expensive quarters -- and then head over sometime on Friday to our friends Barbara and Richard for a relaxing, wine-filled Shabbat in Har Halutz..

Tzfat,we believe, is the last major spot we had been to on our five week sojourn to The Land in 1980 that we have not subsequently revisited.  No surprise, my memories of the place were somewhat foggy. Par for the course. Almost every place we had gone back to bore little resemblance to what I thought it would look like.  It had never occurred to me   thirty years ago to take detailed notes of where we had been and what we had seen: that the gevaldig couscous and chicken dinner we had in Yaffo was in a place called so-and-so on rehov so-and-so, and here's a picture of what it looked like; which was the bus station we were in where the two cabbies got into an argument as to whether the liquid in the container was water or coffee.  All I conjure up about Tzfat was that much of the old area  was in ruins, and there were a lot of working artists with studios.  I do have one great photograph from there: a baker feeding scraps of meat to a herd of hungry cats; but I have no idea where I took it. We do remember coming across a group of teenagers having a French version of a hootenanny in an abandoned storefront.  And then there was the old man with pants so shiny that you could have used him to draw yourself a self-portrait; he had appointed himself a tour guide and was trying to collect coins of the realm for synagogues that you could enter for free.  That wouldn't have been so bad, except that all the while he was doing his best to fondle my wife's fanny. Life is filled with wonderful memories.

Finally, "later" did arrive, and Barbara headed into Jerusalem to pick up our car at the Eldan office.  WHEELS!!!!!!!!!!!!!  After almost four and a half years, we were renting a car and going somewhere.  No more looking at all the articles in the newspapers describing this particular valley which on a February day is a carpet with wild flowers, or that mountain top where you can see the raptors gliding majestically over head, or this fort or that cave, this battle field or that  spot where the Elijah prophecized -- any of which you can get to  in your car.  Of course you have a car!  Egged buses?  Not a chance. We would have this little Hyundai, and we could go wherever we chose Wed., Thurs, Fri., and Sun. (For reasons I cannot begin to understand, because we have American passports, we were give unlimited mileage at no extra charge. Just fill the tank with gas before you bring it back.)

There's one other wonderful thing, I thought, about having your own vehicle.  You can stop wherever and whenever you want, a feature of some relevance for a photographer.  Many of the most remarkable sights I have seen hither and yon in The Land have been viewed from elevated perches on tour buses or out the side windows of someone else's car -- meaning that you see it and then it's gone in the twinkling of an eye.  There is one image stuck permanently in my mind.   It was back in 1980 and Yehuda was being kind enough to drive us down to Masada and Ein Gedi.  We had taken a route through east Jerusalem -- one you wouldn't take now -- and were now on one of the  insanely winding roads that is typical here.  There are on the side of this road was a dead donkey, evidently hit by a passing vehicle, with two other donkeys, one on each side, standing vigil.  If only I had been able to photograph that poignant scene.....  But, even if I had somehow gotten Yehuda's attention and convinced him that he had to stop the car somehow in the middle of nowhere -- no mean feat in itself -- I would have had to walk back who knows how far up the road, quite possibly meeting the same fate as the fallen donkey.  Some things are better left in one's mind's eye.

We had taken route 1 heading towards Jericho on any number of tiyulim, and each time we passed the Bedouin encampments on either side of the road, I wished I could stop long enough to get my camera out and snap away.  I could do it now, couldn't I?  Barbara was driving, and I was looking out the window, camera in hand.  You know something: it just doesn't work.  Cars don't stop on a dime; and even if they did, you don't want to do it in the middle of the road with a bunch of Israeli drivers breathing down your rear bumper.  So the image of a flock of sheep dotting a hillside in the shadow of a power grid remains untaken.

