Freckles Was His Name, or Velcro and the Jewish Question

(Our regularly scheduled post about Tu B’Sh’vat is being temporarily postponed in order that we might bring you this special edition on a timely topic. We are sorry for this inconvenience.)

Freckles was his name,
He always used to get the blame,
For every broken window pane,
It was a shame……..
Composed c. 1920 by Milton Agar and others

As there are no more than a handful of people, one or two of them receiving this post, who would understand this reference to my childhood, I will begin by bringing the rest of you “up to speed.”
For the “Ziegfield Follies of 1919,” Irving Berlin was asked to write several songs to be added to the show, which he did. One of them, “You’d Be Surprised,” was performed in the first act by the young Eddie Cantor, who subsequently recorded this song. In those days, songs – music and lyrics – were written by professional song writers and the sheet music peddled around to anyone who would perform it. If the original version of a song did well, other performers would sing it on a vaudeville stage or record it also. “You’d Be Surprised” was, like many Berlin songs, a very big hit, and it was “covered” by Billy Murray, the most popular recording star in the period from 1900-1920, the Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, or Elvis Presley of his day. It was this version, with “Freckles” on side B, recorded in 1919 or 1920, which my parents had. Originally we would play this and several other 78’s which my parents had managed to preserve – these acoustic 78’s were very, very fragile – on an old wind-up victrola (powered by a hand crank) and then later on a more modern three-speed turntable. Our friends loved to listen, the music being so different from what they would be hearing anywhere else, at a time when people were buying thirteen inch black and white television sets.
“Freckles” was everyone’s favorite. This extremely obscure song painted a picture – in three minutes – of a rural America and a childhood very different from what we knew in The Bronx: “And though he was his mother’s pride and joy, He was worse than Peck’s Bad Boy; At the swimming place, you’d always see his grinning face, And down by the old church picnic, He’d win every race.” But for our young hero, there was a definite downside: “And when a dog had tin cans tied to its tail, It was never known to fail; Everybody said ‘Freckles,’ He always got the blame.”
Velcro. You may recall that certain Presidents were called “Teflon” by their opponents, the implication being, that they were never held to account for things that ostensibly went wrong during their administration. “Velcro” is just the opposite: you get blamed for everything!
It is my contention that the Jewish people are a Velcro nation. Everything sticks to us: we’re always blamed for things, in the middle of things, involved in what would not seem to be our business. You may know the old story about the international scientific conference on elephants. Many papers were presented: a French scientist spoke about the love life of elephants; a German scientist spoke about the social patterns of elephants; an American scientist spoke about elephant conservation, and so on and on. As the conference was winding down, in raced Sammy. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said breathlessly. “But I just found out about the conference. I just finished writing a paper I want to present.” The conference chairman asked him what his paper was about. Said Sammy, “Elephants and the Jewish question.”
It was not that long ago that the Turkish government absolutely needed to know what was the position of the Israeli government and the Anti-Defamation League on whether or not Turkey was responsible for massacring Armenians during World War I. The future of Turkey’s trade relations with Israel would depend on what Ehud Olmert or Abe Foxman would say. All of a sudden, everyone cares what the Jews think. Unless I’m mistaken, nobody went off and conducted a poll of the NYC Council, or went off interviewing legislators in Virginia or Florida, or the government of Thailand. I can imagine the response in the great state of Texas if Turkey threatened to withhold its dried fruit unless the state disavowed any knowledge of Armenians. There would probably be a run on t-shirts saying something like “I don’t give a fig.”
More problematic by a mile is the business with Gaza. As everyone knows, the Israeli government expelled about 8,000 Jewish people living peacefully and legally there, and turned over the administration to the “Palestinian Authority” with an all-too-predictable result: mayhem and a government of terror. The only positive thing that one might think would have come out of this debacle was, at least, whatever happened, we in Israel wouldn‘t be responsible for it and for the Arabs living there. WRONG!!! It seems that, according to many, we are still responsible for Gaza, no matter who runs the government there, and we will always be responsible – until the end of days. No matter how many kassam rockets fall on the hapless residents of Sderot, we apparently have a moral obligation to continue supplying the fuel and electricity that are used to make these rockets. Even the Supreme Court here has gotten into the act, kibitzing the civil authorities responsible for safeguarding the lives of Israeli civilians: can you, can’t you, how much, how often, blah, blah, blah.
When I began this article, the entrance into Gaza from Egypt was also the subject of a blockade – which was usually ignored by the world media – so that there was a very interesting asymmetry: if Arabs from Gaza could not enter Egypt for needed medical attention or because they were accepted into universities in The West, it was Israel’s fault. When the Israeli government produced videoed evidence of collusion to allow terrorists to enter Gaza from Egypt, that country’s government got defensive and huffy; the American State Department refused to allow members of Congress to see the films because it would damage U.S.-Egyptian relations. Again, it was Israel’s fault for noticing.
Now that Hamas has destroyed the wall separating Egypt from Gaza – I guess the Egyptian Intelligence didn’t hear the banging sounds all these months – people around the world seem intent on painting the Egyptians as the good guys and the Israelis as the bad guys. Here in The Land, there is the interminable second guessing of why the P.R. here is so poor. Personally, I haven’t read any of these articles because I have my own more comprehensive answer: “They” just don’t like “Us,” which is perfectly understandable, given that “They” just don’t like “each other.”
When I say that They don’t like Us, I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t tens or hundreds of millions of wonderful gentiles out there with whom we get along quite well, or that the talents and creative gifts of Jewish men and women aren’t widely appreciated. It’s when we go from the individual to the collective that we run into trouble: As nations, the gentiles of the world, busy massacring each other all these millennia, do not like or respect the Jewish People. In order to make my point, let’s get back in our time machine and advance about twenty years from the Ziegfield Follies of 1919. While the winds of war and a Holocaust were beginning to sweep Europe, Americans were listening to their radios (an industry pioneered by Jews), laughing at the Jack Benny and Fred Allen shows, listening to (a now older) Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice (Baby Snooks), and Gertrude Berg (Molly Goldberg), and dancing to the music of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. The songs that were on “the charts” and in the movies (an industry that was developed in the States almost entirely by the initiative of uneducated Jewish immigrants) were written by the ever-popular Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, and lesser lights …like Milton Agar. In a few years, at the urging of Albert Einstein, the Manhattan Project was underway, and J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller were developing the weapon that would end World War II. So you might have thought that Americans might have had room in their hearts and in their vast, open plains for our equally talented cousins across The Pond who were being threatened with annihilation. But you know how that story ended.
I know that many Jews back in The States are involved in “hasbara” campaigns, writing letters, sending each other e-mails of recent articles by our defenders, lobbying elected officials, all in behalf of our beleaguered little nation. And that’s all well and good. What puzzles me is the accompanying tone of indignation and surprise at the prevailing world-wide anti-Semitism, the anti-Israel bias. You see, I look at things from a different point of view. Personally, I don’t get angry because it gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter; that’s the way things are. If you live by the banks of the Passaic or Mississippi River, don’t be surprised if one day there are five feet of water in your basement playroom; if you live at the base of a volcano, don’t be indignant if on a different day a stream of molten rock is about to engulf your rose bushes.
As Jacob Cohen/Jack Roy/Rodney Dangerfield was wont to say, “We don’t get no respect,” and we, the Jewish People/Nation of Israel haven’t had any for two thousand years since the destruction of the Second Temple (if you don’t believe me, you can look it up.) From that moment on, we were the fall guys: we killed “Their Savior;” we caused the bubonic plagues in Europe; we murdered their children and used their blood to bake matzohs. To the Communists, we were capitalists, to the Nazis, we were Communists; either way, we were responsible for the world’s economic woes. Now we have taken the land away from “The Palestinians,” a nation created in 1973 by Yasser Arafat, may his name remain a curse.
You want some respect? We will get it once we are collectively back in Our Land, when we show a little class, a little attitude (Perhaps then we will all be wearing t-shirts with a Hebrew version of “I don’t give a fig.”), and when we do a better job of being “A Light Unto the Nations.”
So what was my response to the threat of further U.N. condemnations of Israel, this time over Gaza? On Thursday, I took my two large, funky plaid shopping bags, put them in my backpack, and headed off by bus to the Mahane Yehuda shuk (which will be featured more prominently in future posts), where I filled the bags with fruit, vegetables, meat, chicken, challah, cake, wine, and finally, a bottle of John Jameson Irish whiskey. When the bags were filled to capacity, to the point that I could barely carry them, I returned home – slightly delayed, along with hundreds of others, while the police exploded a “chefets chashud” (a suspicious package. Much of Friday was spent preparing huge quantities of food for Shabbat, as we were having company. Shabbat morning, I trudged over to my beit knesset, Mussar Avicha, where we recited the traditional prayers, for rain to fall in OUR country, for the well-being of OUR state and OUR soldiers. I joined the other cohanim in transmitting the priestly blessing to the congregation and to all Israel. Then, I went home, and we and our guests had lunch.
It is now Sunday. I am shortly expecting Harry, a friend from Teaneck to drop by. Some of his children are now living in Jerusalem, going to school at nearby Hebrew University, and considering moving to our community. While I was talking to Harry on my cell phone a while ago, I got a call from Shelley Brinn, Maale Adumim’s community liaison. She was driving around with a woman who is making aliyah this summer. Could she drop in and show this prospective MAer, our oversized cottage?
So here we are. Because it is too cold to wear any kind of a t-shirt, I am wearing Tina’s heavy “Frisch” (her high school) sweatshirt with a hood. But the message to the Rices-of-this-world, whoever is running the U.N. these days (I have lost track), Mr. Abbas, and anybody else who is not happy that we are living a little bit east of Yerushalayim, is “ I don’t give a…………” Meanwhile, should you choose to arrive in our environs, I would be happy to take my two large, funky plaid shopping bags, put them in my backpack, and head off by bus to the Mahane Yehuda shuk so that we can provide you too with Shabbat lunch.

