Not So Friendly Fire

In between the time of the US residential election in November and the inauguration of the new resident, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss the results of the election with some olim like us and some friends visiting form the U.S. I can report with some certainty the following trend, at least for people that we know: most Jewish women seem absolutely unable to relate to Sara Palin. I asked one woman, a friend of a friend, here for Shabbat lunch, why she so disliked a candidate who actually did keep a flag of Israel in her office, even though the number of Jews in Alaska may be lower than Joe Biden’s I.Q. Her response was interesting, although I couldn’t quite get the sense of it. She said that she thought that Palin would be good for Israel but bad for the U.S. The young woman was our guest and I wanted to get on with lunch, so I let her remark go unchallenged, although I see this as a false dichotomy: I didn’t and still don’t understand how anything that was bad for the U.S., politically, economically, militarily, or any other way you can think of, would be good for Israel. I can think of a number of scenarios whereby America would dump its ally, but in all of them the land of my birth would be sinking into a European-style mediocrity. Pardon me my “fundamentalist” approach on this one, but I believe that G-d will abandon any American administration which abandons Israel. (Some people say that this is what happened to the outgoing president.)
Most people I spoke with, even those who supported the Democrat candidates, were fully aware that the media in America had made mincemeat of Ms. Palin, playing up every rumor (generally false), half truth, and innuendo while giving a pass to Joe (a gaffe a day) Biden. So you would see a report that Palin’s husband had been arrested in the 1980’s for drunk driving, yet no reporter seemed interested in reminding the folks back home about the plagiarism scandal which derailed Biden’s presidential aspirations at about the same time. The result of the media’s assault on the Republican vice-presidential nominee could be seen in a video of some interviews with Obama supporters either directly before or after the election, in which the interviewer tried to elicit how much they knew about the candidates. Now you have to be careful here: it would be the easiest thing to interview 100 perfectly normal voters and then find ten abnormally stupid lumps of protoplasm and interview them. The people being interviewed were among those whom I describe as “cheerfully clueless,” people who feel a sense of pride in their ability to remember from day to day the names of the major candidates. Still, the results were edifying, if somewhat scary. These witless souls were asked questions like, “Which candidate said that there are 58 states in The Union?” “Palin?, Palin?, Palin!” (correct answer: Obama) “Which candidate didn’t know the year in which FDR was first elected president?” “Palin?, Palin?, Palin!” (correct answer: Biden) “Who said that you could see Alaska from his/her living room?” “Palin?, Palin?, Palin!” (correct answer: Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live) “Which candidate defeated an entrenched political machine to get elected?” “Obama?, Obama?, Obama!) (correct answer: Palin) You get the idea. We need to remember one simple rule about how many people think: they begin with an opinion or impression about other people or groups of people and then bend the facts to conform thereto; sort of like banging second-hand auto parts to fit the somewhat dented frame. You will not create a Unified Field Theory in this way, but what the heck! However, if the rest of us realize the importance of first impressions, we can then understand the power of the media in shaping world opinion.
I don’t think Ms. Palin had any idea of how the American media could take her, a gifted newcomer whom they didn’t like, and turn her into a caricature of herself (just as they could take another political neophyte whom they adored and turn him into something akin to The Messiah.) One need not feel sorry for the moose hunting governor from Alaska; she will, if she chooses to remain in national politics, have her day. And if it’s any consolation to her: “Hey, Sara, we the Jewish people collectively have had the pleasure of being “Palinized” for the last 2000 years!”
All this is a prelude to a thought I had last week on an entirely different matter, one much closer to my new home. You are all aware that there has been a bit of a ruckus in this part of the world recently, and in all the ensuing carnage ten of our fighting men have been killed – about half of whom have been killed by “friendly fire,” which is the apotheosis of an oxymoron. I have seen photographs of these men in the local press, a few with kippot, some without, in fact one or two were not Jewish, Druse or Beduin. Most of them were smiling, with their whole lives seemingly ahead of them. When I looked at their faces, I had the thought, “I’ve seen this guy before. Wasn’t he sitting on a bus going to Tel Aviv; wasn’t he with his buddies on a bus in Jerusalem, with their huge backpacks and their guns, and didn’t he get up and offer me his seat?” Or perhaps, one of these soldiers was involved in the following story making the rounds, one of the endless series of “American olim mangle the language.” It seems that a young woman was getting off an Egged bus, and she wanted to remind the driver that her belongings were in the luggage area on the side. But instead of saying “under the bus,” this innocent young lady told the nonplussed driver that she had something “in his underwear.” There were, apparently, four soldiers who overheard this and couldn’t resist the temptation to inquire about their own underwear.
I could have encountered those young men who had been killed, but I guess I didn’t. It was probably a different chayal on the bus; they all have the same uniform (except for the berets which identify their assignment). For a time in Teaneck, at the early Shabbat minyon I attended, the gabbai would read out the names of any Israeli, civilian or soldier, who was killed in the previous week during one of the intifadas. And at the annual community-wide Israel memorial day/independence day event, school children would read out the names of all the soldiers who had died during the previous year. Hearing the names of men and women you have never seen is chilling enough, but when you are here, and every day you see so many of them in their uniforms, the fighting forces and the jobniks, riding the buses to and from their bases, coming and going for Shabbat, I keep telling you that it’s a lot more tangible, as if something that’s part of you has been ripped away.
Generally, the articles in JPost which described their deaths would include a statement from the bereaved family. Despite the almost unbearable anguish in losing a son, many of the parents noted a slight feeling of comfort and consolation knowing that their loved one died Kiddush Hashem (sanctifying G-d’s name) defending His people and their Homeland. Better that than having someone killed by a drunk driver in a senseless road accident. But supposing that sense of comfort were ripped away? Supposing your son’s death was as “senseless” as having your neck broken falling on an errant banana peel? Or even worse: suppose your son, the one you knew in your heart of hearts was a hero – was being called a murderer, a baby killer, a villain of the worst sort? Suppose he, and the cause for which he was fighting was being…….Palinized? Suppose that every day on the Yahoo home page and the world’s press there were half-truths, stories sensationalized or ripped out of context, and blatant lies, all the while the obvious excesses of your opponent were minimized, ignored, explained away, or even glorified?
The bereaved parents might not even be aware of the animosity being fomented against us throughout Europe and Asia. The local papers, reflecting the ninety plus percent support for the IDF military campaign, have trumpeted the military successes, highlighted the unusual popular consensus, and been supportive of the government. Even the left-wing Haaretz has pretty much confined its negativity to the cranks who inhabit its editorial pages. And, frankly, I don’t think at this time and in this situation, the “average” Israeli is particularly concerned about how the U.N. will respond. It’s only when someone like me picks up the International Herald-Tribune (which accompanies Haaretz) that I realize the feeding frenzy which has been going on around us, and which those of you in The West, if you are paying attention, see all around you.
But for some of those who are aware of the hatred being brewed in the world’s capitals, there is a sense of puzzlement. The letters to the editor in JPost are filled with questions like: Don’t these people realize that Hamas doesn’t even recognize that our State exists; that they have no intention of negotiating with us; that they conduct warfare from the middle of cities; that they deliberately put men, women, and children at grave risk while their leaders hide from danger; that they use mosques and hospitals as military bases? Don’t these people realize that all we want is for Hamas to stop attacking us, and we can’t wait while they improve their weaponry? Don’t these people realize that the forces attacking Israel will someday try to take control of Western Europe and impose Shariah law on them? Haven’t these critics been ignoring the rockets which have been falling on Sderot for eight years? And why aren’t they protesting with equal passion the starvation, rape, and pillage going on every day in parts of Africa? Personally, I am not surprised by the outpouring of venom directed at the State of Israel and Jews in general. I am not happy, but I think I know what we are up against.
I have written before about replacement theology, the insistence of the religions we have inadvertently spawned that they take our place as “the chosen people.” One of the problems herein is that the Nations, while wanting the glory, do not seem to understand or be willing to accept the challenge of being “a light unto the nations.” (Of course, even when given the opportunity to perform this task, we have not done such a good job of it either.) Certainly, the nations of the West have done an excellent job over the last 1000 years in many field of human endeavor: sciences, technology, artistic and philosophical expression. But being a “light unto the nations” involves something substantially more: the task at hand is much grander, to spread G-d’s kindness throughout the breadth and width of the lands in a way that has never been understood, let alone tried. Despite a common misconception, the Nations cannot be worthy of G-d’s affection, if they are not hospitable to his People; and that won’t happen when they have not even been nice to each other – and that is one huge understatement. Why would it be a surprise that, in front of their beautiful cathedrals, they would burn every copy of The Talmud they could find – and sometimes us with it – when they were burning each other alive at the stake because they disagreed on a point of theology? You could say that they don’t do that anymore, except that people were burned alive in my lifetime – some of them family members of some of you – because of who their great-grandparents were. You could say that they don’t still torture each other, rape each other, engage in unbridled savagery one against the other anymore, and then engage in the most exquisite forms of hypocrisy to justify their actions – except they do.
Many years ago when I was a supervisor in NYC’s child welfare administration, I worked with a fellow who had had a yeshiva education which taught him about every calamity that had befallen the Jewish people and who was quite cynical about our relations with the gentiles of the world. With my secular, humanist education, I felt he was exaggerating; certainly, the non-Jewish people I had met in my lifetime, with few exceptions, seemed free of any desire to murder me, and I didn’t like to think in those terms. The older I get, the more I realize that his pessimistic view of world history was closer to the mark than I had realized. Who are these people in the pictures and videos from all over the world demonstrating in support of Hamas – or against our efforts to stop the terrorists from destroying us, which winds up essentially being the same thing? Who are these folks calling us murderers, carrying placards calling for “Palestine from sea to sea,” vandalizing our houses of worship, urging boycotts of Jewish businesses in Italy? These are the descendents of the very people who have been murdering, brutalizing, condemning, and expelling us from their midst for well over a thousand years. These are the people who are assuaging their own guilt for allowing so many of us to be butchered by the Nazis by labeling our self-defense as a “holocaust.” You may not appreciate this answer and they will deny these accusations, but perhaps they are true. The irony therein is overwhelming.
I am not in a position to say what has been accomplished by this military action. The Hamas leaders have climbed out of their rat holes and have put their uniforms back on, all the while claiming victory. The devastation on their side is appalling, but I cannot imagine that any great wave of introspection will occur. While they bewail their horrendous loss of life, many of these people would willingly strap on themselves or their children an arsenal of explosives and set off to blow up themselves with as many Israelis as they could find. The tunnels through which they smuggle weapons will be rebuilt, probably before any of the homes. Gilad Schalit remains a prisoner of war; Jonathan Pollard expects to live out his life in an American prison. The elections here will go on as scheduled in February.
During the course of the campaign, thousands of Israeli soldiers requested and received sifrei tehillim (books of psalms) and tefillin. Thousands of Israelis – even Hareidim who in theory are not supporters of The State – volunteered to recite prayers for specific soldiers who requested it. The story has been circulated here within religious circles about two soldiers who were on patrol in a town in Gaza. They were about to go in one direction down a street when they were stopped by a woman dressed in black who told them emphatically to go the opposite way. A minute later a bomb exploded where they would have been, had they gone where they intended to. The woman in black then identified herself as Rachel immeinu. Now, the story is as likely to have happened as some big cheese from Hamas coming to my home in Maale Adumim tonight and joining me in some Elmer T. Lee (my favorite bourbon.) The fact that the story is being circulated at all (ignoring the gullibility of the tellers and listeners) is what interests me. As Rav Aviner delicately put it, we should remember that the spirit of Rachel the matriarch has sustained us for these millennia. I would say, leave it at that, but maybe that is the point of all this. We are who we are, and “they” are who they are. The “theys” of the world will always be who they are. We can try mightily to forget who we are, but doing so will lead us in the wrong direction down the wrong street in the wrong place with unfriendly fire from unfriendly forces waiting at the end of the road.