Undaunted -- even though we missed the turnoff for route 90 and had to double back -- we headed north, stopping long enough at a rest area to get some coffee and share our tuna fish with some local cats.  Then back on the road to Tzfat.  When Barbara had most recently been back to The States, she had purchased a GPS.  It was much cheaper to do that than to rent one for two weeks; plus the one she bought worked a lot better than the one we had rented in March.  For a few dollars more, she was told, we would be able to download all the maps we would ever want, assuming that "all the maps" meant all the maps, not just those that related to the continental US of A. Part of her preparation for our journey was a concerted effort to download something relevant to the roads here in The Land.  Let's just say, No Luck, and spare you the gory details of why not. So all the way, we were relying for directions the old-fashioned way, on a bunch of maps, some which Barbara had collected and one which came with the rental car.  We came to realize that there is one distinct advantage to using a GPS; it is better at playing "Find the Highway" than we are.  Many of you are familiar with this game, even if you don't know it by name.  Here's how you play: you're driving along a main road which goes through a decent size town, and now you're lost.  One of the streets is actually the road you want to stay on, but you have no idea which one it is because it doesn't say.  Are you supposed to go left or right where the street forks; should you follow the traffic or your intuition -- neither of which is foolproof. If you want to play that game big time, head over to Tiberias for an afternoon of fun and frolic.  At some point, you will eventually find your way out, which will put you on the new road leading to our destination.

Now, if a good GPS is better  than we and our maps were at playing "Find the Highway," imagine how much better it would be playing "Find the Street." For, you see (actually you don't), there are no street signs in Tzfat.  General indicators for the bus depot or the artists' colony, yes, but actual signs saying "Jerusalem St.", no.  A GPS is supposed to know where you are, without cheating and looking for a street sign.  It is blissfully unaware that there is no sign -- the one that would confirm that what it says on the map is where you actually are.  By dumb luck we drove past the pension and I could yell out, "Stop, we're here."  At least on a local street, we could turn around and park our car.  No fallen donkeys to photograph, just one concierge type lady anxiously awaiting our arrival -- so she could give us the key,  let us in, and head home.

What Used To Be Home Pt. 8

DON'T YOU FORGET DEWEY

"Every time I go back to Brownsville it is as if I had never been away...."

People here often ask me where I'm from in The States; and I tell them that we made aliyah from Teaneck, N.J., but I'm from The Bronx, or, if I'm in a more expansive mood, from New York -- meaning NYC. So the opening words of Alfred Kazin's autobiographical memoir, "A Walker in the City" have a certain resonance for me, articulating a simple statement of fact: that you can move some of us thousands of miles and more years than we would like to reckon from our old neighborhoods, but you can never entirely blot out that childhood piece of us. What was the hold, the glue that bound the acclaimed critic Alfred Kazin and that still binds me and others like me to the neighborhoods in which we grew up? It probably has to do in part with the years and the miles we spent as young, impressionable pedestrians, playing in the streets, walking everywhere, until at an early age we had come to memorize the name and contents of the small stores in which our families shopped under the shadow of the elevated train tracks, every apartment building in a six block radius and the names of the streets on which they were located, when the ice cream trucks would arrive on a summer afternoon, and down what alleyway would you be likely to find a broom handle which you could "borrow" for a game of stick-ball -- the essential things and places a kid in The Bronx needed to know.

Lest any of you think that my sense of nostalgia is excessive or at least unshared by others, let me prove you wrong. I happen to have, for anyone to inspect, a poster, now framed, which I received in 1982 at a neighborhood reunion. A number of people who had grown up with me had gotten together and contacted everyone they were in touch with, so that on this special Sunday in May, hundreds of former Bronxites and their families returned to "The Parkway" for an afternoon of memories. The poster is filled with the names of local avenues (Rochambeau), roads (Gun Hill), places (Knox), and streets (even 208 St.), stores that members of my family patronized, Hi-Jinx Sporting Goods, Sheff's Bakery, Sam's Pool Hall, Schweller's Delicatessen, and others that somehow escaped my attention, like Yetta's Corset Shop and Cal-Tuv Caterers, along with local schools and movie theaters, plus songs and musicians that had their moment of fame in the early 1950's.