N.I.M.B.Y.. or Life Goes On In Titipu

And we are right, I think you'll say,To argue in this kind of way;And I am right,And you are right,And all is right--too-looral-lay! (from Act 1,“The Mikado, Or The Town of Titipu”By William S. GilbertMusic by Sir Arthur Sullivan)

The following morning, Wed. Jan. 9, was when the President’s entourage arrived at Ben Gurion airport, and then by helicopter to Jerusalem. Traffic was supposed to be a nightmare (We had visions of a two hour delay at the checkpoint going into the city.) It didn’t take much to persuade us to forego ulpan, sleep in, and stay home. When I finally got up, I went to the living room to daven shacharit (the morning prayers.) From this vantage point, I can look out and see the new police station only a few miles away. Some of you may be familiar with “E-1,” an area a little bit west of today’s Maale Adumim, in fact, originally slated to be part of our town. The government built a new regional police station there and it’s just about ready, but it has not been used because Condi says we can’t be there, and no one yet has politely told her that it’s not her place to tell the Israeli government where we can put a police station.
Now if Condi doesn’t want us to be there in E-1, I imagine that she wants the “Palestinians” to live there. If I were going to include digital images with this blog, I would show you how close this area is to where we live. Even scarier is the large, uninhabited hill behind and slightly to the left of the police station. If there were a weak, unstable Arab government with a full complement of terrorists in the adjoining areas, it wouldn’t take much to place a rocket launcher on that hill,or one nearby, perhaps in the dead of night, and send a kassam rocket or two our way. Real estate prices in Maale Adumim have risen noticeably in the last year, but it wouldn’t take much to turn our lovely community into another Sderot, with the concomitant fall in the value of everyone’s home as we watched “the rockets’ red glare” and a slew of Magen David Adom ambulances careening wildly around the traffic circles, taking bloody victims to the Hadassah Hospital on nearby Mount Scopus.
Imagine if we were back in New Jersey, and one of the cell phone companies wanted to put up an antenna within a thousand feet of our home. Some neighbor would be running around with a petition against it because everyone might get cancer (which never stopped these same people from being on their phones ten hours a day while complaining about the poor reception.) Or what about the woman on Johnson Avenue in Teaneck who went into court to prevent a Conservative temple from opening on her block. One of the arguments that her attorney made with a straight face was that it would increase automobile pollution on her block. Here was a woman who lived about a mile from the intersection of Route 80 (going from the George Washington Bridge to California) and Route 95, the New Jersey Turnpike (going all the way down to Florida), and she could go into court and complain about air pollution from a house of worship. N.I.M.B.Y!!!!!! Not in my backyard! Not in my neighborhood! Why can’t I do that? Where’s the court that I can go into? After all, the chances of my home being destroyed, of my limbs being severed in a terrorist attack launched from within a of Gaza-in-my- neighborhood would be much greater than people dying of cancer from cell phone towers or Conservative Jews in New Jersey.
I have the sense that the land of Israel has spawned a dozen or more parallel political universes, each one occupied by a different faction, group, or party. What’s scary is that few of them seem to be related to the world I live in. Here’s the scenario and the cast of characters, as I see it: George W. Bush, a quintessential lame duck, along with his Secretary-of State, about whom it is next to impossible to say a kind word, comes to Jerusalem to meet with Ehud Olmert and then Mahmoud Abbas. Now Ehud Olmert will always be remembered in a Guinness-Book-of-Records kind of way for being the democratically elected head of state with – deservedly -- the lowest approval rating ever. While his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, is being kept alive by tubes, Olmert is being kept alive politically by two political parties, Shas and Israel Beitenu, who are opposed to his policies (since I wrote this, Lieberman has left the government, leaving Shas as the force keeping Olmert alive.) Then there is Abbbas, who is not-so-affectionately known as the “Mayor of Ramallah,” because he rarely leaves his home base for fear of being assassinated.
Several weeks ago, The Jerusalem Post printed an interview with Olmert in which he discussed his plans to divide Jerusalem and allow the establishment of a “Palestinian” state in what the world calls “The West Bank,” and some of us refer to with the original names of Yehuda and Shomron (Judea and Samaria.) He claimed triumphantly that he had enough support in the Knesset to win approval for his program. Not so fast! The next day, JPost ran an article in which both Shas and Israel Beitenu repeated their positions that if Olmert continued his negotiations with Abbas on “core issues,” or on dividing Jerusalem, they would at some point bolt from his coalition. In other words, they will allow him to make commitments which they know he will make, and they know they will not vote for, before they turn off the lights.
Not so fast! The next day JPost ran another article with Abbas’ position. Olmert must be living on another planet, said the Fatah representative, his proposals are completely unacceptable, non-starters. Understand that there is a difference between the radical positions of Hamas and those of Fatah, the more “moderate” group which Abbas represents. Unlike their more extreme counterparts who dress the part and want “Jews out or dead,” Fatahites wear western garb and do not necessarily refer to “Allah” all the time. What they want is simple: Israel must withdraw to the indefensible pre-1967 borders, in the process, relocating hundreds of thousands of Jewish citizens (including the 40,000 in Maale Adumim), giving up sovereignty over Jewish holy sites – which, if past history is any indication, means that these sites would be desecrated and we would never be allowed near them again – and slicing our capital city into two mutually exclusive parts. In addition, Israel must renounce its commitment to being a Jewish state and take steps to insure that the Jewish people would soon be a minority in its ancestral homeland. Shall we commit suicide now or later?
To add their voice to this cacophony of illogic, Israeli’s small but vocal political left felt the need to chime in. In an op-ed piece in Haaretz, one Gideon Levy articulated the faults, real and imagined, of the American president, and then opined that “(U)ntil a determined president is inaugurated in Washington who will engage in a serious effort to bring an end to the occupation, no peace will prevail here. Bush could have done this, but he abused his office.” This, however, is mild compared with the impassioned appeal of Haaretz editor David Landau, who reportedly told Condi that Israel needed to be raped (his words) by the United States into accepting a “Palestinian” state. Israelis, in general, do not want to abandon our holy places, do not want to fracture Jerusalem, and are very leery, after the debacle in Gaza, of any more concessions to hostile entities; but the Levy’s and the Landau’s will have none of that, because they know better. The way I see it, it’s sort of like a group of people whose leader wants them to climb a treacherous slope. They demur, citing the danger. But there is a vocal minority who, in addition, want the group to jump off the top of that mountain, and, when they really don’t want to do that, tries to hire a tough guy to force them do it.
By this time, I desperately needed to return to reality. Several weeks before, prior to the scheduling of Bush’s visit, we had purchased tickets to the Jerusalem English Speaking Theater’s production of “The Mikado” for this particular evening. Now, we were willing to forego a Day At Ulpan, but miss a performance of something by Gilbert and Sullivan? Never (well, hardly ever!)