A Letter to ..........

Have you ever had the experience that you have left your house to go somewhere, and you get halfway there and you have to turn around and go back to where you started – maybe you forgot something: your lunch, your glasses, your bus pass, or your cell phone, whatever. That’s sort of how I feel right now. I finished my last article about Sderot, “First, Steal a Lamppost,” and I was working assiduously, as promised on a new piece about the United Jewish Council’s General Assembly in Jerusalem, when I realized that I had to go back to the topic of Sderot and deal with some unfinished business. First of all, the ceasefire there has ended, kassams began to fall from the skies, war with Hamas appeared inevitable, and then, as we know, it broke out, first in the skies and now on the ground.
But something else had happened, albeit a lot less dramatic. After I sent out the last piece, I got back a message from a very devoted reader in Teaneck, thanking me for the article. It seems that she is in touch with a college classmate (this goes back more years than we are willing to discuss!) who she wrote has recently become “observant,” and the college buddy had sent his e-mail list an article about the sad plight of the Arabs in Gaza. My friend, after wiping away her crocodile tears, sent him my article and asked him to send that as well to his list. My feeling was that I wasn’t going to hold my breath; most Liberals I have come across recently are less than liberal when it comes to considering divergent points of view. But, to his credit, my friend’s friend, who will remain nameless, did circulate my piece, which prompted to me to look at it again – whereupon it occurred to me that a) it wasn’t intended to be “hasbara” (an explaining) to a world which doesn’t “understand” what’s going on in Gaza and why there was at times a partial or complete blockade of goods going in from Israel and why there is again open hostilities; b) I really don’t do hasbara, and there are times when hasbara is either not appropriate or a total waste of time.
Nonetheless, I began with a feeling that I should respond to him and address his humanitarian concerns. And as the crisis escalated, the war began, and the shrill cries of denunciation began to fill the streets and airwaves around the world, my sense that I should communicate to our new friend and to his circle of friends only increased. I’m sure he is a good guy, and maybe he and his wife, both of whom I understand are apparently relatively recent returnees to Torah Judaism, are still in the process of sorting things out, evaluating and coming to terms with lifelong held beliefs. So I am putting aside for now my (almost) half written article on the GA to write this piece, working on it for over a week, which I hope will find its way Lew and perhaps give him pause to think. Here goes:
Dear (),We, of course, have never met. I know you only as someone who I’m told went to school with M.; and you know me only as the author of my article “First Steal a Lamppost,” which you were good enough to forward to your e-mail list. We do have several things in common. First of all, my name – at least my middle name – is the same as yours, and I do have some very old and dear friends, who, for reasons I will not bore you with, still refer to me by that moniker. I am also someone who grew up very much estranged from the Torah and only discovered much later in life that “Its ways are ways of pleasantness.” If you went to school with M., then we are roughly contemporaries. And both of us, in our own way, feel a connection to the Land of Israel, although how we have chosen to express that commitment is very different.
We have had the good fortune, my wife, my children, and I, to move to Maale Adumim, a community of almost 40,000 Jews, which as everyone knows by now is ….. a little bit east of Yerushalayim, and which our Arab “cousins” and many others want us to “give back” – although twenty five years ago there wasn’t even a stray cat living here, and the land on which my house, my street, my neighborhood stand was as barren and “unoccupied” as any piece of property could ever be. Living here has been a revelation, strengthening my belief in the value of empirical observation. That is to say, something which you have heard with your own ears or seen with your own eyes becomes more tangible and significant than anything you have only read or heard about second hand. For example, now that I have been to Sderot and walked around the shopping mall, when I read about the kassam rockets which landed several weeks ago in the mall parking lot, I knew exactly where that was, and I could picture in my mind’s eye the exact spot and what the damage must have looked like; it was no longer an abstract place in an abstract town.
Being in a place also allows you to have a relative sense of the danger you might be in. It’s like calling a friend in California and asking, “Did you get injured by the earthquake?” And your friend responding, “That was in Los Angeles. I live in San Francisco.” A friend of my older daughter was visiting in Tel Aviv; she was scared to come to Jerusalem because someone had told her that if “anything happened” it would be in Jerusalem. Never mind that she was more likely to be injured in a traffic accident on the way to Jerusalem.
Walking around downtown Jerusalem the last week, you would never know that there is a military engagement less than two hours away. Shops in the “Arab quarter” may or may not be closed, but Arab workers in the Mahane Yehuda shuk are still dealing in cucumbers. (Our biggest problem continues to be maneuvering around the light rail construction on Rehov Yaffa.) I read about two opposing demonstrations at Hebrew University on Monday: Arabs on one side of the street; Jews on the other. At about the same time, my daughter Natania – on vacation from the army – and I were on that very same campus on Mount Scopus, innocently looking for the newly refurbished botanical gardens. There are signs all over the place, but no mention of the gardens. We kept asking security guards where to go, and each time we got a different and conflicting set of directions, and we then set off this way and then that way. Finally, we were sent walking through a very long tunnel under the main set of buildings, where students wait for buses. We came out of the tunnel into a dead end at the Egged parking lot. (No flowers there!) At that point, it began to rain lightly and we gave up, hopping on a bus going back to Jerusalem. So for all I know, the Arab students could have been throwing Molotov cocktails less than a mile from where we were wandering. We wouldn’t have noticed. I should mention that the next day, Natania and I were in MisterZol, our local supermarket, when Natania got the call to return to her base. The other young woman who runs the weapons depot with her was out sick; even though hers is only a training base, they wanted the neshkia open and the weapons therein available. So Natania did not get the chance to join us that evening for a wonderful production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Yeoman of the Guard,” instead joining thousands of resolute young men and women who are guarding us, making it possible for all of us to remain safely in The Land. Friends of ours were joining us for the performance and gave us a ride to the theater. One of their sons was in the car, and he related his experiences on the last day of Hannukah going back to his former yeshiva in Otniel (south of Hebron) for their annual “alumni” event, and seeing burning tires on the sides of the road and in the middle of the road and seeing Arab boys throwing rocks at buses passing by. It was the first time, he said, that he felt a sense of danger on these roads. He had hitched a ride to his school; he took a bullet-proof bus back to Jerusalem. Again, the only problem on our way to the theater – perhaps an hour from the yeshiva –is the on-going construction on Rehov Bar-Lev.
One problem with first hand observation is that often when you relate what happened to other people, they fail to understand why you think it is so important. Let me relate to you a seemingly trivial incident which happened to me about a year ago when I was sitting in class at Ulpan, listening to a young Arab college student give as an oral presentation an explanation of Eid el-Adha, a festive day on which Muslims still publicly slaughter goats, sheep, or cows to commemorate Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his chosen son, Ishmael. Our teacher went on asking him questions; he could have been discussing building a geodesic dome or eating a life snake, for all she cared. But I sat through this painful presentation, trying and barely succeeding in keeping my composure, trying not to exhibit any body language of discomfort and keeping my sighs of distress inaudible. It was all I could do to stop myself from screaming, “Yitzhak, Yitzhak, not Ishmael!” Now I have related this incident to many of my friends, and usually the response is one of bewilderment. It is as if I rushed in and said something as novel as, “It snowed last night, and, guess what, the ground is all white!” “Everyone” knows what the Arabs think. My point is that you can read about Eid-el-Adha in Wikipedia and find it of academic interest, but when I heard this young man with my own ears talk about our Patriarch and his favored son Ishmael, it was like my bumping into the real live Santa Claus or the Abominable Snowman. Here in front of me at Bet HaAm in the Gerard Behar Center located on Rehov Betzalel in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish People, was a living, breathing embodiment of ………replacement theology.
In case you are no familiar with this construct, this is where all the promises and rewards recorded in The Torah that were given to our Patriarchs and to Moses become nullified and transferred to other faith groups. We all know how that has been played out over the centuries by our Christian neighbors. The Muslim version is much more subtle. They have no problem allowing us to live (they even honor our prophets) and be well – as long as we acknowledge our second-class status. They have replaced us in G-d’s eyes and therefore they must rule over us. We are now theological nobodies, and it is for that reason that our holiest sites, The Temple Mount and the Ma’arat Hamachpela were turned into mosques and other shrines, and when they have been under Muslim control, we have had no access to them. The best student in this Ulpan was Rami, a big teddy bear kind of a guy, originally, I think, from Saudi Arabia, and trained as an engineer. If anybody needed an answer, we would turn to him, fairly certain that he would supply it. He mentioned in class once that every day he would go up to the Al-Aqsa mosque to pray. As sweet a guy as he is, can you imagine his response, if you mentioned to him that his mosque and the beautiful Dome of the Rock were built where our Holy Temple once stood and that there will come a time when we will want that real estate back?