Now no one who was on "The Parkway" that particular day still lived in the neighborhood; even our parents -- most of them -- had moved away. Another example of demography trumping nostalgia. We had all outgrown the confines of this neighborhood, and soon we, like the aforementioned exile from Brownsville, would find themselves walking in other parts of the city. For me, that meant trading in the egg creams from Bond's candy store and later the incredible honeydew ices from Jack Ashwal's chocolate shop on Jerome Avenue for the aroma of smoked fish and other delicacies wafting out of Zabar's on Broadway. It meant more years of walking new streets and new venues until they became as familiar and as comfortable as the ones I had known in The Bronx.

I've often wondered if children who grow up in The 'Burbs have that sense of connection, those unerasable memories of a place that we city kids used to have. Can you get to know a town with the same sense of intimacy when you're constantly being ferried around from here to there in the back of someone's car, when there's no schoolyard to play in or any place special to hang out? Is there any sense of magic in the signposts along Route 4? Part of my lack of connection with any of the towns we lived in New Jersey was that you neither walked very far nor was there any sense that anybody else would be either. OK, you might have to walk to and from the bus or train which would take you to your job in New York -- where you would walk. And those of us who don't drive on Shabbat got to walk to shul and friends' homes for lunch. Otherwise, the streets were empty, except for those coming and going from their cars.

In addition, in towns like Teaneck, virtually no one we knew had grown up there, and so everyone's childhood memories were from elsewhere. (Actually, Passaic was an exception, but that was more of a small city. We came to know a number of old-timers who had grown up in the old downtown section. They had plenty of memories of the streets filled with Yidden on Rosh Hashana.)

So my fond memories of Teaneck had nothing to do with the town per se, but our relative comfort with our shul, the availability of goods and services, and, most important, the many wonderful friends we still have there -- too many for us to have seen in the few days we spent there as the last stop on our journey back to what used to be home.

In an earlier article, I wrote about my interest in seeing a mission statement prominently displayed in the lobby of the Kemp Mill Synagogue in Silver Spring, MD. I had no such hope for the document that we lovingly created in New Jersey, if for no other reason than CBA was missing its lobby the Shabbat when we were there. Shiputsim!!!!! Millions of dollars to expand the premises, the culmination of a multi-year effort that had been started when we were still there, leaving most of the edifice temporarily unrecognizable, except for the main sanctuary where davening could still take place.

A number of our friends (generally the middle-aged and older crowd who had nothing vested in this extravaganza) were asking my opinion about the large amount of money that was being spent on the project. Knowing we were leaving the community, I hadn't gotten involved in the original discussion. Now that we were no longer there, it wasn't my money, and it wasn't my business. My original dismay, which I had voiced privately, was the utopian fallacy that underlay the project from its conception, the "if you build it, they will come" approach. My take on Jewish demographics in America has always been, "If you build it, we will abandon it," as witnessed by the dozens of opulent synagogues and temples in The Bronx, The Lower East Side, and Newark -- let alone the rest of the planet -- that are now boarded up or used by other religions. If you decide to fix up your shul because you need more space now, to make it look a little nicer now, or be a little more comfortable now, and you have the money to do it, fine. Just don't expect that by having emptied your collective wallets, you will have increased the level of kedusha in the community or solved its potential demographic problems, that you will have assured a Jewish presence fifty years or even twenty years down the road. It would be like expecting that your wayward teenager's grades will improve because you've bought him a new computer desk. If only life were that simple.

One good thing, though: while you're tallying up the millions of dollars a project of this magnitude would cost, friendship is still priceless -- especially the kind that lingers over a Shabbat meal. For the price of a few chickens and a bottle of decent wine, you can share all the camaraderie you would ever want. Talk about getting your money's worth! We, at any rate, certainly did. For weeks and weeks, I had been looking forward to a Friday night dinner with one set of dear friends and a Shabbat lunch with others. Equally anticipated with the promise of spending two hours between the early Shabbat morning minyan and lunchtime with the guys I had been learning Gemarrah with and ever so s-l-o-w-l-y going over the material -- all the while having some sort of kiddush, a little shnappes, plenty of crackers to dip in the hummus and babaganoush (this blew me away: while you can find containers of grilled eggplant blended with mayonnaise, you will never find anything called babaganoush in The Land) and, it goes without saying, some coffee. There are plenty of opportunities for Learning here in The Land, but that combination of informality and intellectual rigor is something I miss and will always cherish.