How I came to my lifelong affection for Gilbert and Sullivan can be traced back to events well before I was born. When my father, may he rest in peace, was a boy on the “Lower East Side” sometime around 1910, his music teacher (remember music teachers?) instilled in him a love for Sir Arthur Sullivan’s soothing Victorian melodies and W.S. Gilbert’s diabolically piercing librettos. So when my brother Frank and I were fairly young, my mother, may she also rest in peace, took us to the Museum of Modern Art to see the 1939 film version of The Mikado, the one with Martyn Green and Kenny Baker (who, in case you have forgotten, was the first singer on Jack Benny’s radio show, preceding Dennis Day. What other blog would provide such information?) I was hooked from that moment on.
So we got ready to go into Jerusalem for the 8 PM performance. Barbara, fearing a monumental traffic jam, had us out of the house a little bit after 4PM. Contrary to our worst fears, there was zero traffic going into the city – like going from Teaneck over the GW bridge into New York at 7AM New Years Day – so that we got to our Jaffa Road at 5PM. We had three hours “to kill” (I hate that expression: you don’t kill time; time kills you.) before the performance, so we returned to Arcaffe for dinner (this time, no strange hands) and then walked around Yoel Salomon St. I have never seen the streets of Jerusalem so empty, even the area around the King David Hotel, where we expected roadblocks and anticipated delays getting to the theater a few blocks from the President’s entourage.
We finally arrived at the theater to join a full house f assembled Anglophones for a performance that greatly exceeded my expectations and provided a revealing insight into the libretto. In case anyone reading this is not familiar with the plot of The Mikado, it goes something like this, oversimplified, of course: Nanki-Poo, the son of the Mikado (emperor of Japan), flees his father’s court rather than marry Katisha, an unattractive woman who is the Mikado’s daughter-in-law elect. Nanki-Poo arrives in Titipu, hoping to find Yum-Yum, a young woman with whom he has fallen in love. However, she will soon be married to her guardian, Ko-Ko, who has risen from being a “cheap tailor” (Taken from the county jail, by a set of curious chances…) to the exalted rank of Lord High Executioner. Ko-Ko is ably assisted by Pooh-Bah, who, when all the ministers of state resign over Ko-Ko’s appointment, becomes Loord High Everything Else, including First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Justice, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral, Master of the Buckhounds, Groom of the Back Stairs, Archbishop of Titipu, Lord Mayor and……… gabbai of the second minyon – something which is left out of most printed copies of the libretto and consequently is not mentioned in most performances.
The plot thickens, as it always does. The Lord High Executioner must find someone to behead within thirty days, or he will be beheaded himself. And the Mikado will soon be coming to Titipu to find out if his orders have been carried out. So Ko-Ko tries to convince Nanki-Poo to serve as the victim, rather than committing suicide over a broken heart. After a second act and much glorious music, Nanki-Poo marries Yum-Yum, and Ko-Ko winds up marrying Katisha.
As I sat there, trying not to “sing-along” with words and music I know so well. I began making a connection which had never occurred to me: The Lord High Executioner (“Wafted by a favoring gale, As one sometimes is in trances, To a height that few can scale, Save by long and wear dances; Surely, never had a male Under such like circumstances So adventurous a tale, Which may rank with most romances.”) was waiting for the arrival of the Mikado and his meddlesome daughter-in-law elect ostensibly to make certain that the L.H.E. was carrying out his promise to separate a man from his head. I repeated this theme over and over in my mind, and then I thought: could it be that this musical play, first performed in 1885, and written as a satire on English institutions and politics of the time, bears any resemblance to what was going on only a few blocks away? There in The King David Hotel, a visiting Mikado and his meddlesome secretary-of-state had arrived to make sure that our local Ko-Ko, who had certainly had achieved his position “by a set of curious chances,” would make good on his promise to sever Israel from part of its heart, Jerusalem, and some of its limbs as well. In the Hirsch Theater, the performance would end with spirited music, wild applause from a very appreciative audience, and possibly an encore. Olmert’s is going on to a very restive populace, displeased with everything it sees and hears.
But never fear, members of this audience. As fine a playwright as was William S. Gilbert in constructing witty patter and happy endings, The Master of The Universe who is guiding The People Israel back to The Land of Israel with his own unique choreography will surely provide a denouement in accordance with His Will. I’m convinced that, like G&S’s Mikado, He has His own “little list,” and that for modern day Mikados, tired and tiresome heads of state, meddling secretaries-of-state, and various politicians with their own agendas, He will find a way “to make the punishment fit the crime” as we see with a certain Supreme Ruler of Egypt in days of yore. Until then…………………

The Ministering Angels, or "Sticking It" To The President

(Note: This is the first part of a larger article, which, because of its length, I have decided to split in half. The second part will be ready shortly,… I hope!)
“Then the Ofanim and the Holy Chayot tumultuously lift themselves up towards the Seraphim…” from the weekday morning (Shacharit) prayers

When I first became interested in Jewish observance, one of the things that troubled me – as it has many others – was the references to these “ministering angels,” which I had never encountered, as well as descriptions of time that seemed to vary wildly from the way time worked in the world I knew. There are, of course, many different explanations, ranging from the simple to the more subtle. I now take it for granted that the universe which G-d created is more complicated than what I can perceive: time works differently in different places, and there are dimensions, and parallel universes that exist even though I cannot see them. Of course, even in the dimensions that I can see, people can be standing next to each other and yet seem to worlds apart.
Here’s a surreal example of what I mean: It was Tuesday, January 8, 2008, the day before American President George W. Bush was scheduled to arrive in Israel as part of his effort to “negotiate” a “peace treaty” between Israel and “The Palestinians.” (Three sets of quotation marks in one sentence; not bad!) For the first time this season, it was actually cold, damp, and dreary in Jerusalem – something like a raw November day in New York City. I had a few hours to spare between the end of my ulpan class at 12:30 and 2:30, when I wanted to be at the Yaffa Gate for the first of two planned demonstrations against the Bush-Olmert-Abbas efforts to divide Jerusalem, truncate Israel, and form a “Palestinian” state. (I should mention that Barbara was heading back to Maale Adumim to deal with a home inspection for an apartment we are considering buying, a few blocks from where we are living now.) So of course I went looking for somewhere where I could sit indoors and have lunch and, just maybe, review some Hebrew. Every place we normally go to was packed to the gills; nobody was eating outside, and everyone was huddled inside. After wandering around for close to an hour, I walked into an attractive place called Arcaffe on Hillel St. After placing my order, I went to use “the facilities.” As I was washing my hands, suddenly a pair of hands – women’s hands – appeared through the wall, and started using the second wash basin. I could not believe what I was seeing: there was indeed a pair of women’s hands opening and closing the water faucet. Where was the rest of her, and how were her hands coming through the wall? I finally figured out the simple, perfectly natural explanation for what had happened: while there were two separate, adjacent men’s and women’s rooms, there was one washing facility: there were two sinks placed on a ledge, accessible from either side of a wall, with an opening in that wall about eighteen inches high, allowing men and women on opposite sides to access the sinks, so you could see the hands, but not the rest of the other co-washer (if that’s a word.) But I’m sure this seeming apparition took several weeks off my life.