I can envision thousands of people at this point getting up and yelling, “Who cares which son of Abraham was chosen for what? What does that have to do with anything? This is 2009. Is that what’s holding up Peace in the Middle East? We are trying to run a world here, not referee some stupid theological argument which is completely irrelevant.” That seems to be what many Israelis think and what seems to be the consensus of non-Islamic world opinion. Now I can give you a number of reasons why we as Jews, especially we as Torah-mindful Jews should care if our Torah is truthful or not. But leaving that aside, there is one rather important point: They, that is the Arab Muslim world, believe in complete sincerity that they are rightfully entitled politically and theologically – which in this part of the planet is essentially the same thing – to the entirety of what we consider our Homeland, this tiny speck of real estate which (I keep repeating) is the size of New Jersey. They believe it, not because they are evil, mean, venal, or retarded (here’s a good, politically incorrect term!), unkind, unfeeling, or uncouth, but because they are impelled to by their religion. As far as Allah is concerned, we don’t count; they do. Agree with it or not, this idea is not that difficult to understand. It is only a Western arrogance – that if “we” don’t believe something, it must be stupid, and therefore “they” can’t really believe it either – that prevents people from accepting the fact that the Arab world really does believe in a number of things that seem “crazy” to the Western mind. And anyone who will take the trouble to remove his ideological blinders can’t help but see the Muslim version of “Palestine.” Just walk into any school in an Arab area and look at their maps or their textbooks.
As I sit here looking out the window of my office at a seemingly endless set of sand dunes, a better question than “Who cares…” might be, “Why would anyone want to live here?” Where I am sitting is close by the trade route on which in bygone days camels laden with goods traversed north and south between Egypt and Mesopotamia. Hardly so today. Birds – some 50,000,000 of them every year – still fly over this picayune piece of property on their way from Europe to North Africa and back. But the camel has long been replaced by the airplane. So there has to be another reason, something else impelling us Jews to return to a land that had few discernable natural resources, and there has to be something else impelling the Arab world to claim as their own a place which they – except for taking over our Holy sites – more or less ignored for 1500 years. It seems to me that we ought to take the time to figure out some good answers to these questions.
And if we don’t take the trouble to understand why we want to be here and why it is so important to “our cousins” that we not be here, we will wind up with some very curious ideas. Here’s an Op-Ed piece I clipped out of a recent edition of Haaretz, written with much conviction by Elia Leibowitz, who asks the absorbing question, why the left-wing Meretz party will do so poorly in the next election even though it brings “the best people to the Knesset.” The answer? “Meretz does not tell the whole truth to the public.” I know that you are dying to know what that elusive truth is, so here it is, in a nutshell: “The State of Israel cannot force the Palestinians to agree to anything, either good or bad. At the same time, Israel does not have the strength to continue to holding on to the occupied territories. The only obvious conclusion from these two facts is that Israel must prepare a plan to withdraw to the Green Line……” In other words, Meretz’s failure to say just that Israel must announce its weak position before sitting down to negotiate to is behind The Left’s poor showing with the Israeli voters. Now if we were sitting down together over a large latte or something stronger, I would ask you what you make of this convoluted logic. As we are not, let me share with you a few well-chosen thoughts of my own: a) I reject the notion that the real estate under discussion was taken – stolen – from a non-existent entity called “The Palestinians,” (there have been for several millennia, Arabs living in villages and organized in tribal groups scattered throughout what the Romans renamed “Palestine;” but to consider them a “People” or a “Nation” when they never did so is ludicrous, even if it is fashionable to do so) and that our living in the Land promised to the descendents of Avraham, et. al. is in anyway “immoral.” b) Whether you fully accept premise (a) or not, there is something baffling about the notion that because I can’t get X to do what I want, I have to do what X wants. c) This is especially true when I am fairly certain that even if I do what X wants, he still will not be satisfied and will want me to give up even more. So what brings about this logical lapse? To my way of thinking, and I have expanded on this idea in earlier articles, the problem is that many of us now consider “The Palestinian question” to be our problem, rather than their problem; and if we “own” the problem, then we are required to find a solution – which the other side can obviously veto. If the Israeli government, at great cost, expels 8000 of its citizens from Gaza, but the Arab population there considers this action insufficient, then the onus for creating a peaceful solution still rests with the Israeli government. It’s sort of like negotiating with a three year old.
A peaceful solution. One thing I have figured out from trotting around many blocks a few times in my sixty seven years, something that I hope you can appreciate and understand – and it does take a considerable period of time for this to sink in; and for many it never does – is that life is often counter-intuitive. Only a certain number of people on this globe actually want bloodshed and the loss of human life. Most of us, in our own way, would prefer “shalom.” Some of us assume that because we want peace, if we insist on peace, if we demand peace, we will achieve it. “All we are saying, is give peace a chance…” “Peace, now.” “One, two, three, four, we don’t want another war.” “The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind.” You get the idea………. But it’s not just fuzzy faced lads and rosy cheeked lasses – as we all were once upon a time – but also great and seasoned minds that retain this level of naiveté. I came across the following summary of an article that appeared in the International Herald Tribune on December 29, 1933 “Roosevelt Calls for Disarmament,” which begins “Widely applauded at home for a stirring appeal to the people of the world to take disarmament into their own hands…” Roosevelt’s program included “scrapping of offensive weapons, refusal to open borders to the armed forces of another power and a covenant to keep the peace.” “The President maintained that at least 90 per cent of the world’s population was ‘content with the territorial limits of the respective nations.’” That’s telling ‘em!
Almost twelve years later and more death and destruction than I am prepared to contemplate, Roosevelt’s successor struck a different tone. One day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Harry Truman said, “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold... We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake: we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war." I know this kind of talk makes liberal cringe, but I ask you, which of these Presidents talked about peace, and which one brought it about?
You see, peace is a funny thing. You can’t will it into existence, and it doesn’t just happen by itself. Sometimes you have to fight for it – and that’s a notion that drives people batty. That’s because life is more complicated than at first it seems; sometimes things work just the opposite of how we expect them to. We do have peace of a sort in the region. The reason so many of us can live in Maale Adumim and the Jewish communities surrounding it is because we have a calm border with Jordan. We also have a grudging peace treaty with Egypt. Why do we have this détente? For one and only one reason: Because we kicked the stuffing out of both countries several times, and the leaders of both countries came to realize that there was no benefit in continuing the aggression against us, that they were better off trying to run their own countries. And there will be peace with our other Arab neighbors, in some way, shape, or form, when, and only when, they come to understand that it is in their interest to do so and, most important, they cannot and will not have it on their terms. Why should any Arab leader sit down to discuss détente when they read in an Israeli newspaper that we do not “have the strength” to continue, and he infers that the longer he holds out, the better the deal he will get? Would you negotiate with us – Israel – if you were the head of Hamas and you thought we were too weak, too addle-brained to continue? On the one hand, I do feel sorry for any Arab living in Gaza; I would certainly not want to go through what they have had to endure, what with high unemployment, limited opportunity, food shortages, and now being in the middle of a war. I also would have had a drop of sympathy for the little children of Dresden in 1945, which was being bombed without mercy by the combined air forces of the U.S. and Great Britain – and Dresden wasn’t even a major military or industrial center. And certainly, certainly, I would have had compassion for the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, victims of the most deadly weaponry known to mankind. However, maybe, just maybe, they brought it on themselves, and there were then and are now others for whom I should have a little more sympathy. Perhaps I should feel a tad more compassion for the civilians, the yeshiva students, the kibbutzniks in and around Sderot who were under attack by Hamas and other terrorist groups for seven years. Likewise for the 8,000 former residents of Gush Katif, most of whom five years after their expulsion still have not been “made whole” by their, our, own government; and whose “sacrifice” brought no tangible benefits to the rest of us.
There have always been people pleading for peace without understanding how to achieve it. Certainly there were such people in the 1930’s when some were certain that there would be “peace in our time.” We know what happened instead. In the 1940’s there were pacifists and others who cringed at the Allies efforts to win WW II. There were people in The West in the 1950’s calling for nuclear disarmament, many of whom did not realize that this was supposed to mean American nuclear disarmament. Nobody disarmed; instead The Iron Curtain fell. Yesterday, I saw photographs from the on-line New York Times of an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square. And there in the background were a host of placards announcing, “Palestine from Sea to Sea.” You see, nothing has changed. There have always been people who will use our humanitarian concerns against us, who will try to trick us into surrendering because we feel sorrier for our opponents than we do for ourselves. You have to decide for yourself where you fit in the scheme of things; but for myself, let the battle continue until we win and they lose. Then there will be peace.
Sincerely,
Fred Casden