Shabbat was soon over; it always is. There were more people to see in a whirlwind of hello's and good-bye's, and others we couldn't squeeze in -- even though we spent most of Sunday continuing our rounds. Then it was Monday. Time for our return back to Eretz Israel. Except that Barbara would have to stay behind for another week, there being too much unfinished business to take care of for her mother. Well, I'm a big boy, and I can travel by myself. The time heading back alone to what is now my home gave me a bunch of time to reflect upon my journey back to where we used to live.

Before our journey began, I wondered how it would be being back in The States. Would it seems as if I had never left; or would I feel like a stranger in a strange land? The Sunday before we left Silver Spring, we took the Washington Metro down to the Nation's Capital, and headed over to the National Gallery. I am very fond of the new wing, an example of what you can do when you have a lot of taxpayers' dollars to finance your project. Of course, if we were at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem or the Tel Aviv Museum, lunch would not have been a problem. But in Washington D.C., sitting in the spacious cafeteria, with water cascading down behind a glass wall for ambiance, I got myself a cup of coffee and we furtively took out the sandwiches we had brought along. The last time we had been there, ten or fifteen years ago,as I reminded Barbara, they had a large exhibit of Paul Gauguin's painting. What did they have this time? Paul Gauguin's paintings. Wasn't I just here? Also on display were an exhibit of Venetian paintings by Canaletto and others, plus a lot of 20th century art. The last exhibit we saw was a collection of exquisitely boring photographs by one Lewis Baltz, the banality of which seems to be the point. Anyway, standing near the exit of the gallery -- which I was heading towards as expeditiously as I could without going into full gallop mode -- were two Afro-American security guards. Having missed the initial drift of their conversation, I overheard them discussing, for reasons I will never fathom, Donald Duck's nephews, Hughie and Louie. A few minutes later as I passed between them, I remarked, "Excuse me. It's Hughie, Dewey, and Louie." That stopped them short, and they thanked me for my erudition.

I know by reputation people who, the minute they touch the ground at Ben-Gurion Airport and get their new identify papers, take it literally and assume a new identity,which means dismissing or forgetting a lot of what they used to know and like in their pre-Aliyah persona. You'd have to give me a frontal lobotomy. Otherwise, I'm still the same kid from The Bronx who knows that the theme music for the radio show "Mr. Keane, Tracer of Lost Persons" was "Someday I'll find you," and who for a number of years was the backup catcher to Roy Campanella on the Brooklyn Dodgers (Bruce Edwards). A head full of useless information that nobody here in The Land cares two toots about -- and few do elsewhere.

"...........From the moment I step off the train at Rockaway Avenue and smell the leak out of the men's room, then the pickles from the stand just below the subway steps, an instant rage comes over me, mixed with dread and some unexpected tenderness."

Let's return for a moment to that somewhat magical day in May 1982 and those hundred of former residents of The Neighborhood assembled on The Parkway -- few if any of whom had arrived by the 'D' train to 205th St. or the IRT #4 to the Moshulu Parkway station. There would be virtual unanimity that "those" were some of the best times we ever had. However, if you went around with an offer to come back to The Neighborhood, to rent an apartment on Steuben Ave. two buildings away from J.H.S. 80, you would not have found a taker anywhere in the crowd . You may not like it, the whole thing might make you angry, but you have to move on. You may have the warmest memories of your past, but you have to move on. You may always wonder what if, but you have to move on. For better or worse, you have to move on; the trick is to make it for better -- as much as you can.

When we made aliyah, we sent most of our belongings on a lift. As much as we were able, we took with us on the plane -- even an aged cat. What didn't count as part of our baggage were our memories. Those just came along for the ride, even if we hadn't planned to pack them. The only things we consciously left behind were our regrets. We happily jettisoned those. To this day, I don't miss a single one.