After finishing a bowl of delicious minestrone soup, some bread, and a cup of coffee, I headed over to Shaar Yaffo to join the demonstration sponsored by an organization called OneJerusalem, whose name says it all. The idea was to have people encircle the four kilometers long walls of Jerusalem’s Old City with linked banners as a sign of support for the continued unity of “Ir Atika,” and by extension, all of Jerusalem. Most of the demonstrators, thousands in fact, seemed to be teenagers from B’nei Akiva, the religious Zionist youth organization, and consider that fact alone: there are now so many B’nei Akivaniks that they alone can encircle the Old City. Placing myself strategically near the Yaffo Gate (inside of which are conveniently located “facilities”; we were going to be there for a while, and it was cold out), I placed my newly-washed right forefinger under the string of a banner and lifted it, so that I would be part of this human chain, and I stood there -- with forefinger extended -- for close to two hours. What an easy way to “stick it” to a whole bunch of people whose plan is having control of our Holy City and our holy places in the hands of parallel but mutually exclusive entities. I watched as the line of people continued to grow, until I could no longer see the end of the human chain which snaked around these winding walls constructed by the Ottoman emperor Suleiman around the year 1537. What I could see over my right shoulder was the rear of the King David Hotel, still the most prestigious hotel in the city, where in one day, George W. Bush and a huge entourage would be occupying all 237 rooms, tying up the entire city, and giving rise to a flurry of political advertisements in the local English press and a series of demonstrations.
At the appropriate time, I was able to withdraw my hard working finger, walk over to the next portal, the Zion Gate, for a brief rally. At this point, I located the contingent from Maale Adumim which had come by bus to the first demonstration. We now headed down to Har Homa for the second one, this time organized by a motley collection of groups I had never heard of, with names like (I’m making this one up) “Har Homa, Now and Forever.” In fact, Har Homa is a small neighborhood, the most southerly part of Jerusalem, but clearly linked to the rest of the city by major thoroughfares. Thousands of people live there now, and there are homes for thousands more already in various stages of construction. Why this area should be of any concern to the American Secretary of State is beyond my comprehension.
What I did understand was that I was getting tired, hungry (we were promised some food, but none materialized), and damp (we were standing in a muddy construction zone, and you can imagine how much we enjoy standing in the mud in our sneakers.) I was getting bored listening to a series of repetitive speeches (in Hebrew), and I was getting very cranky because my only means of escape was the bus, which would not leave until the rally was over. I have this belief that there is a diminishing return in having a series of speakers repeating the same idea over and over again. To be fair, the organizers of this rally were not planning to limit their activity to verbal protestations. On this muddy field were three trucks filled with building supplies (provided by supporters faraway) with four more trucks in another undisclosed site. The more zealous protesters were planning, after the rally, in the dark, in the rain, in the mud, to go off and build some form of “outposts” in locations unauthorized by the Israeli government, and certainly not marked on “The Road Map” of the Bush-Rice entourage. (At this point, each of you reading this article is entitled to indicate your opinion as to the value of this enterprise, from [1] stupid, counter-productive to [10] the highest form of devotion to our Torah and our Land. It’s a secret ballot.) I personally chose to get back on the bus, go home, eat dinner, take a hot shower, and go to bed. I had done enough “sticking it” to whomever for the day.
The end of part 1

It Happened Here Part 2

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

I’ve always had a fond feeling for this little haiku-like poem by Carl Sandberg, perhaps because it was the subject of the most successful lesson I taught in my short career as an eighth grade English teacher. Understand that it had nothing to do with me; my assistant principal, Alice Zeghers, was “observing” my class, and so, of course, for the only time in my short career as an eighth grade English teacher, there was not an inappropriate peep from any of my students – which only served to reinforce my sense that teaching eighth grade boys and girls was not going to be my life’s work.
In any event, it seems an appropriate way to describe the advent of Hanukkah here in The Land, a little bit east of Yerushalayim. Unlike in America, where the “Holiday Season” arrives with great fanfare, or as with our own major holidays: Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Pesach, where there is a buzz in the air and mucho preparation, Hanukkah does seem to creep up on you until it’s in your face, like certain cats I have known and loved. And that’s part of the charm of Hanukkah here: it’s not considered more important than “the biggies;” it’s free to be what it is and no more, playing a supporting role in the calendar of holidays – instead of having to be our “answer” to Xmas. Imagine someone who bats seventh in the lineup who is one day asked to be the cleanup hitter and carry the team in The World Series, or a woman who is usually cast as one of the Three Witches who has to take over for Lady Macbeth when the leading lady is indisposed. Maybe they were just good enough to be at the bottom of the batting order, or charismatic enough to recite “Double, double toil and trouble…..” every night.
JELLY DONUTS EVERYWHERE
Just about one month before Chanukkah, you begin to notice sufganiyot in the midst of the other cookies and pastries displayed in the ubiquitous bakeries throughout The Land. One day, they’re not there, the next day they are – sort of like spring crocuses in most of America. Usually, the Jerusalem Post, as a public service, does a taste-testing, sampling the wares of some of the most popular places in the Jerusalem area. (In fact, I remember reading last year’s review –generally very negative – and sighing wistfully that we still had seven or eight months to go before aliyah.) This year, for reasons unknown, the JPost did not perform this essential service. Never fear, Fred is here! Your intrepid blogger, capably assisted by daughter Natania, went about to do his own review. (Why else did we make aliyah, if not to help out?)
Now you might wonder, wouldn’t that be dangerous to one’s waist line, eating all those calorie-laden jelly donuts? Actually not. The first thing to understand is that you are dealing with something like the buttered bread syndrome: if you drop a piece of bread which has butter on it, invariably it will land butter side down. If you bite into a sufganiyah, the jelly inside will immediately begin a downward trajectory, especially if you are standing while eating – which is most of the time in today’s hustle-bustle world. Of course, the jelly will not go straight down to the floor. No way! First the jelly will go sort of sideways, landing on your shirt or blouse. Then it will find its way to your pocket book, the book bag you have draped over your shoulder, or anything else you are carrying. From there, it will slide down to your pants or skirt, and then to your shoes, before finally reaching the ground. On the other hand, the white powder on top of the donuts travels horizontally. If you come within five feet of a counter with several dozen donuts – especially if you are wearing dark clothing – the powder will begin a migratory flight in your direction, until you look like a walking advertisement for Head and Shoulders shampoo. So what you wind up eating of the sufganiyah is mostly the bland dough, not all that fattening.
Even so, there was no way that Natania and I could sample the products of every purveyor in Jerusalem and Maale Adumim, so there were a few places of note that we never got to. We did, however, munch samples from such places as Marzipan (a highly regarded producer of pastries on the outside of the MahaneYeduda market), Peer (a somewhat less known bakery in the closed part of the shuk, which makes hands-down the best challah that I have ever tasted) a few other places in the shuk (which you have to find by location as they usually don’t bother to advertise their names), a marvelous French patisserie on King George St., and by way of a contrast, a boxful from MisterZol – six for fifteen shekels – right here in Maale Adumim. (By the way, the word for supermarket in Modern Hebrew is “supermarket,” usually shortened to “super,” and pronounced “superrrrrrrrr,” as in “I’m going to the superrrrrrrr,” or “they have it at the superrrrrrrrr.” Most of us Anglos have a very difficult time trying to roll our “reshes,” especially those of us for whom final r’s have become vowel sounds.) But by far the best sufganiyot we sampled was from Maafa Ne’eman, in our mall and throughout Jerusalem: the dough was tasty, the jelly was plentiful and not the same commercial glop we found in every other product. I am making a standing offer to anyone out there: Natania will be in the I.D.F. starting in February, and I will be in desperate need of an assistant for next year’s taste-testing –whether or not the JPost resumes its review.
HANUKKIOT HERE THERE AND EVERWHERE
The next sure sign that Hanukkah is coming is the availability of candles about two weeks before. We found a guy selling boxesful for seven shekels on the sidewalk outside the shuk. A few days before, you can find street vendors selling simple, tasteful, hanukkiot for about as little as fifteen shekels (the fancy Judaica shops have tasteful, expensive ones for sale all year ‘round.) And, of course, there are the large, public ones throughout The Land. The biggest one I heard about was in the municipal square in Jerusalem: something like six stories high made of corrugated metal. It goes without saying that in a country where the most ubiquitous face remains that of “The (late Lubavitch) Rebbe,” Chabad got into the act. Hundreds of metal hanukkiot, about eight feet high, and lit by electricity were placed in malls, municipal centers, and facilities all over The Land. Lest you think that Chabad hanukkiot are a source of controversy only in The West, here is a quote from an article in the Haaretz magazine (a publication which goes out of its way to find points that it can miss) by one Ariel Hirschfield, entitled “Dim Light:” “The Chabad hanukkiot….are the personification of a total absence of viewpoint; they are a cheap industrial product that emits industrial-contemporary-global anonymity in all its nakedness.” (Stop that runaway metaphor!) If you think that this pontification is weird, consider the campaign by one of the more extreme environmental groups here, to light one fewer candle each night in order to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide pollution! A competitor group thought that this suggestion was too extreme, so it suggested that everyone light the appropriate number of candles, but place an additional, green candle in their hanukkiah – but don’t light it. What I derive from all this, is that in a nation of Torah giants and Nobel prize-winning economists, we have our share of fools as well; that people who are trying to turn political social, or ecological concerns, valid or invalid, into secular religions are – whether they realize it or not -- waging the same war against our religion as did the Hellenists, whose defeat we celebrate precisely at this time every year; and that no matter how much light you try to spread, there will always be somebody ready to pour cold water over it.
HANUKKAH AT THE ULPAN
We did have ulpan the first day of the holiday in order to have an ulpan-wide Hanukkah party. However, we did have a few hours of class first. Our teacher, Ora, wrote on the board the words of the song “Sivivon,” (Sivivon, sov, sov, sov, Hanukkah hu hag tov…….) and after explaining the words, asked students to provide a translation in their mother tongue (we have students from Italy, Slovenia, Holland, and France in our class) which she wrote on the board in Hebrew letters. (Are you with me so far?) So we had a slew of translations in all these languages, as well as Arabic. What about English? Now normally in ulpan my brain while thinking in Hebrew is working with the efficiency of a very large truck going up a very steep hill, but just then I was being asked to think in English, and suddenly the very large truck was now going downhill. So fifteen seconds later, I asked the teacher if she wanted a “free translation.” Whereupon I recited the following: “Little top, spin, spin, spin, Get a gimel, and you win…….” But I needed a second stanza, so I further improvised, “Spinning tops everywhere, Miracles happened there….” Except that Ora quickly reminded me that I was now in The Land, and the dreidels here say “Nes gadol haya po,” instead of “haya sham” as Jews have been saying for all these years of painful exile. What to do? Well, how about “Spinning tops, far and near, MIRACLES HAPPENED HERE.” Last year, we were far (as in Teaneck, NJ.) This year, we are near (as in Maale Adumim.) You may consider our coming Home a “nes gadol,” a “nes katan,” or no “nes” at all, depending on your point of view. But I also have a point of view, very far removed from industrial-contemporary-global anonymity. To my way of thinking, there are such things as miracles, and miracles are never anonymous, because to Our Creator, no one is anonymous. And nowhere can you be less anonymous than in The Land, where everyday a miracle occurs to someone who takes the trouble to see it.