First, Steal a Lamppost

I had to admire Josh. First, he had advertised that the buses would be leaving at 10:30AM; now he was sending all the participants an e-mail saying he wanted everyone there twenty minutes early, so he could collect money and get everyone onboard to leave on time. Once a yekke, always a yekke! At any rate, Barbara and I took him at his word, and we left our house especially early so we could get the bus from Maale Adumim first to the Central Bus Station and then another bus to the Inbal Hotel.
It was the second day of Chol Hamoed. If I had forgotten that this was “duchaning day,” when tens of thousands of Jews would converge at the Kotel to hear the priestly blessing recited by thousands of Cohanim, I would surely have remembered when I saw the fleet of #1 buses, the one that goes to our holy site, lined up opposite the Tachana Mercazit, with passengers scrambling to get aboard. Whenever I think about this twice yearly celebration, I remember back to our experience exactly 28 years ago when we were at the Kotel. To be more precise, we were trying to leave the Kotel after the Birchat Hacohanim. It wasn’t quite as crowded then as it is these days, but still, there were thousands of people all trying to get on a #1 bus. As many of you know, Israelis are not noted for their ability to form a line, especially to get on a bus. But to make it worse, it never occurred to the drivers taking people from the Kotel to stop their vehicles at any one designated spot. So no matter where you were standing, it was the wrong place to get on the next bus. You can imagine the chaos that was ensuing. Here it was, only a few minutes after the “shalom,” the final word of the final blessing had been amplified around these ancient walls, and a small scale riot was about to break out. Finally, we were about to board a bus, and there was a woman standing behind Barbara who was going to push her way onto that bus, come hell or high water. She began shoving Barbara as hard as she could. The problem was that my wife was standing directly behind a small boy, and this woman was inadvertently causing Barbara to crush this child. After remonstrating with this woman several times, Barbara, in complete frustration, turned around and smashed her fist on top of this woman’s head, almost knocking her sheitel off. The woman finally stopped pushing and started shrieking, “She hit me, she hit me” to everyone within earshot – several thousand people. I will never forget the bus ride back. Barbara was sitting and pretending that she didn’t understand what the woman was saying, and I was pretending that I had never seen either of these women before.
That was then. Today I would be playing hooky from my priestly responsibilities and heading to Sderot, the town which has come to symbolize the dangers facing Israel today and the fortitude of its residents. We got to the Inbal Hotel real early, giving us an opportunity to go inside, use the facilities and look around. For those of you who don’t know, the Inbal is one of the swankiest hotels in Jerusalem, definitely out of our league – except to use the bathrooms. It has an enormous dining area in the center of the lobby which must have some sort of retractable roof, because it had been turned into a very, very large sukkah. There were all these families, parents with two, three, or four children having breakfast in the hotel before starting their day of sightseeing. And all I could think of at that moment was how much it would cost for a family of six just to have breakfast at the Inbal Hotel, and what percentage of our weekly food bill that would be; and how nice it would be to have that kind of discretionary income. And perhaps how different Israel would seem from the respective vantage points of a posh lobby in downtown Talbieh and a yeshiva in hunkered-down Sderot. For it was the latter which was sponsoring our tour, officially the Max & Ruth Schwartz Hesder Yeshiva of Sderot (a hesder yeshiva is an institution in which for five years young men combine learning and serving in the Israeli army).
Soon we joined the growing number of people in front of the hotel, all waiting patiently to board their bus to somewhere. Josh was right; it took at least twenty minutes for him to gather all the Sderot people together, collect our money, and get us all on the appropriate buses. It turned out that the guide for our bus was someone we had met before in the home of friends in Beit Shemesh. Win and his wife live in Beit Shemesh half of the year and in NYC half of the year, when they are not globe-trotting and photographing. They had recently been in India and had together taken 20,000 digital images (the equivalent of almost seven hundred rolls of film), some of which we had the opportunity to see this past summer on a Shabbat afternoon in June. Win had previously been to the yeshiva and was so impressed with their efforts that he spends a considerable amount of time doing volunteer work for them, talking, writing, and, of course, photographing.
Since we arrived here last summer, there has been a lot of activity in support of Sderot. For example, our friend Jeff was one of many to organize a shopping trip there to support the local merchants. Someone here in Maale Adumim for a while had arranged to have challot and other baked goods sent here every Friday. But we were always doing something else to take one of these trips, and, frankly, I didn’t care much for the challah. So we never really got involved in the Support Sderot campaign or thought that much about it. Thus, the first thing I needed to do was get up to speed about Sderot, to realize that it was more than just a landing place for the Kassam rockets which have been falling for over seven years. Like a lot of other communities in Israel, this one began as a development town in the early 1950’s, providing a permanent place to live for Jews who fled from Asia and North Africa and had previously been living in tents in refugee camps elsewhere in Israel. There had been almost 20,000 residents before the Kassams began to rain; no one has a handle on exactly how many people left and what the population is today.
As we neared the town, Win pointed out that Sderot has two main attractions: the Osem plant (a very large manufacturer of food), just off the road, still operational and the largest single employer in the area, and our hosts at the yeshiva (to be inclusive, I should also mention Sapir College, an academic institution with a highly regarded program in film making, which has been in the news because it too has been the target of rocket attacks and because of a dispute involving an otherwise qualified Arab film maker who allegedly refused to allow a student doing reserve duty to come to class wearing his IDF uniform). The first thing noticed as we entered the town was that, just as in most other Israeli communities, there were hundreds of campaign posters for a host of candidates in the local elections on November 11 (many of them in Russian – testament to an ubiquitous presence in The Land). Believe it or not, there was a food festival going on in downtown Sderot when we arrived; the main road into town was cordoned off and we had to go around the back way to get to the yeshiva. One might have expected to see a town reduced to a pile of rubble; but at first glance Sderot did not look much different from a number of other not-so-upscale towns we have visited – except for the existence of a bomb shelter next to every bus stop. The damage done to the community was in many ways more subtle. We were supposed to meet some of the local residents and hear some firsthand accounts of living under the constant threat of attack when you have fifteen seconds to find shelter when the sirens go off and the long term psychological damage caused by living under such conditions. However, there just wasn’t time for such interviews in our busy schedule. Nor did we speak with any of the students from the yeshiva either because, being Chol Hamoed, they were all away. But we did get a tour of the facilities and an idea of why this facility is so special.
To understand anything about this hesder yeshiva, it must be placed in context. It is October, 2008 (in our secular calendar), a point in time which everyone understands is a temporary lull in the fighting with Hamas. The same “everyone” is aware that Hamas is using this time-out to improve their rocketry, increase their fighting strength, build tunnels to infiltrate our side of the border, and in general prepare for the next round of fighting in their on-going effort to drive us out of our homeland. What the IDF is doing is uncertain – and whatever it is should be rightfully cloaked in a veil of secrecy. But what the town and the yeshiva are doing is public knowledge: they are all digging in, increasing and improving their fortification. The townspeople, by and large, are not leaving. The yeshiva definitely is not leaving, and that was the main point of the tour.
There are about five hundred young men currently learning at this facility in Sderot. While hundreds have already graduated, only a few have ever left because of the fighting. To make it possible for the school to continue to grow and thrive, they are, building by building, fortifying every nook and cranny: the dormitories, the beit midrash (house of study), and every other structure on the campus, in a way which will be both safe (according to the regulations of the Homefront Command) and esthetically pleasing. They are, as I said, not leaving; on the contrary, the yeshiva is expanding.
After stopping for a snack in the dining hall, looking at the existing dormitories and the new ones under construction, we headed over to the new beit midrash, which is being used as it is being built. We davened mincha there, and then we ascended to the roof, two stories up. This is, I believe, the highest point, not only in Sderot, but in the Western Negev. On one side you can see across the central plains all the way to the hills of Hebron. On the other side, you can see Gaza. We were asked to notice a large hill not too far away; from over that hill have come the kassams. It reminded me of the big empty hill near us in E-1, the “contested” area to the west of us in Maale Adumim. Place a rocket launcher on top of or behind that hill or any hill, and the hostile forces that surround us would be in control. It is that simple.
Looking down and around from on top of the roof, you realize fairly quickly that the yeshiva is right in the center of the town. Of course, that is no accident; the whole purpose of this institution is to be part of the community. Now you could say that about most hesder yeshivot. But here, they take that idea to the next level. Not only do these “yeshiva bochers” serve in the army, they drive the local Magen David Adom ambulances and form an emergency response team. They have formed another “army,” dedicated to performing chessed: bringing food for Shabbat, giving gifts to children and emotional support to adults, creating a climate of caring and concern. The boys dance through the streets on Yom Haatzmaut; last Simchat Torah, students from throughout the country came to Sderot to participate, strengthening the spirits of the entire community. Perhaps the best way to describe what is going in Sderot is found in a publication which the yeshiva distributes with the following caption: “A World of Chessed Will Be Created.”
Somehow, in this world filled with confusion and animosity, a simple message is going out: “Torah is the light of the world. It is not there to be a ladder for one’s own success, a vehicle to show how smart or important one is, a bludgeon to hammer others into submission, a means to show that some of us are different, better, or more moral than the rest of us. It is to share G-d’s glory with anyone who hasn’t noticed it until now; and to do that sharing is the reason why some of us were put upon this Earth.” (Note: these are my words, not the yeshiva’s.) The students who learn at this institution look like thousands of other typical Israeli young men who will go to school and ultimately to the IDF. What distinguishes them is their desire to serve and to inspire: to share their learning with elderly men, to befriend and serve as role models for adolescent boys, to join local families at their Shabbat tables. And when they graduate from the yeshiva, they do not run away; many of the young men begin their married life in downtown Sderot.
How can you quantify the value of all this? How can anyone begin to assess the importance of this institution to the survival of this town? There are no delicate instruments to measure the effect of an act of kindness on one’s heart or how one’s resolve has been strengthened by an act of valor. But, as the former mayor expressed it, “It is hard to imagine Sderot without this dynamic young force.” Here is a Jewish response, a Zionist response, a Torah response to the forces that are hell bent on annihilating us.
None of these activities or even the continued existence of a yeshiva in a war zone could have happened without the vision and leadership of Rav David Fendel, the American born Rosh Yeshiva who discusses (and embodies) what Maimonides describes as a ruach Hashem, a special spirit of G-d, which has enabled Jewish people throughout the generations to perform acts of extreme heroism. Talk about a “man with a plan.” His (Rav Fendel’s, not the Rambam’s, although I am sure the latter would approve) intention is to turn the beleaguered “development” town of Sderot into a center for Jewish learning and culture in the Western Negev. Not content with only one program, six years ago the yeshiva opened a satellite center to accommodate students with limited backgrounds from Southern communities; this program, using former students as instructors and role models, has grown from eight to one hundred twenty students. Following this model, the yeshiva has now opened a similar program in Kiryat Gat, a community of 50,000 a half hour away. Both of these institutions focus on preparing young men spiritually and emotionally for a regular stint in the IDF.
Perhaps the most ambitious project is the construction, now underway, of the Jewish Identity Center in Sderot, a cultural and pedagogical center which will serve in a number of capacities: audio-visual programs for students; a resource center for teachers; a place where graduates can continue their studies and obtain an academic degree. I am certain that should we revisit Sderot a few years hence, we will find some additional programs up their sleeve (Can one say that a yeshiva has a sleeve?). But more fundamentally, many hundreds of young men will have had an amazing yeshiva education and will spend their lives influencing for the good untold numbers of others in ways too subtle and diverse to consider.
After a much needed break for lunch, we were escorted on a shortened tour of the town. Although, as I mentioned, we were not able to meet any of the residents to hear their first-hand accounts of life in a war zone, we did hear some memorable stories of miracles in Sderot, the kind of remarkable incidents which have been happening in The Land for the last sixty years. When you hear one story about this person or this group of people trying to seek shelter from a kassam attack and somehow being prevented – perhaps by a door which is always open mysteriously being locked – from going to the one place they believe will be safe, whereupon it is precisely that place where the rocket lands, perhaps you can reasonably say, “It’s a coincidence.” But when you hear variations on this theme which have occurred over and over again: a kassam landing in the next room six or eight feet away and no one is injured: a rocket lodges in the ceiling between two floors and never explodes; at some point, even the most committed rationalist would have to calculate the odds against such a series of events re-occurring and would have to wonder if maybe – just maybe – there is something (gasp!) super-natural, non-rational, otherwise unfathomable, going on to explain this incredible safety net.
But it was time to confront “the belly of the beast.” For this we were taken to the local police station, which has become de facto a kassam museum, a showcase for thousands of rockets which have landed in Sderot and neighboring areas. (Actually, this is only part of the treasure trove; many thousands of other rockets have been discarded because there was simply no place to store them.) A volunteer police officer explained to us how a rocket of this type is constructed. I immediately thought of the recipe for chicken soup from a fictitious Hungarian Cook Book: “Step 1) Steal a chicken.” A kassam rocket is made using a hollow, cylindrical tube, about four inches in diameter. Where would one find such a tube? A street sign, a lamppost, or something similar. An Arab terrorist would simply remove such an object from its base (preferably from a Jewish source, as in the following true story: the residents of a nearby kibbutz woke one day to discover that all the street signs nearby were missing. They were soon “returned” when a series of rockets landed nearby, still retaining the original inscriptions on them.) However, if you can’t steal a sign from a Jew, take one of your own from Gaza. If you are contemplating sending your child laden with explosives to kill as many Jews as possible, you probably don’t need traffic lights. One point of interest: just as American Indian tribes would create distinctive markings on their arrows, each Arab terrorist organization has a slightly different way of making the tail of their rockets, so we should know exactly who our attackers are. For weeks after, every time I would see any similar object on the streets of Maale Adumim, I would think of its potential as a weapon of destruction, something to blow up our apartment.
So that our tiyul shouldn’t end on a “downer,” our last stop was the main shopping area, so we could do our part in improving the local economy. Nobody was going to buy a refrigerator and have it shipped to Jerusalem or wherever, and there wasn’t time to go grocery shopping in one of the local superrrrrrrrrrs, but our tour-mates did spread out and buy a few things. Barbara went to one of the chain drug stores, and I walked around the mall and checked out the shops on the adjacent streets, which went on for several blocks, all the way to where the food festival was going on. I was amazed at how many shops there were in this relatively small town (a little more than half the size of Maale Adumim). Then something which had been mentioned earlier in the day began to make sense. Sderot is not an isolated town; there are any number of small kibbutzim and other communities nearby. No doubt, people from the surrounding parts come here to shop. To put it simply, the destruction of Sderot would have a devastating effect on the economy and morale of the entire Western Negev. You may, if you wish, take that thought a step further. If I hadn’t until fully comprehended the importance of this hesder yeshiva as the moral backbone of the Jewish resistance to Arab terror, I did now.
A few weeks later, I met one of my buddies on the bus, and I began to describe our tiyul and my admiration for Rav Fendel and his bochrim. My friend asked me if there were any Americans at this yeshiva. I looked at him, he looked at me, and we simultaneously realized how absurd this question was. No, there were no American students on a one year program, or any program, in Sderot – or the “Muslim Quarter” of The Old City, or any number of other places we could think of. Maybe that, in a nutshell, summarizes one of the differences between the Israeli experience and that of the Exile. If G-d gives me the strength, I will elaborate on this point – and infuriate some of my audience – when I discuss the General Assembly in my next article.

