Nine Days of Ex-Jasper-ation

This was a strange complaint, but I guess it could happen. I ran into Lionel A. at the local library last week and he was frustrated because he has read all of the English language books they have – even though the library claims that they get new books (and ironically if you offer to donate books, they don’t want them). The funds for the Ma’ale Adumim library have been donated by the Bnei Zion Foundation; while it can’t compare in size and scope to the one in Teaneck with its link to forty other Bergen County libraries, the multi-lingual award does go our local effort. Here, in addition to the Hebrew language collection, there are sections for books in Russian, French, Spanish, and English (three rows). We have not been here since the dawn of time like Lionel, so there are still lots of offerings to supplement what I have at home. One of which is a novel I stumbled on quite by accident. I was doing what I don’t encourage others to do, talking on my cell phone in the library (two demerits!), answering our handyman’s question about something, walking back and forth, trying not to disturb anybody, when I spied a well-worn copy of a novel with an intriguing title, “The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon” by Richard Zimler. Reading the back cover, I pegged it as an entry in a small, but significant genre, which, for wont of a better term, can be called historical mysteries, well-written works steeped in the ambience of a particular period. I had previously read most of Frank Tallis’ books, which recreate turn of the (20th) century life in Vienna, the home of coffee and pastry shops, Gustave Mahler, Sigmund Freud, and more than faint whiffs of the genteel anti-Semitism which, like a leaky gas stove, would explode several decades later.
Zimler’s novel, though, takes us to another time, another place, one to which the word ‘genteel’ would definitely not apply: “the universe of Jewish Kabbalah during the Lisbon massacre of April 1506.” [from the back cover] “Drenched in atmosphere and period detail….(Zimler) does succeed in conveying the surrealistic nightmare of being a Jew in the age of the Inquisition.” [The Wall Street Journal] As I started to read this account, I thought to myself, “What a perfect book to read during the Nine Days preceding Tisha B’Av, a terrifying reminder of what it is like to live in a World Without Redemption. I was particularly struck with the following poignant conversation, and if you read on you will see why I am including it. “The next evening, totally disheartened by Reza’s continued imprisonment, Uncle came to me in our cellar and mentioned for the first time the possibility of our leaving Portugal. “If I asked you to leave this country forever, would you go?” he asked. “Yes, if I had to,” I replied.“Good. But your mother…could she leave”“She’s frightened. An enemy one knows is often easier to bear than one who is unknown.”“True. And if your mother doesn’t leave, I doubt Esther would. Nor Reza, now that she’s married and trying to start a family. If we can just get her home.”(You don’t need to know who all these characters are or what this is all about. Suffice to say, that within a few pages, Uncle Abraham, a secret teacher of Kabbalah, is brutally murdered, his wife Esther is ignominiously attacked and violated on the street, and the narrator, Berekiah Zarco, must discover the whereabouts of most of his family members and uncover the murderer of his uncle – who may be among his disciples – in the midst of a on-going massacre.)
As I continued to read this frightening account, a series of thoughts entered my head, which, because you are a good audience, I will share with you. For whatever reason, I carry with me a very vivid memory of a dispute I had well over thirty years ago with a young man; I even remember his name, David. He was going on and on about the special nature of the Holocaust, and I felt the need to set him straight. A) The tragedy in Germany is relatively recent, a wound still open to those families that lived through it. B) It was carried out on a scale previously unimaginable. But that’s all. It could not have occurred to the Cossacks in the Ukraine or the Dominican Monks on the Iberian Peninsula that they could create a world order to kill every Jew everywhere. But those they could get their hands on……. The Germans methodically gassed and incinerated millions in camps away from the public eye (so that the neighbors could later deny any knowledge of what was going on. “We didn’t see or smell anything.”) Centuries before, when they were in the mood, drunken revelers and/or crazed Christians would round up a certain number of Jews, throw a party, and burn them alive in the public square, so everyone could see. I maintain that the events of previous two thousand years were a series of dress rehearsals for The Final Solution; and when we say, “Never to forgive; never to forget,” let us remember all those martyred souls who were burned or hacked to death over the centuries by the ancestors of those who condemn us now.