It Happened Here - Part 1

Sometimes it’s the little things that help you bridge the gap between what you “know,” and what you appreciate. A recent example:
We were again in Tel Aviv the Sunday during Hannukah to visit with Tina, and for all of us to go see an exhibit at Beth Hatfusoth (The Diaspora Museum) about Soviet refuseniks and their struggle to escape the Iron Curtain. The exhibit began by documenting the role of Jewish Bolsheviks in creating a Communist government in Russia and the inevitable follow-up: the replacement of Czarist anti-Semitism with Stalinist anti-Semitism. From there, it traced the burgeoning of a Zionist movement, essentially from Israel’s Six Day War in 1967, until the demise of the Soviet Union. There were photographs and accompanying biographies of refuseniks, film clips, underground self-published books, posters, paintings, prisoners’ uniforms, religious articles, typewriters, and materials to learn Hebrew. All that was missing was the indescribable: the fear, the danger, the hunger, the cold, the isolation of a tiny minority defying one of the most terrifying totalitarian governments the world has ever known. Some of Tina’s relatives were real authentic refuseniks, and I thought it would be useful for her to see the history of the struggle before 1992 when she was born in Odessa. For Barbara and me, it was a trip down memory lane, at least the last part of the show, which dealt with the international support for Soviet Jewry, as the two of us marched in many of the Solidarity Sunday demonstrations in New York. (I still have a print of a large throng of people gathered at the UN, watching on a giant screen (then) Anatoly Scharansky when he was first released from the Soviet gulag. It seems like yesterday that we were there; and now I can see him, as Natan Scharansky, in person at demonstrations here in Israel.)
Our lunch at the museum was meager. (I think for the sake of authenticity they were using “The Refuseniks’ Cookbook for their menu planning: “place one potato in four liters of boiling water…”) So after Tina went back to await a shipment of furniture from Ikea for her new apartment, Barbara, Natania, and I went off in search of something more substantial to eat. Barbara had discovered a rather upscale mall about two blocks from the Tel Aviv University campus (I consider any mall which has a demo model of a Lexus hybrid on its first floor as qualifying for “upscale” status), and we trotted off in the hopes of finding some place, anyplace, that was kosher – this being Tel Aviv. Imagine our astonishment when the woman at the information booth told Barbara that all the eating establishments there were kosher (which probably meant that the entire mall was closed on Shabbat -- even more amazing for Tel Aviv.) We sent Natania up to check out the food court on the second floor, while Barbara and I went searching for a plastic spatula in a very fancy kitchenware store. Unlike the “meraglim” in The Bible, Natania came back with a favorable report. After much indecision, we wound up with some decent take-out level Chinese food. When we finished, we went back down to the ground level to leave – we simply wanted to get back to Maale Adumim to commence the sixth night of the holiday. As we were walking, we noticed a guy wheeling a portable, four foot high hanukkiah – just lit – to where it would be displayed. We could hear singing a little bit ahead of us, and we came upon a bunch of Chabadniks and a few “friends of Chabadniks,” all of whom had been involved in lighting the Hanukkah lights in this upscale mall in Tel Aviv (while I was obliviously snarfing some Szechuan chicken.)
I must have had one foot still on Memory Lane, because the sight of the Chabadniks and the hanukkiah brought me back some twenty years in time to when we were living in Caldwell, NJ and we had gone the Willowbrook Mall for the first ever candle lighting ceremony there, organized by Chabad in Morristown. (I remember photographing that as well, but none of my negatives looked promising and I tossed them.) I could picture that mall in my mind’s eye and I began to consider what a mall would look like this time of year – if we were back in New Jersey.
Now on a number of occasions, we had discussed the obvious fact that Xmas is hardly noticeable in Jerusalem (even though the municipality gives out FREE Xmas trees to anyone who wants one), but my point is that there is a vast difference between knowing something superficially and understanding its consequences. For the first time, I started to visualize what it would be like and how it would feel and how it would sound like on that December day if we were suddenly transported back to The States. What would it be like wading through the crowds at the Garden State Plaza? What music would I be hearing while maneuvering my cart down the aisles of the Shoprite in Englewood (where they have a Xmas tree and a big electric menorah in the parking lot all through December) or on “light FM” in my chiropractor’s waiting room in Bergenfield? And then the floodgates opened in my mind, and for the next several hours all the Xmas music I have ever heard since I was a boy – all the stuff about reindeers, and sleds, and snow, and winter wonderlands, that the gentile teachers at P.S. 80 felt obliged to teach us Jewish kids -- began racing and crashing through my brain until I was finally able to gain control and turn it off.
I was eating breakfast the following morning, idly flipping (in Hebrew, “ledafdef”) through The Jerusalem Post, when I came across an article entitled “The Three Reindeer Rule,” in which columnist Marilyn Henry described December in America as “the month of conflict and confusion over religious symbols in the public square and hurt feelings over holiday greetings.” I began to skim through the article, stopping abruptly in column four when I realized that Teaneck, my old home town, was mentioned: it seems that a divided town council there decided to add a crèche to their seasonal display, as opposed to removing the “menorah” (I imagine leaving only the Xmas Tree by itself.) The article describes the contortions that communities have gone through in dealing with visual symbols of “The Holidays” that would please their conflicted constituents and satisfy the often contradictory rulings of the American legal system. One town, Briarcliff Manor, wound up displaying a twenty five foot high Xmas tree and a six foot high dreidel! (Why not a plastic Santa Claus with a Kwanzaa symbol on his chest carrying a sack full of little dreidels? (Somebody please suggest this to Elie Katz [the mayor of Teaneck, himself a religious Jew.])
Please understand that one of America’s greatest contributions to Western Civilization – in addition to sliced bread and perhaps Al Gore’s invention of the internet – is the incredible concept of “secular” symbols of religion. The Supreme Court ruled twenty years ago that “both Christmas and Hanukka are part of the same winter-holiday season, which has attained a secular status in our society.” In other words, if you add “three reindeer” to a Xmas display, then it is no longer a symbol of Christianity, but part of “The Holidays,” to which everyone is invited, and by which nobody should be offended. Join the party! You can even bring your own music! (Most of the seasonal music that you hear in December in America was written by Jews: not only the incomparable Irving Berlin, but lesser lights like Johnnie Marks, who fashioned an entire career out of writing tunes like “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.”)
You see, the Greeks had it all wrong. Forbidding a stiff-necked people to practice its religion will only get you something like a civil war. The American system, on the other hand, without even trying, has accomplished much more in destroying the religious fiber of the Jewish people – just by being nice (as in “Have a nice day!”)
I remember when Chabad began its campaign of placing hanukkah lights in public places – as much to reach out to their co-religionists as to publicize the miracle of this holiday to the gentiles of the world. And I remember the furor this campaign created. I will never forget a short speech delivered by a young woman who had just become a bat mitzvah who said that the modern day Maccabees were those Jews who were fighting the Chabadniks, so that there would be no hanukkiot allowed anywhere except in synagogues and private homes. Now you can think whatever you want about the legality and the efficacy of lighting hanukkah candles in malls, parks, and bridges. That’s not the point. The issue is, what would a modern day Maccabee do? Or better still, who might qualify as a modern day Maccabee? Who could be seen as being G-d’s agents in delivering “the strong into the power of the weak, the many into the power of the few, the impure into the power of the pure, the wicked into the power of the righteous, and the sacrilegious into the power of those immersed in Torah…” Or, in modern parlance, what few people did the most to bring down an Evil Empire? If you’re not sure of the answer, please return to the top and reread paragraph one. And what is the correct answer to the question: what would a modern day Maccabee do about the vexing issue of Hanukkah lights on public property in America? Would it be impertinent to suggest that most modern day Maccabees do not live in America?
For more about Hanukkah in Israel you will have to wait for part 2 of this article, coming soon to a computer near you.
(A brief postscript for all you cat-lovers: About a month ago, a friend of ours was walking back from our local MisterZol with her shopping bags of food. She stopped to rest along the way, and suddenly a forlorn, emaciated little kitten ran over to her and started meowing. The message was clear:”take me home or I will die of starvation.” Our friend put the kitten in her bag and proceeded home. Last week, our friend told us that she would have to return to The States on business for several weeks, and would we mind dropping into her apartment once a day to feed the cat and deal with the litter. Barbara, who is always getting into trouble over cats, decided that the now much bigger kitten would be lonely if left alone for several weeks. So she suggested that we keep him in our house. Our fourteen year old cat, Mimi, was not too happy with this idea, but we did it anyway. After a day or so, Mimi and Witty Kitty [don’t blame me; that’s what Yaffa named him] have come to some kind of understanding: Mimi is on our beds, and WK is in a shoe box under our beds. The only problem is that WK eats Mimi’s food, into which Barbara puts Mimi’s high blood pressure medication. The solution? Place the food where Mimi can get to it, but not WK. Now Mimi can no longer jump at all; she gets on our beds by climbing onto a plastic container which Barbara placed at the foot of her bed, and from there, she can climb up. WK is still too small to jump onto our bed, even using the container. So Barbara has been covering her bed during the day with newspaper and putting Mimi’s food bowl on top. I woke up this morning, and there was Mimi a few feet from me, snarfing down her morning meal. I called out to Barbara, “I’ve heard of breakfast in bed but this is ridiculous!”)