:Daddy, they're punishing the paintings!"

There isn’t much to do at 4AM except let your mind wander. Of course you might wonder, why is this man awake at 4AM? For someone of a certain age, the first answer is “bladder.” But there is an additional reason. Younger people may have children to keep them up; we have Mimi the geriatric cat who is always awake at 4AM. Because she has lost a good part of her hearing, she no longer goes meow; she shrieks like a banshee. What is bothering her?, you ask. It could be that her food bowl is empty or that she is not pleased with what remains; she might have made a mess next to her litter box and is offended by the smell; she might have knocked over one of her three water dishes and needs to have it refilled; possibly she is announcing that she is about to upchuck a hair ball under our bed; perhaps she wants to curl up on Barbara’s stomach but my wife is sleeping on her side. At any rate, our cat is standing on my pillow, howling in my ear. Why? Go ask her. As I lie there, trying to go back to sleep, I have time to think about things, perhaps to consider what I would be writing next for my eager readers. And so on this one night I began to focus on The Underground Museum.

My first thought a year or so ago when Barbara had suggested that we visit this place was a visit to the bowels of the earth. Now it occurred to me that it also could have been an exhibit about the history of the London subway system, which is called “The Underground.” There is such a museum devoted to the NYC system in Brooklyn. I seem to remember Barbara telling me that she had been there. I never was. Haval (it’s a pity). There wasn’t so much reason for me to have gone there; I grew up in New York and I know I rode many of the subway cars that are on display. By the end of WW II, my mother was already taking my brother and me on the D train; we were still small enough to walk under the turnstile, meaning my mother didn’t have to pay the five cent fare (I come by my frugality naturally). My brother and I would stand in the front of the first car, looking through the big window next to the motorman, and pretend we were driving the train. The subway cars of that day had wicker seats and large ceiling fans – no air conditioning. The irony of the New York subway museum is that much of the system was never underground. Riding on the 3rd Ave El was like being in a living museum; the platforms and the cars were relics from the beginning of the 20th century, waiting to be torn down or sold as scrap metal. In some places, the tracks were laid directly opposite the windows of tenement buildings, sometimes so close that you could see a man in his undershirt brushing his teeth. We would ride down to 14th St, and on our way back, our final destination would invariably be a large coffee shop which had a conveyor belt which carried donuts from the back of the establishment all the way around to the display window in the front. In my whole life, I have never come across anything remotely as fascinating as that never-ending stream of donuts marching on a mechanical belt seemed to me when I was eight years old……

Back to a more scary and prosaic reality. Our museum in Jerusalem serves a testament and memorial to the Jewish underground, those groups (the mainstream Haganah and two other more extreme factions, The Irgun and the Lehi [The Stern Gang]) who defended Jewish communities from Arab attacks and opposed the efforts of the British to restrict immigration during the British Mandate. Barbara and I had visited this place before, built originally 150 years ago as a hospice for female Russian pilgrims to The Holy Land, and after 1917 served as a British prison. Here you can see the actual cells in which political prisoners were kept in solitary confinement, the infirmary where a doctor would dispense brightly colored placebos, the courtyard into which the prisoners would be allowed for an hour of exercise a day, the office of the High Commander, with furniture and equipment hurriedly left behind in 1948 when the Mandate ended. In one room there is a memorial with photographs and information about these brave men who died fighting to save Jewish lives.