Then there is the role of Kabbalism, then and now. We live in a world of alleged reason. The people I hang out with, the people I learn from are all rationalists. In my circle, we do not study the Zohar (and I could care less whether this work, prepared by Moses de Leon in 13th century [C.E.] Spain was written by him or was redacted from the work of Shimon bar Yochai a thousand years before). We are profoundly skeptical of the efficacy of wearing red strings; we are bemused by groups that include non-Jewish entertainers claiming to teach this esoteric stuff. There is a gulf between us and those legitimate Jewish groups that do incorporate mystical ideas into their belief system. But I think I understand. If you were a Jew living in Lisbon in 1500 C.E., why wouldn’t you be attracted to mystical ideas about things you otherwise could not comprehend? Consider the environment. Everyone you knew had been forcibly converted to another religion. Nothing was what it seemed, and nobody was who he seemed to be. Your former rabbi was now peddling Christian relics and was probably a spy for the Dominicans. But Brother Carlos was actually a secret Jew, as were some members of the nobility. In the cellar where you prayed on Shabbat and held your Pesach Seder, you were a Jew. On the street, in different clothes you were a ‘New Christian,’ a marrano to the ‘Old Christians,’ a target for their vengeance. Why not look for hidden realms and elusive meanings? Why not invoke transcendental forces to protect your people from an overwhelmingly oppressive enemy? The alternatives seemed to be apostasy or madness.
What I keep coming back to, though, is that conversation. It could have happened in Berlin in 1935; it could have happened in Brooklyn last week. Why can’t we leave? Everyone seems willing except for Mollie; and Sara won’t go without Mollie; and Sam won’t go without Sara; and Lisa won’t go without Sam. So nobody goes. There’s always a problem, always a reason. No matter how bad things are. Here is this family in the novel. They are, months, weeks, days, hours, from annihilation; and they are finding every excuse to stay put, frozen in place by custom and convenience. You want to jump onto the page and shake them. ARE YOU ALL NUTS? GET OUTTA THERE! BEFORE IT’S TOO LA-A-TE! How my grandparents managed to make it out of Europe in the 1880’s, I’ll never know.
These ruminations rumbling through my brain, I came upon an article on the Israel National News (Arutz 7) website entitled “How Badly Do We Want it?” by Go’el Jasper – a genuinely good guy who otherwise hosts a talk show, The Aliyah Revolution, on their internet radio site. Before we made The Great Leap Forward, I used to sit at my desk in New York and listen with earphones to this and other shows on the website while I did my work. Go’el always struck me as the right kind of guy for his job, patiently but earnestly urging an audience of Galut Jews to come home, all the while giving useful information on aliyah-related topics. In this article, however, I think he cranked the volume up a wee bit too high. I sent back a comment in which I surmised that he had been ‘Ex-Jasper-ated when he wrote it. He responded to me; I responded to him……
Speaking of ‘it,’ what does the pronoun in the article’s title refer to? The Redemption, of course, the ultimate ‘Good news for the Jews.’. That time in the future when we will be made whole; when the Jewish people will live freely and safely in The Land, teaching Torah to the nations. That’s a big order, and the question is a valid one: how much do we really want to escape from the clutches of those good folk who have two thousand years of blood – ours and their own – on their hands? And then, A) what do we need to do to bring it about, and B) in Go’el’s words, ‘how badly do we want the redemption?’ If you are a perceptive reader, you have already surmised that Go’el’s opinion on the second question is: not enough.
What got him going on this train of thought? Unless you cheated and read his article, you would never in a million years guess; so I’ll tell you. It was the publication by the Orthodox Union in New York and the Koren Publishers in Jerusalem of a new translation of the Kinot for Tisha B’Av with a commentary by Rav Soloveitchik – or at least the advertising for said publication. (for anyone who needs footnotes: Kinot are a series of elegiac poems written to express our collective sorrow over the destruction of the Second Temple as well as later tragedies which befell various communities during the Crusades and the various Inquisitions. Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, known to many as THE Rav, was a towering figure in American non-Haredi Orthodoxy, the teacher, or the teacher of the teacher, of most American congregational rabbis.)
Go’el included the following excerpt from the OU press release: “The Koren Mesorat HaRav Kinot is designed to enhance the experience of users by giving them a taste of those glorious days with the Rav…Tisha B’Av is doubly sad for these students. Not only is it the annual day of fasting and mourning for the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, it is also a day on which the absence of their venerated mentor is sorely felt.” Being in a charitable mood, I would ascribe this hyperbole to the copywriter’s overdose of coffee and the absence of a careful editor, because no one in his right mind would equate the grief over the passing of a loved one or a beloved teacher – at a ripe old age – with our collective sense of desperation over the two thousand years of history gone wrong that we feel on Tisha B’Av.. Go’el however saw fit to pounce: “And played the other way, if the Rav were still alive today, I guess that would mean that his students would only be half as sad as they are today. After all, only the Temple is gone, but The Rav is still here.” Ouch!