Ehud Olmert and Abraham Lincoln

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
For our tenth grade project in our American History honors class in DeWitt Clinton H.S., our teacher, Mrs. Wilson, would require from each student a term paper on a presidential election. She had the election years written on separate cards, which she would distribute at random to everyone in the class. Some poor shnook drew 1880: James Garfield (R) vs. Winfield Hancock (D). (Imagine finding information about Winfield Hancock!) But I was fortunate: I was given 1860, which meant I had a lot to write about and zillions of reference books. Now my question to you is: whom did Abraham Lincoln run against in 1860? (I’m assuming that most of you who were born in the U.S. know that Lincoln won the presidency in 1860. Please don’t prove me wrong.) If your answer is Stephen Douglas, you are partially correct. In fact, Lincoln and Douglas contested the North, and two other candidates now consigned to the dustbins of history, John Bell and John Breckenridge campaigned in the South, with the result that Lincoln won handily. Breckinridge had the second most electoral votes, Bell the third, and Douglas – who is still remembered for his debates with Lincoln – was almost shut out.
I can reasonably trace my life-long fascination with America’s 16th president to my efforts in the tenth grade, when my only purpose was to get a respectable grade from Mrs. Wilson. But I now understand that Abraham Lincoln was one of the great political leaders in world history and perhaps one of the dozen or so greatest writers of English prose. Have you ever visited the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC? OK, it’s not the Kotel or Kever Rachel, but it is an inspiring experience, especially if you choose to read the words of the Getttysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address (the ending of which is quoted above), and reflect on how much his words speak to us to today.
Imagine if, after his election in 1860 when the South seceded from the Union, Lincoln had let them go: “take your cotton and your slaves and be gone!” Consider the consequences of having two hostile nations: a vastly diminished United States of America and The Confederate States of America, instead of one great nation. (And because there were only three states west of the Mississippi in 1860, there might even have been three or more nations in the area between The Atlantic and The Pacific.)
Lest you think that all this is interesting but irrelevant to your life, consider the following: if instead of one United States, there were two essentially hostile nations side by side, would either have had the interest in allowing mass immigration on a scale previously unimaginable? When my grandparents arrived in New York sometime around 1885, they would be among some 2 million Jews (and 25 million gentiles) who would emigrate from Europe between 1880 and 1924, when the gates to The New World were shut tight by immigration restriction. Most of those Jewish families would have had to remain in Europe: two million more potential sacrificial lambs to the Cossacks, the Communists, or the Nazis.
And consider this: only a truly United States would have had the strength to intervene – not once, but twice – in the 20th century European maelstroms that would have destroyed the world. We know that the Roosevelt administration did almost nothing to save Jewish lives when we were dying by the thousands every day (if you think that recent secretaries of state have been unfriendly, consider for a moment one Jew-hater named Breckenridge Long, who served under Roosevelt, and who more than anyone else at the time was responsible for blocking the entry of Jewish refugees.) But The United States, with the help of “The Allies,” did ultimately stop The Nazis, shutting their gas chambers once and for all, leaving enough Jews alive to form a fledgling state in our ancestral homeland.
I have been thinking recently about these events in American history, but in a very different context. Last Monday night, Barbara, Natania, and I got on a bus in front of the shopping mall in Maale Adumim to participate in our very first political demonstration as citizens of our new country. “One Jerusalem” organized what turned out to be relatively small indoor rally at The Haas Promenade (a site on the southern part of the city which overlooks most of Jerusalem including The Old City.) against even the thought of dividing Jerusalem -- as part of a “two-state solution.” But we got to hear Natan Sharansky speak, (another man for whom I have the most profound respect) and Shuli Natan (the original singer of Naomi Shemer’s “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav”) perform. (May I respectfully suggest that hearing that song performed in Jerusalem, overlooking the Old City at night, at a time when “friends” and enemies are considering the fate of our ancient capital, creates a perspective which is simply unobtainable in Flatbush, Teaneck, or Baltimore?)
After the music and the speeches, the 500 people in attendance went outside to witness a laser show, which was the major point of the evening. We watched a demonstration of how close to kassam rockets (less than ten kilometers) all of Jerusalem would be: The Kotel, The King David Hotel, Hebrew University, The Knesset, Ben Yehuda St. – if Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem were turned over to a hostile entity.
As I watched this simulation, I began to consider how we came to this point whereby unless we stop them – and we will – the Israeli government would join the nations of the world in giving away our land and our safety. Was it not about a dozen or years ago that a retired and out of work Ariel Sharon took the then governor of Texas, George W. Bush, on a helicopter tour of Israel to point out – as Sharon had done on many previous occasions to other American officials – how tiny Israel actually is? When Sharon showed Bush how undefendable Israel would be in its pre-1967 borders (something like nine miles wide at its narrowest point), Bush is reputed to have remarked that there were driveways in Texas bigger than that. (That might be an overstatement as a point of fact, but I am told that there is at least one ranch in Texas as big as pre-1967 Israel.)
(And while I am on the subject, consider this: we are most recently from New Jersey, a state which has certain similarities to Israel. They are about the same size; they are both long and thin; they both have certain areas in which few people live [The Negev and The Pine Barrens]; in both places, most of the population is concentrated in one area [the coastal area around Tel Aviv and the northeastern area near New York City.] Now, if somebody had the bright idea of taking four or five counties in New Jersey [maybe west of Morristown or south of exit 7 on The Turnpike] and making them, not just another state, but another country, how far would that idea get? I remember a few years ago when there was talk of Staten Islanders wanting to become a separate city, where that notion went. America is still the country of Abraham Lincoln, and secession is still a dirty word.)
While it is easy to blame the American president and his secretary of state for the farce called Annapolis, remember that it was Ariel Sharon who blinked first with his “security fence,” which would be seen as the de facto borders between Israel and a “Palestinian” state. Of course, Condi Rice has since decided to run with this insanity as if it were her own private football. Why someone who has a Ph.D. would not understand that creating a politically unstable nation state on Israel’s borders, one which has no economy to speak of, too many people for a tiny area, and where two rival factions are intent on killing each other – let alone its Jewish neighbors – is not a good idea eludes me. I guess some people are too smart for their own good.
As place after place in Jerusalem was lit up by laser as the focal point of a simulated attack by even the most primitive rockets, thoughts about Abe Lincoln began to percolate slowly in my brain. You can say that he was the first leader – in very trying times – to reject the “two-state solution.” Perhaps we should consider the validity and urgency of his words, “…with firmness in the right, as G-d gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in….” For us this must be the building and defending of the Jewish state which was founded in even more trying times sixty years ago. And may we then “achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all other nations.”
And let us say “Amen.”