But now this somber reminder of an heroic past would serve as the venue for a Jerusalem Art festival; and this would be our next scheduled stop on our Hag Hamoed itinerary. Needless to say, once we returned to Jerusalem from Beit Shemesh, we needed additional sustenance before doing anything else. And so we walked, as we have done so many times, up and Rehov Yaffa, considering which of the many local establishments we would patronize – all of them, it goes without saying, kosher, and all of them this time of year having a sukkah in the front or side – so that for entire blocks the sidewalks are festooned with festive booths. Any time I can, I steer people to the Coffee Bean, probably the only kosher version of an international chain. Why? First of all, they are fairly inexpensive (did you expect any other ‘reason number 1’?), most of the day serving a “businessman’s lunch” – a very popular item in almost every Israeli restaurant – in this case, half of a large sandwich and a cup of cappuccino or good tea for twenty shekels. You can sit at a table for hours on end without anybody bothering you; you can utilize their wireless internet connections; and people (lots of American students) do just that: sit for hours with their laptops, doing business, writing papers, talking long distance with their VOIP connections. And third, they have clean bathrooms – which I have availed myself of even when I wasn’t otherwise patronizing the place. Needless to say, we had our coffee there outside in their sukkah (number three for the day) – which I admit had very schvach schach – and then headed over to the Russian compound to the art show at the Underground Museum.

It just goes to show: how you can take something and turn it into something completely different. Normally, you would not use the word “cheerful” to describe a testament to brave men long gone and barely remembered (and the history of the formation of the State is replete with such people). But now the corridors, the rooms, he courtyard was filled with art from Israeli galleries. Some of these were first rate galleries with carefully selected collections: acknowledged first rank Israeli artists like Reuven Rubin and Nachman Gutman, a few small canvases by Utrillo or Pisarro, interesting work by “emerging” Israeli artists; then there were lesser galleries with more of a hodgepodge, whatever they managed to get their hands on; there was plenty of kitch on display: by-the-numbers paintings of bearded men dancing with torah scrolls, etc. There were a number of individual artists displaying their wares, some good, some not so. At one point, Natania came over to me and said to me, “Daddy, they’re punishing the paintings.” Sure enough, someone had had the most out-of-the-box idea: displaying paintings behind the barred windows of the solitary confinement cells (which contain some thin bedding on the stone floor and a chamber pot). Effective, but very disconcerting. Then it occurred to me. Many of the prisoners incarcerated and executed in this jail were from the Lehi, (a Hebrew acronym for ‘Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), the smallest, most extreme and controversial of the groups opposing the Mandate, called by the British ‘The Stern Gang’ after its leader, Avraham Stern. Here in these halls more than sixty years after Jewish men were hung in the courtyard, the Stern gallery was hanging its wares. If that’s not a kick in the pants, an eyeful of irony, I don’t know what is.

After having had breakfast in Yehudah and Arleen’s sukkah, refreshments in a sukkah in Beit Shemesh, coffee on Rehov Yaffa, the only thing left to do was have dinner. Natania was eager to try a new sushi joint on a nearby street called Shlomzion Hamalka, where again we found room in their sukkah. This place was “fancy” (defined as using table cloths), and the food was pretty good – although no better than at some of the “less fancy” places we had frequented. We had a leisurely meal; and when we left, there was suddenly a huge line of people waiting to get it. We started to walk back to Yaffa to get a bus to another bus to get us back to Maale Adumim (a little bit east of you-know-where). Every food establishment along the way worthy of the name was packed, with people waiting to get in. Then it occurred to me: I was hearing an awful lot of English. Yes! That was it! All the yeshiva and seminary kids here for the year, all the families here on vacation, they were free to go. Free to join the rest of Israel. Free to find a restaurant – because they hadn’t eaten enough over the last two days. Thee synagogues and hotels were emptying out. Hag Hamoed was over!

The next day, we would be visiting Sderot on a tiyul organized by the yeshiva there. But that’s for next time.

Hag Hamoed, or a Tale of Four Sukkas

“Hag Hamoed,” that’s what I am going to call it from now on: the second day of Sukkot, which is still Hag (the holiday) for you laggards in Exile and Chol Hamoed, the intermediate days for those of us who have successfully made it to The Land. By 9AM of that day, here a little bit east of Yerushalayim, you can see teenagers and adults getting ready, backpacks prepared, cars and buses being loaded, as a huge part of the nation prepares to celebrate our return by walking and riding the length and breadth of the country during these glorious days. But we in the Anglo community have a problem; to wit, you. Many of our English speaking friends and neighbors are hosting family and friends from back where they came from; the hotels in Jerusalem are packed with tourists. And all of these unfortunate folks are required to repeat the prayers and restrictions of The Hag for a second day. So “us natives” are, in effect, waiting for the rest of you to get done with your business so that we can get going; there will be no organized tiyulim for the Anglo community until the following day. It’s like a family in New Jersey having to delay its summer vacation until their son finishes summer school to make up the courses he flunked during the regular school term.
No matter, there is plenty for us to do on this Hag Hamoed. We are expected in Jerusalem at 10AM to visit Yehudah and Arleen, whom Barbara has known forever. When Barbara’s family moved to Rochester when she was thirteen, the only Jewish family on Goodman St. was the Osbands. Helen, may her memory be a blessing, and Les, who is now in an assisted living residence in Baltimore, had three children. Arleen was the oldest child; Barbara went to Monroe H.S. with the Leah; the youngest was Michael, an extremely brilliant and gifted boy who became a renowned pediatric oncologist, later tragically succumbing to cancer himself.
The first plane that left Israel after the 1967 war had among its passengers Rabbi Ohad and Bracha Habshush who arrived in Rochester just in time for the wedding of their oldest son Yehuda to Arleen. As it happens, Barbara had planned to go to Israel shortly thereafter, and she spent a week in the very (very!) cramped Habshush apartment in the Yeminite neighborhood near Mea Shearim – in which then lived their very large family – with a kitchen as big as a mid-sized American bathroom. From then on, Barbara became the ninth Habshush child, the only one with blue eyes and rosy cheeks. Rabbi Habshush is long deceased, but Bracha is going strong, living in Efrat, and meticulously tracking in a notebook the birthdays of her perhaps forty grandchildren and a developing army of great-grandchildren.
The apartment in which Arleen and Yehuda live in the Artzei HaBirah neighborhood is the same one they lived in when we came to Israel in 1980 (I always think of how many homes and communities Barbara and I have lived in since then). Their four children are grown, out of the house, and two of them are married with their own children. Some of the pictures on the wall are different; otherwise, the apartment seems exactly the same as when I first saw it in 1980. The neighborhood, though, has changed; it has gone from being a poor, mixed, working class neighborhood to an overwhelmingly Haredi one. I know the area well. When Barbara, Natania, and I were in Jerusalem in 2004 we rented an apartment a five minute walk away. I always marveled at the residents’ total disregard for the garden areas and the yards around the buildings. I wondered if they believed that the empty pizza boxes strewn around would grow into pizza trees, the plastic cups into soda bushes, or, and this would truly be a miracle, the candy wrappers into Torah scrolls. Otherwise, I can find no satisfactory explanation for the obstinate refusal to pick up any refuse anywhere in the area and a total aversion to any living plant life that did not precede the current occupants’ arrival on the scene.
The bus schedule from Maale Adumim always prevents us from arriving anywhere exactly on time; we have to be either early or late. So we arrived in plenty of time to help Arleen set up for her brunch in the sukkah, an annual event commemorating the yahrzeit of her mother, to which she invites a many people as she can who knew Helen Osband from the old days in Rochester (making Barbara a prime suspect). Arleen, being Arleen, was certain that everyone would arrive at 10AM and we would be done by 11AM, at which point she could return the borrowed plastic chairs which were needed by their real owners by 11:30. (Needless to say, her family and friends did not arrive en masse at 10, and, of course, we were not finished at 11.) By 10:30, we went out through a bedroom to their small balcony on which there was sukkah big enough for about eight people to squeeze in (the women, who are not obligated to eat in a sukkah, stayed inside – there just wasn’t enough room). We then returned inside back to the table in their small dining nook, and we began taking turns reviewing the sections of the Mishnah which relate building a sukkah, taking turns reading each section. (A sukkah more than twenty cubits high is invalid…) I must admire the patience of the Habshush clan for putting up with me; I’m sure that any of their children, third grade and up, could read with greater agility, but they included me and allowed me to take my turn. Guests kept arriving, and at this point David Glazer, the son of our dear friends Jeff and June, came in with his wife, Yardaena, and her mother, Barbara, the widow of Michael Osband. The three of them sat down at the table and joined in the learning. Now in this kind of environment, the men will sit around and do the learning, while the women are usually involved in other things. But I imagine that everyone present understood and expected that these two women would join in; they were certainly knowledgeable enough.
I still have fond memories of traveling up to the Maimonedes School in Brookline, Massachussets so many years ago for Yardaena’s bat mitvah celebration, for which she and her father – then very much alive and full of energy – had spent an entire year learning a large section of The Mishna – so that it wasn’t just a party, but a Siyum (a celebration at the completion of a section of learning.) Yaerdena blossomed into an amazing student like her father and began teaching Judaic Studies (she gave a shiur at Beth Aaron one Shavuot morning a few years ago). And in the “it’s-not-just-a-small-world-but-a-broom-closet” department, I remember the look on our friend Heshy’s face. We had invited him and his wife Chana-Chaya to our home in Teaneck many times for Shabbat meals. On this one occasion, when we passed out the “benchers” (booklets which include prayers after one has eaten, which are often given out at events with the names of the honorees), he asked in astonishment, “Where did you get this?” He showed us the bencher which he had selected seemingly at random from a large stack. It read “Bat Mitzvah of Yardeana Batya Osband, Rosh Chodesh Tamuz 5747” (that’s 22 years ago). “We know the family, and we were there.” “So was I” said Heshie. Turns out he went to school with Michael. I know that most of us have similar tales of amazing connections, but it doesn’t take away the shock and awe every time you hear such a story.
But take it one step further: one century ago, more or less, three families were part of a mass migration which would move hundreds of thousands of Jews great distances from the cities, towns, and villages where they had lived for centuries. The Habshush clan was part of a movement of Yeminite Jews who somehow, with great difficulty and through great danger, made their way from Saana, the capital city, to Jerusalem. A second family, the Osbands (along with the Marzel family) would come to Rochester, NY. A third family would wind up in Fort Worth, Texas with their family name changed to “Glazer.” It would seem to require the talent of a very gifted novelist to construct a plot intricate enough to unite these families who had been geographically so distant. Yet, we were all sitting around a table in Jerusalem: a Glazer and an Osband having married and being related by another marriage to the Habshushes, three families which we had met in completely different contexts, in different times and different places. And we were there to share memories of Helen Osband, one of the truly nicest women who ever walked the face of the earth.
The party was still going on, but we had to leave. We had arranged to meet Natania at a bus stop on a street corner to get the #415 bus to Beit Shemesh, our next destination, and we didn’t want to keep her waiting.
We have friends from our days in Passaic who a number of years ago bought an apartment “on paper” (in other words, construction hadn’t begun; you were just shown the floor plan). To our amazement, we received an e-mail from them shortly before Sukkot. Their home was now finished, and they were inviting all their friends in The Land to join them for a hannukat habayit (house warming). From the wording of their e-mail, that it would be the second day of the holiday for them, we inferred (correctly) that they have not yet made aliyah. Still, a residence in The Land is noteworthy, and we would be happy to see them under any circumstances. In keeping with our pattern, we were the first to arrive, and so we had time to take a house tour and catch up with each other’s stories. Both of their kids are still in college, and they do not expect to be able to live here permanently for another few years. But now they have a place of their own to come to even before that Big Day comes! Not yet fully furnished, but livable – with many nice neighbors. So it would be fair to say that they were excited. Both of their children were with them, and each child had three or four friends staying with them. So their two story apartment, planned to satisfy the demands of the American Jewish community, looked like a large dormitory. No matter.
Their sukkah was on a patio outside the “salon,” facing a very large New Jersey sized back yard (just parched bare dirt for now.) There was plenty of nosh and several bottles: a few single malts and the original Jack Daniels (not the inexpensive black label stuff they used to serve at kiddushes back in Passaic). I picked up a small glass, sat down in the sukkah (with appropriate blessings), and began to sample the various whiskeys and whiskies before me. Sadly, as people began to come in, nobody, nobody, sat down and joined me for a wee drop. This is almost unheard of, but true.
But, as I was sitting in the sukkah and looking out at the street beyond the yard, I heard the following cautionary tale. We have already discussed “be careful what you wish for” and my corollary “be careful what you complain about.” I now realize that there is a third element to this: “be careful what you worry about.” The family in question was considering buying a home in The Land and was looking at an apartment in Modiin. From the description we were given, it seemed like a really nice place. But the realtor they were using had other ideas (it’s called “steering,” common among realtors world-wide, but especially prevalent here in The Land where telling somebody else what they should be doing is a national pastime). She began explaining that the particular neighborhood in Modiin was “mixed” (that is, “religious,” traditional, and secular people living in close proximity) and you couldn’t tell who your neighbors would be, and they might make noise on Shabbat. Before she was finished, she had painted a dire picture of a busload of Hilonim (secular Jews) moving in downstairs from them who would have loud parties from Friday night all through Shabbat. She frightened them out of Modiin and into purchasing something in this area of Beit Shemesh. Across that very street we could see from the sukkah was another housing development that had just been completed. Originally, it was built for a group of French Jews who were making aliyah, but at the last minute, the project was bought out, and now the occupants are………….extreme Haredim, hostile Mea Shearim-type expats who do not like their new neighbors or any other Jews who do not look, think, or act like them. “We were so worried about who our neighbors would be, and now we’re the goyim.” Just goes to show. No matter how “religious” you think you are, there is always someone else who thinks that you are a dog-in-the-street. And Moshiach is waiting patiently in the wings……..
It was time to leave sukkah #2 and head back to Jerusalem, where we would find out what happens when paintings misbehave.