What Used To Be Home Pt. 7

SHIPUTSIM, FOR BETTER OR WORSE

1978. Was it a good year? Was it a bad year? Depends on whom you ask. Other than Jimmy Carter being the U.S. president, it was, at least for me, a pretty good year. My father was still alive, although beginning to show the alarming symptoms of the leukemia condition which would do him in a few years later. Barbara and I were dating, and we would wind up deciding to get married, one of the better choices of my life. Asa result, I was soon to conclude my second and final tour of duty as a denizen of Manhattan's Upper West Side, moving from W. 104th St. to Jackson Heights, Queens, the first of many moves away from the places I had come to know. This past March, after a week with Barbara's mother in Maryland, we would have the chance to spend a few days staying with Frank and Abbey, my fraternal twin brother and his wife, in their apartment on 94th St and Columbus Ave. We would really be in that part of the city which used to be home.

My memories of this area go back a long way, say to the 1960's. It's not something you might notice in the hustle and bustle of living your life, but if you hang around Manhattan long enough you can watch neighborhoods change before your eyes -- sometimes for the better, sometimes not. The first thing Barbara and I noticed that March day when we alighted from the #2 train at 96th Street was the redesigned train station -- complete with an elevator. Just the thing when you've got all those suitcases which otherwise would have to be dragged up two flights of stairs. I understand it took only three years to complete the work, all the while making a generalized mess, which compares with the six plus years to build the light rail system here in Jerusalem. We walked from there the two blocks to the building in which they live. The second thing to catch my eye was the redesigned entrance. Unlike the pre-war apartment apartment buildings with their elegant lobbies that graced the surrounding avenues, a Mitchell-Lama co-op on Columbus Ave. hadn't seemed to need anything so snazzy. It was as if the residents were trying to hide the fact that they were middle class by having the entrance of the building look like it was a welfare hotel. All that, however, was history. A new set of doors with electric eyes that would open by themselves, paneled walls, a user-friendly inter-com and bell system. What will they think of next?

My brother was continuing his own set of shiputsim (renovations) to their apartment. Years before, he had surreptitiously removed an interior wall, turning two small bedrooms into a bigger studio, so that Abbey would have as much room to paint as she did in their country place. Now Frank was redoing the spare room where they kept the Apple computer and the futon on which Barbara and I would sleep the few days we would be staying there. A new wood floor and bookcases. Looking good, but I was more interested in whether he was looking good.

About eight years ago, my fraternal twin brother was diagnosed with what was essentially the same medical condition as our father had. Fortunately for all concerned, the possibility of treatment had increased tremendously in the intervening twenty years, and Frank was able to "buy" seven good years with massive chemotherapy that would either have killed him or cured him. Now the condition had reappeared and he was back in treatment. So he had been having good weeks and bad weeks, and my concern had been that we would arrive at their doorstep at a time when he wouldn't be up to having visitors. But no, he was in the best of spirits and keeping busy, which my brother is very good at. So the four of us got to hang out together, doing as thorough a perusal of the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art as time permitted. I will never again be able to spend as much time in a cultural venue as I have spent in these two venerable institutions, each of which has gone through at least three renovations in the time that I can remember.

The Metropolitan has bulked up in size, started to charge an entrance fee, and begun hanging banners to advertise their "blockbuster" exhibitions (there was a time when that term meant neither a place to rent videos nor an exhibition for which they could soak you to get in). It is no longer a place where a solitary art lover can wander around unimpeded, without being trampled by a tour group doing more listening than looking. Nevertheless, the grandeur of the original building remains, and their collection is unmatched; so you can never go wrong by showing up and paying them whatever you feel like it -- which is what we always have done.