License-ious Behavior

Part One
My parents were always a little out of the ordinary, out-of-the-box, in their own quiet way. I’m certain that they were the only Jewish square dancers in the Bronx. They were not the only Jewish hikers in the area (there was after all at least one Jewish hiking club, The New York Ramblers, in which my father was a charter member) but they were in a distinct minority. They travelled all over the tri-state area (NY, NJ, and CN) occasionally through the kindness of others, but mostly by public transportation. In short, they never drove and never owned a car. This put me at a distinct disadvantage in the late 1950’s. All of us were in college, and all my friends were getting their driving licenses and getting cars of their own. Even my fraternal twin brother Frank got his license. (I distinctly remember the series of old cars – usually Pontiacs -- he bought, all of which he was still paying for long after each of them had found its final resting place in automotive heaven.) But I could never get it together to get a license. A number of years later when I was working, I finally made the effort. And let me tell you, getting a drivers license in New York City was definitely an effort, trying to overcome enormous bureaucratic inertia. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that they were doing you a favor by granting you a license. After you had spent the time to get your learner’s permit and the money for driving lessons, you would be confronted with a grim-faced motor vehicle inspector who would take you out for your test drive. He had a scorecard on which he silently deducted points for everything you did wrong. A week or ten days later, you would receive the results in the mail with cryptic comments like “poor motor control.” You may assume – correctly – that I failed the test several times until I gave up in disgust. It seemed I was destined for permanent pedestrian status.
Years later, when Barbara and I got married, it was a package deal: I brought to the marriage three cats (Bonnie, Clyde, and Lulubelle), while she had a car, having obtained a drivers license in “grad school” in Minnesota. After driving me around for several months, Barbara informed me that our ketubah did not include her being my chauffeur for life. So, once again, I was back to driving lessons. At least this time I had a car in which to practice driving and the encouragement of a loving wife. Finally, I had my driver’s license – first from New York and then from New Jersey.
Let’s fast-forward this reverie to October 2007, at which time Fred, Barbara, and Natania were now A Little Bit East of Yerushalayim and were ready to get Israeli driving licenses. Understand that a) you can drive here for one full year with your American license, and b) we’re not planning to get a car anytime soon, so it was just one more thing we were doing to get it done and out of the way. I’ll spare you the boring details of all the steps required in this process: from going to the Jerusalem (Malka) Mall in the southern part of the city to get our eyes checked, to our visits to various offices and post offices to process our paper work. What you need to know is that if you have a foreign driver’s license, you must take a mandatory forty minute lesson, reviewing the rules of the road, before you are permitted to take your driving test – even if you had spent thirty years as a cabbie in New York City. What you need is an instructor who will give you the lesson and arrange for you to take your test in his car on the same day. We got a recommendation from our friend Steve Leichman, called the teacher, and were given a date for our lesson and test. I should also add that this is not a solitary venture: both the lesson and the test are done with three “students” in the car. This arrangement worked for the Leichmans, and since we are three, it worked for us. So on a Tuesday, our man picked us up at our Ulpan in “downtown” Jerusalem, and we drove down to the Talpiot neighborhood where we would take our lessons and our tests.
One more thing to mention: in all the time that the three of us have been in Israel, none of us has ever driven a car here. Like my parents, we have always gotten around either through the kindness of others or by taking buses all over the place. Nor had we given the slightest thought to how the road signs look or where they are placed, or how traffic flows – with all the traffic circles and two-way streets becoming one way, very different from driving in NJ. The fact that we had no idea how one drives in Israel was painfully obvious during our lesson, as we all failed to notice road signs in plain sight.
Finally, we were ready for our tests. I drove into the parking lot of the motor vehicle bureau. Our instructor got out of the car, and the inspector got in. Unlike the instructors of my youth, she had no scorecard, nor did she appear to be especially menacing. Fortunately, she did speak English, so we didn’t have to process and respond to “smola” and “yamina” while driving on our best behavior. Nonetheless, we all did poorly. I was the first to go. My problem was that our instructor’s car had brakes that were ultra-tight, so that every time I slowed down for a speed bump, I was braking much too hard – something which the lady tester noticed and told me in no uncertain terms that I could cause an accident. One down. Natania was next, and driving on a two lane one-way street, never signaled when she changed lane, something you have to do on a road test. Again, our tester complained to Natania. Two down. Barbara was doing quite well until she rounded a turn and hit the curb, visibly flustering our inspector. When Barbara drove back to the parking lot, the inspector got out, and we could see her haranguing our teacher. Noticeably upset, he expressed his frustration to us. He told Barbara to call him at 5PM, and he would give us the results. As if we needed to know.
We were only a few blocks from the Hadar Mall, so we walked over and ordered some coffee from Aroma, something desperately needed to soothe our wounds. In all the several months we had been here, I had never felt so down, so completely decimated, totally wiped out. The three of us had just flunked our road test. We would have to do it again at considerable expense. If any of us flunked a second time, it would mean starting from aleph, as if we were an eighteen year old Israeli kid who would have to take twenty two lessons before taking a road test. This is when you wonder why you’re here. If we were still in the Great 48, we could move to any state, read the driving manual, (something which I don’t think they have here – certainly not in English) pass the written test, and get a new license. Even if I didn’t care about getting an Israeli license, my New Jersey one will expire the end of 2008, meaning that starting in 2009 I would have no license, so I couldn’t even rent a car when we came back to visit. We finished our coffee, and Barbara wanted to get a few items at The Home Center before we went home. There were a few things I wanted to get, but I was too depressed to think about it. When Barbara was done, we got back on the bus heading to the center of town. It was now 5PM. I would have waited until we got home to get the bad news, but Barbara promptly called our instructor. I heard her let out a gasp. “We all passed,” she said.