Elmer Among The Sheltering Palms

HOW MY HEART IS YEARN-ING, YEARN-ING, YEARN-ING,
TO BE DOWN A-MONG THE SHEL-TER-ING PALMS,
O HON-EY WAIT FOR ME.
(chorus of “Down Among The Sheltering Palms,”
Music by Abe Olman, Lyrics by James Brockman, 1914)

One of the fun things I noticed right before Sukkot was an article in the Jerusalem Post in which the writer considered inviting his own ushpizin into his sukkah. Now the ushpizin, the “guests” we invite, one by one, into our sukkahs are in our tradition, seven biblical heroes from Avraham Avinu to King David (although I assume in today’s world, many people think to invite some biblical women as well). But suppose you could make up your own laundry list of characters to invite? The writer in question, cheating a bit by having ten people on his list, got a little creative. He “invited” Molly Picon, the Yiddish actress, Levi Strauss, who basically “invented” dungarees, and, most intriguingly, Lippman Pike, one of the first professional baseball players, who flourished in the 1880’s, long before Hank Greenberg or Sandy Koufax.
By the time the holiday came around, our sukkah was ready to host our guests. Our cotton panels, slightly shrunken from a trip through our clothes dryer, were fitted onto the plastic poles with only one small rip in the cotton; our bamboo mat was rolled out for schach (no need for branches from the sheltering palms); I had purchased a few more decorations (imitation fruit purchased on one of my excursions onto Malchei Yisrael). We even had a real light. Barbara had gone into our local Ace Hardware in search of the simple one bulb holders that we had always used in The States. All they had at Ace was a much more elaborate florescent fixture which came without any way of hanging it and without any wiring. Not to worry. Buy it and bring it over to the next counter to the young Russian woman who was spending her day wiring these lamps for use in sukkahs. Then it took us several hours more to figure out a method of attaching it to our sukkah, but we finally got it up. The table and chairs were set up, and we were indeed ready.
For our first guests, we invited a family who had made aliyah only a few months before. This family’s klita (absorption) has been a lot more complicated than ours, which was, in hindsight, a piece of cake. All of the 2008 olim faced one serious obstacle, a port strike which meant that all of the lifts were left to languish somewhere in Turkey until the Israeli dock workers agreed to resume their labors. This family also had a problem with their son’s education. The first school they enrolled him in, while perfect on paper, proved to be a disaster in practice, and it took a month of effort for the local officials to allow them to transfer him to another school (both of which are within walking distance of their apartment, by the way) where he is now doing fine. Then there was their preparation for Sukkot. Last year, when I went to the concession in front of Ace Hardware, they had everything I needed; my only problem was finding a monit with a roof rack so I could cart it home from the Mall. This year, when Michael ordered a sukkah, they didn’t have any bamboo mats on hand. Soon. Well, as does happen here with some frequency, “soon” morphed into “never.” Plus, Michael had tried to order a lulav and etrog from one of the local synagogues, but because of some snafu, he never got it. So there they were a day before the Yomtov, species-less and schach-less, putting out frantic e-mails to the community. Fortunately, they have a wonderful landlady, a veteran Maale Adumimer, who took it upon herself to drive around town and get them everything they needed. So they were a little frazzled from all of these difficulties. Hence I figured that Michael deserved to meet and greet my long-time acquaintance, Elmer.
Elmer T. Lee has been making a mighty tasty single barrel sour mash “for over fifty years” somewhere in Kentucky. I had discovered that Michael, like me, is ambidextrous: that is, he drinks both Scotch and bourbon (although I am also very fond of Irish whiskey, but I still only am allowed two hands). When Barbara went back to The States to visit her mom and to hang out for a week in Teaneck, we all gave her a shopping list. Mine was fairly short: a few items of clothing and a bottle of bourbon, listing a few possible brands. Sure enough, Barbara returned with a bottle of Elmer’s carefully wrapped with her socks in a suitcase. You may inquire: why do you have to go back to Teaneck to buy some booze? Fair question. One, the selection in New Jersey is more extensive than it is here. Two, it’s a matter of price, which is always a matter of some interest to me. While the cost of Israeli wine is a lot less here, the cost of most hard stuff is much, much more. I saw in an article a few months ago that the British government was protesting the unfair tax imposed here on Scotch whisky. (I should note that in Dublin or Louisville it’s “whiskey,” while in Glasgow it’s “whisky.” I have no idea why.) The response of the Israeli government, as is often the case, made us seem like a bunch of blithering idiots. They mumbled something about taxing whiskey based upon its alcohol content. Of course, you can get rot-gut vodka here basically for the same price as soft drinks. (That’s because there are a million Russians here, and no one is going to mess with their vodka. When we have a million Anglos here, we will have similar clout.) Towards the bottom of the article, I noticed the following amazing statistic. Three quarters of the whiskey purchased here comes from the duty-free shops at the airport. And that’s only what can be quantified. There’s no way to count the number of bottles of booze that enter our Ancestral Homeland legally and illegally from The States, or more likely, England(where it’s a lot cheaper than the duty-free shops). Can you find a better illustration of the haven’t-got-a-clue-ness of our government? They have an astronomical tax on a product, but they collect it on perhaps one fifth of the items purchased. So the only individuals they collect it from are those too poor to travel, too much of a freier to notice, or too drunk to care. I could swear that the l’chaims we made with Elmer’s fine brew tasted even better because of its tax-free status.
Anyway, we had the fine meal which Natania and I prepared, and we sat for quite a while, enjoying the rapidly cooling evening air. Our Shabbat and Yom Tov table is more likely to involve brilliant conversation rather than vocalizing; but on this night, our various neighbors more than made up for it. Our immediate neighbors, the ones who share the building with us, are Russians, and from them, sounds of the Volga enhanced by vodka wafted our way. On the other side of us lives a Moroccan family, long time residents of our town. The mother, Tzippi, is very friendly and often brings us samples of her excellent cooking and occasional leftovers (her family does not like to eat reheated meals; remember that there was a time when most people here in The Land did not have enough to eat). The following Thursday, a son would be a bar mitzvah, and so they were in a particularly festive mood, sitting in their sukkah and singing for hours on end. If we listened closely, we could hear our neighbors up and down the block singing as well, on into the night. But, as usual, I began to hear the sound of my pillow calling to me, and we called it an evening.
Over the next several days, I kept thinking about Lippman Pike and the other goofy guests whom our JPost reporter had virtually “invited” into his sukkah. I’m as “creative” as this guy; why don’t I compile my own list? I just ask for one easement: I want to invite them all at the same time, have a real sukkah party. Since I myself don’t sing in the sukkah, why not invite some of my favorite song writers? I figure that Irvin Berlin would be too busy writing “White Christmas” to come, but perhaps ask Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers, George Gershwin, and Harold Arlen. Maybe lyricists like Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Larry Hart, Otto Harbach, and Dorothy Fields? I could ask Al Jolsen, Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, and Eddie Cantor to sing. If that idea doesn’t pan out, how about a little comedy? Imagine a sukkah with the Marx Brothers inside. Of course, even including Zeppo, that’s only four, room for some more. Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and George Burns would liven up the evening. Of course, nobody else would get a word in edgewise.
I kept mulling this over and over in my mind. These lists were all well and good. But what it came down to was this: if I could actually invite, “virtually” or for real, anybody I wanted to into my sukkah, it would have to be the guys I grew up with on 208th Street in The Bronx. We are scattered. Some of them I am still in contact with; some are long gone. Some have quarreled and are not speaking to one another. But I can see them now, arriving at Hamitzadim, my street in Maale Adumim, a little bit east of Yerushalayim, coming down the steps to our front door. On chol hamoed, we could get out the cards and resume the poker game where we left off some fifty years ago. At a certain time of night we would put away the cards and go out to Schweller’s delicatessen for a bite to eat (a sandwich or a hot dog, depending on our evening’s fortunes); so perhaps we can order some really good and really kosher corned beef or pastrami and have it speed-sent from The States. And plenty of Dr. Brown’s soda! That you can get here. (For reasons I could never quite fathom, my friend Al was partial to their Cel-Ray. The rest of us would be content with cream soda or black cherry. Remember that we were too young for anything stronger.)
I will be continuing this series, describing real people whom we met and places which we saw over the holiday. But if Sukkot is zman simchateinu, you will forgive me a moment of reverie for a long gone time in my life, which, in its own innocent way, was a time of happiness for a special group of friends.