The Modern.......that's a horse of a different color........ It used to be a little kind-of-welcoming place, in a sense a 'temple' for modern art, which in the 1930's started with the Impressionists and included Picasso and Matisse as well as others from the turn of the 20th century onward. At a time in the 1960's, when I was making $8,000 a year, I could afford a membership which might have cost $25 each year, meaning I could hang out there a lot. There were times when I went in just to use the 'facilities.' More often than not, after a perusal of some part of their collection, I would wind up whiling away a good hour, sitting with a cup of coffee in the little cafeteria overlooking the sculpture garden -- an island of tranquility with sparrows chirping in the trees. I had not been back to MOMA since the latest reconstruction;for one thing, the admission charge is up to $20 per, more than Frugal Fred is prepared to shell out. As Frank and Abbey have a membership, we were able to get in as guests for a more reasonable price. Their collections are as fine as ever, but I have seen office buildings and airports with as much charm and aesthetic appeal as their newest structure, a definite triumph of function over form.

I began by alluding to the changes that have occurred in the Upper West Side over the decades. There used to be a slew of movie theaters that would show old films; next there were video stores which then more and more stocked DVD's; finally there was nothing. There used to be more little stores that would sell or fix whatever you needed or provide personal services at affordable prices because the rents were reasonable and the store owners could make a living. Now the area is being swamped with larger, impersonal chains. The problem is, you are less likely to buy a new mattress than to need a haircut or to have your shoes re-soled; so the commercial changes are probably not for the better.

On the other hand, there wasn't that much going on Jewishly when I lived there. Yes, the shuls remained open, although business generally wasn't booming; and you could find kosher food, if you worked at it. But you wouldn't describe the Upper West Side in 1980 as a happening place for the Yidden. Over the years, the situation slowly improved, so that in the last ten years the place is crawling with yuppified Orthodox members of the tribe. Along with the general trend of replacing Comidas Criollas joints with quasi-quaint bistros, little places serving exotic cuisines from around the world, and other assorted watering holes for the young and up-and-coming, there are a growing number of kosher eateries, from a Dunkin' Donuts on up. One place I fondly remembered -- although in a different location -- was Casbah, a Moroccan restaurant on a little side street in the West 70's. My suggestion to have our belated birthday celebration there was accepted, and Frank and Abbey, Barbara and I headed over there, now a fifteen minute walk from their apartment. We went down the few steps to enter, and I looked around. On my right, was a stand with three Japanese guys making sushi. Above them on the wall, as well as on the opposite side were large TV's showing home videos of various farbrengens (I guess you'd call them "gatherings" held by the late Lubavitch rebbe) which kept being repeated, so as we sat and enjoyed a meal fit for a rebbe, we could watch the same kids wandering around 770 Eastern Parkway over and over again. A steak house with sushi in a place called Casbah run by Lubavitch. Only in New York!

One task I neglected to mention, a most important one at that, was the purchasing of suitable whiskeys to bring out to New Jersey and to add to my stash back in The Land, as paying the confiscatory VAT there is only done when you're really desperate; and I don't intend to get really desperate. There I was, standing in the back of the Gotham Wine and Liquor Store on 94th St. and Broadway, eying their impressive collection of Kentucky's finest. Soon I was joined by a woman employee who, it turned out, was in charge of ordering the same. Although she did not come right out and say so, she assumed I was in the wrong section, as all her other customers who were identifiably Jewish headed straight to the single malt scotches. I patiently explained to her that there were plenty of nice Jewish guys and gals both in New Jersey and The Land who had a liking for a good bourbon, and that I, being a man of peace, took both sides of the argument, drinking either distillation with equal gusto. My main concern was finding a good bottle at a modest price. My favorite bourbon, Elmer T. Lee, was not on the shelves; a serious omission, which I was not reticent about pointing out. What else did she have? Without blinking and eye or hesitating for even a fraction of a second, her hand grasped a bottle of Buffalo Trace and handed it to me. How could I quarrel with this personal assurance? I could not; and I did not, heading straight to the cash register, credit card in hand. Sitting here months later, all I can say is this: if you are anywhere near 94th St. and Broadway in NYC, and you're considering getting a bottle of something, walk into the store, head to the back and wait for this woman to tell you what to buy. If there is a buffalo on the bottle, you're in business.