Part Two
The next day, Wednesday, we went and got our temporary drivers licenses at an office near our Ulpan in Jerusalem and then went home to rest. Our community aliyah liaison, Shelley Brinn, (a wonderful lady!) had organized a little trip that evening for the recent olim, and forty of us had signed up to go. So at 4PM, we showed up at the parking lot in front of the Maale Adumim City Hall and boarded the bus, which actually left on time (very unusual!)
Usually when we take a bus from our town we are heading to Jerusalem, which means that we start on the main road, and then the bus takes a clover leaf to the road through the tunnel, past the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University, and into the City. Today, our bus stayed on the first road, which goes to Jericho and down to the Dead Sea. We had been on this road only one time before, when we went to Rami Levi, the big supermarket in a neighboring industrial area. Now we kept going, into the Judean desert, on one of those winding roads where one false move and you’re over a cliff (no guard rails here!) We began to pass Bedouin encampments – a few families with as many goats and sheep – with no electricity in their shacks and, I assume, no running water. (It’s as if you were driving on the New Jersey Turnpike and you stopped, say, at the Richard Stockton rest stop, and you pulled out, but instead of going left back on the Turnpike, you inadvertently went right, and there you were at a campsite of Oakies, right out of “The Grapes of Wrath.”) For a moment, I thought I was in a time warp, going back at least a century. But then we passed a flock of sheep grazing under an electric grid on the top of a mountain, all this as the sun was setting through the clouds. We arrived at our destination: Eretz B’reshit or Genesis Land, depending on which language you are using, and I realized that our whole journey from the parking lot next to the Maale Adumim mall to the middle of nowhere took less than fifteen minutes.
I try not to get too carried away with myself when writing this journal. I could paint a picture of this “theme park” as something special, the equivalent of Great Adventures. The truth is that for most people this place would barely make it if it were located on State Road 37 in Arkansas. We were ushered into a small building (a combination orientation center and gift shop) where we met “Eliezer,” the faithful servant of the patriarch Abraham. “Eliezer” gave us a brief presentation about the life of his master, and, to get us in the mood, offered us the use of some tacky smocks (period costumes!) to put over our clothes – which I graciously declined. We were then ready to set forth to meet “Avraham Avinu.” We could either walk the 100 yards or ride one of the ten camels waiting outside. Now if you know Barbara and me, you know which one of us wanted to ride, and which one would have been just as happy to walk. Have you ever ridden a camel? It’s not like a pony ride at the Central Park Zoo. A rather large animal was basically squatting on the ground, held down by two assistants to make certain that it didn’t get up prematurely. The larger person (me) was in the rear, and the smaller person (Barbara) was in the front. The camel was then urged to get up, which it did in sections, first the hind legs, then the front legs, at which point I screamed to no one in particular, “I’m only doing this because I love her” (My wife that is, not the camel.)
When everyone was mounted, the procession of walkers and riders began, and I soon realized why camels are called “ships of the desert.” Seasickness was fast approaching as our “boat” lurched down the path. It also occurred to me why there are usually two spaces on a camel’s back: one for you, and one for your chiropractor. None too soon, we arrived at our destination, the headquarters of our host, “Avraham Avinu,” whom we gathered had begun his journey to Eretz Yisrael from Australia. He ushered us into his “tent,” and after a few words of welcome and introduction served us a delicious meal, which we ate surrounded by old and new friends. (We could of course quibble over the fact that most of the food: tomatoes, cucumbers, hummus, potatoes, or coffee would have been known in the time of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, but I never believe in sweating the details.)
After the meal, Barbara, Natania, and I stood in the dark, looking out over the desert, facing due east towards Jericho and further away to Jordan. It was mostly dark, with a few lights indicating the existence of several “settlements,” and our problematic “neighbor.” “Avraham” came over and joined us, and we began speaking about the animals – gazelles, foxes, sheep, goats, and birds – which live in what would seem to be a land inhospitable to wildlife – except that when the rains come (and they do even in Judea) out of nowhere the barren hills are filled with vegetation, enough to feed the animals for several years. “Avraham” has lived in The Land with his wife (not Sarah!) for twenty years, and, if it were up to him, they would live permanently in the authentic desolation of “Eretz B’reishit,” not just when the place was open for visitors, but his wife was not quite ready for that!
Here’s the point: someone with an entrepreneurial spirit could try to recreate “Genesis Land” on a few hundred acres of land off Route 37 in Arkansas, complete with animal rides, actors in period costumes, roller coasters, 3-D movies, you name it. But something would be missing. Standing at night under the stars on a hilltop, overlooking the real Judean hills – even without the assistance of computer animation or light shows -- is an experience which cannot be duplicated, even by a Disney or a George Lucas. One can imagine – in a tackier world – a large, flashing neon sign, saying “Avraham Avinu slept here.” Because he probably did at least walk on that hilltop, or on one very close by, in his journey to the land which he, his son, his grandson, and his descendents throughout the generations was promised. And that is why “Genesis Land,” however modest in scope, was there: to give a context and a connection to people from Tel Aviv to Toledo (Spain or Ohio, take your pick.)
How did the real Avraham get here, let alone his self-styled wannabe? How did we get here? My journey had begun sixty-six years ago a little bit east (one block!) of Moshulu Parkway in The Bronx, and I had spent the last batch of years on the West Bank…of the Hudson River in New Jersey. Now I could get on one of these cantankerous camels and be at The River Jordan in less than one day. Such a strange journey!
It was time to board the bus back to Maale Adumim. Because the camels were all bedded down for the night, we all walked the hundred yards or so back to the Orientation Building, being careful to avoid the camel droppings on the way. The gift shop was now open, and I browsed around, eventually buying some date honey. I noticed that Barbara was dealing with “Avraham” at the sales counter, and when we boarded the bus, she showed me her prize: we had two official (?) “Camel driving licenses” signed by “Avraham” himself! It was Barbara who figured it out: on the same day in Israel we got our licenses to drive a car and to drive a camel. Only in The Land!