The Time of Our Joy - Introduction

It seems inescapable that there are times when you must begin with a cliché before getting on with the business at hand. One example I can think offhand would be if you were writing an article about the latest selection of kosher wines, you would have to begin the article by reminding everyone for the twentieth time that twenty years ago the only kosher wines available were sweet Kiddush wines or poor quality red wines, etc. Then and only then, could you discuss the good quality of today’s wines. The same is true of Sukkot. I am planning to write a series of articles about the fun, interesting, and meaningful things we did over the Hag, but I have to begin with reminding everyone of two well-known and inescapable facts about Sukkot in Israel:
The best time of the year to be here is right now when the weather is perfect.
The best place in the world to be for Sukkot is here in The Land (although that’s true for any day of the year.) There, I have disposed of my obligatory clichés and I can proceed to write what’s on my mind.
It was Tuesday night, and the first phase of Sukkot was now officially over. My friend Steve S. had invited me to join him in his sukkah on the way back from Mussar Avicha, our shul. I didn’t want to stay too long; my family was waiting for me at home. But there was enough time to make a lashev b’sukkah (the blessing upon entering the sukkah) and then have a piece of cake and some melon. We started to reminisce about Sukkots of by-gone days in the Old Country, Steve and Ettie originally having hailed from the Albany area where it gets mighty cold this time of year. For them, if it didn’t rain – and the rain was frequent – that was considered sufficient motivation to sit in the sukkah, regardless of how cold it got and how many layers of clothing were required. Steve remembered sitting and waiting late in the morning for the sun to be high enough to penetrate the cold of the sukkah for an hour or two. And he remembered lining the sukkah with the local fruits of the fall harvest: various sizes, shapes, and colors of gourds and pumpkins. That reminded me of the first few years that we lived in New Jersey. Someone once suggested that we use corn stalks (readily available that time of year) for schach (what you put on top of the sukkah). It never occurred to us that what we considered as something spiritual and decorative would be seen by the local critters as food. The corn stalks we hung up one day would all be eaten by the next morning. We ultimately resorted to bland but absolutely inedible bamboo poles. But that vision of a sukkah festooned with the fall colors of the squashes and gourds led me back to something I thought about last year.
One of the great haval’s (it’s a shame) of American Jewish life is the fading away of this holiday from the consciousness of most of our landsmen. For most American Jews, the experience (if they have it at all) of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur (and the never-ending time in synagogue or temple) is sufficiently daunting enough to last them for quite a while, thank you very much. If you want to do the fall harvest thing in America, there’s Halloween and Thanksgiving, which are certainly more mainstream and a lot easier to get into, as everyone else is doing it too. Enough of this separateness thing. There’s no need to take off another four days from work for parochial concerns and experiences. We’ve made our point, and let’s get on with our lives.
So if you want to do Sukkot, you have to understand what it is that is being celebrated and why it is zman simchateinu (the time of our happiness). Yet even for those of us in most of The Exile who are “religious,” our joy over the Hag is somewhat diminished by the fickleness of the weather. But the biggest limitation in America, as I see it, is the blandness of Chol Hamoed, the intermediate days between Sukkot and Shmini Adzeret/Simchat Torah, essentially “down time” when you try to limit your everyday activities. Personally, I always went to work because there wasn’t much else to do – especially if the whole idea is to be in a place where you could eat in a sukkah. Kind of limiting. Very few museums, parks, zoos, or places anywhere in The States fill the bill. The run-of-the-mill places like Great Adventures you can visit any time of the year. You might as well save your days off for another day, another time.
Here in The Land, Sukkot is The Time: time to tour the country, time to visit with family and friends, time to chill out, whether you are haredi, daati, masoreti, hilloni. People here who do not consider themselves especially “religious” enjoy sitting in their sukkah on The (one day) Hag, which is a national holiday – as is the last day, on which the staid Shmini Adzeret is enveloped into the emotional Simchat Torah. During the intermediate days, all the schools are off, government offices are closed, and many people are either off from work or take a day or two. There are special events and things to do, places to go, and, if you are of the mind, it’s not too hard to find a sukkah, even in parks and certainly in kosher restaurants.
I am especially fond of those few days here between Yom Kippur and Sukkot when you can see sukkahs being built in an hour (as opposed to the snail’s pace for most construction!) and when an arcane industry flourishes, the urgent merchandising of a citrus fruit, a palm frond, and some otherwise insignificant vegetation. It was during this season that Barbara and I visited The Land in 1980 and 1988; that was when I first “got it,” when I first understood what The Hag was all about and what was so special about being Here. In 2008, having some time on my hands, I made it a point to walk, camera in hand, around some of the religious neighborhoods in Jerusalem, including places in Geulah where we had stayed two decades before. Sort of a walk down Rehov Hazichronot (Memory Lane). Some things have changed: I don’t remember that twenty years ago they were selling boxes of plainly marked “Christmas lights” for sukkah decorations to Haredim. And all the tables of lulavs and etrogs that stretched all the way down Rehov Mea Shearim have been moved into covered min-shuks along King George and on Jaffa opposite Mahane Yehuda. Twenty years ago, I returned from Israel with the latest innovation, a heavy-duty plastic container, with zipper and handle, to hold my lulav; this year, every single person in Mussar Avicha had the identical holder. A handful of years ago, somebody had the brilliant idea of marketing sealed packages of myrtle branches. This year, for the first time, I saw similarly sealed packages of those troublesome willow branches, which otherwise wilt if you look at them the wrong way. But some things have hardly changed: the ingenuity of people building sukkahs in the most unlikely, incongruous places; the general bustle, the way Haredi men will spend an hour or more meticulously examining every lulav and etrog that a vendor has to offer (the way some women shop for hats or some of us men taste wine or single malts). Everywhere in the Geulah area, people were buying and selling something. Where else in Israel would you find young men shopping for neckties? And so I sent two days just walking and photographing around Malchei Yisrael and the side streets nearby, down Rehov Yeheskel and the Bukharin market. Needless to say, there were other things to do: shopping, cooking, and erecting our sukkah (a pre-fab model with cotton panels, which because we’re stupid Americans, we washed and put in the dryer last year, so that the cotton shrunk and we had a deuce of a job getting it to fit). By the time that zman simchateinu arrived, I at least was ready. No time to think about Tzipi Livni (here in The Land, negotiations over a coalition government would be suspended until Acharei Hahagim) or Barack Obama; nightmares are not conducive to a festive mood. Barbara was off from work, Natania was on vacation from the nishkia (the weapons storeroom where she is assigned), and there would be ample time to enjoy The Land. In the next several posts, I will describe some of the things and events which brought us joy over the eight days of The Hag. I hope your holiday was as pleasant as ours.