So far, our writer is on reasonably firm ground, but…..he felt the need to extend his argument, and, as we all know, it is a matter of moments to go from safe ground to quicksand. So let’s go on v-e-r-y c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y. The Rav, our writer points out, “used a simple, flimsy paperback edition of the Kinot. He used the same simple edition every year.” Not only that, but there was a custom in eastern Europe and the pre-1948 yishuv to throw these booklets into the place where they kept holy writing prior to burying them; and then to retrieve the booklets the following year. Go’el’s premise is by doing so they demonstrated how badly they wanted redemption. Of course, these worthy Jews never actually buried them so that they couldn’t be retrieved. That might have shown a real commitment!
I was discussing this premise with a buddy who had been a congregational rabbi in a small shul back in The States. Did that ring a bell! Where he had been, the Kinot booklets were kept in an old shed, and every year they were brought out, reeking of mildew and mold. The print was so small that even he, the rabbi, could not read it properly. Plus the translation was in Yiddish; you can imagine the age and condition of these pamphlets! It didn’t take my friend, a reasonably astute guy, very long to figure out what the drill was: ‘It’s Tisha B’Av; you don’t eat; you sit on the floor; you spend an hour or two thumbing through an odiferous booklet which you can’t read, and even if you could, you wouldn’t understand; until it’s time for someone to help you get up because your legs have lost all sensation.’ In other words, reading these Kinot was part of the discomfort of the day. Plain and simple. Like many congregational rabbis today, he began making the effort to explain to his small minyan what they were reading – which is what I gather the Rav was doing – with a somewhat larger audience.
It’s fair to say that Rav Soloveitchik didn’t need a new edition of the Kinot for Tisha B’Av because he knew his material cold. He did invest a lot of time in teaching his students, who spent a lot of time taking notes, which notes on a multitude of topics are being edited and now compiled into book form. But Go’el, forgetting about the quicksand all around us, ventures the following opinion: “I would propose that he used the same flimsy edition every year because perhaps he couldn’t bring himself to buy a new version, at least not if he was a real Torah Jew, who prayed three times a day for the redemption.” Let’s parse that sentence again. Is our writer suggesting that if you buy a new version (especially this version) you’re not ‘a real Torah Jew?’ That’s what he seems to be saying. Is that what he means? Of course not! No more than the over-stimulated copywriter at the OU meant that the death of this Torah giant is equivalent to the destruction of The Temple and all that followed from it. You have to be careful with words. They’re like wayward children; if you don’t pay attention, they can get out and embarrass you. Words have a way of hanging out with other words and forming sentences that say something very different from what you want them to. And then you’re in trouble.
So where is Go’el Jasper going with all this? Consider the following: “I have an idea for how the day can be more meaningful and appropriate as well…“Perhaps we should behave like we want the redemption and not buy any new Kinot books. Or perhaps, at least, the publishers should include with every purchase of a new Kinot a coupon entitling the buyer to a full refund should the Mashiach arrive.“But that would be bad business, I suppose.”
Au contraire, Reb Go’el, that would be GREAT BUSINESS. What a marketing ploy!!!! But why stop there? It is generally assumed that when the Beit Hamikdash is rebuilt, many of our practices will become obsolete – including some of our prayers. What about the Rosh Hashana prayerbook? So we should ask for the same kind of coupon if we buy a new machzor? Of course, once my mind gets into overdrive, I come up with some really out-of-the-box ideas. Go’el mentioned the custom of leaving a little piece of wall in one’s house unpainted as a sign of our incompleteness. How about house painters offering coupons as well: if you leave that strip of wall unpainted, if Mashiach comes in his lifetime, he will come back and finish the job. Supposing this idea caught on? Clothing stores in religious areas offering discounts on black hats, streimels, children’s clothing – as soon as Mashiach arrives. Wigmakers, too. Pre-paid airline tickets for special charter flights to meet and greet The Mashiach. On and on. We’ll show them that we are serious about the redemption.

What else? “Everyday, three times a day, we pray to G-d that he should restore His Kingdom to his people. We raise our children on songs regarding our desire for Mashiach’s arrival. We say at our weddings that if we should forget the Temple-including Jerusalem, we should lose the use of our right hand……..” The sad reality is that those of us who daven three times a day often do it mechanically (perfunctorily, desultorily?). “Mashiach, Mashiach, Mashiach, Oy, Yoy, Yoy, Yoy, Yoy, Yoy” is nothing more than a line dance performed at over-fancy weddings where all thoughts of Jerusalem ‘are soon forgot.’ I would think that these are examples of where we desperately need to improve, not as paradigms for our behavior on the Ninth of Av; but that’s one man’s opinion.
I mentioned airline tickets a little bit above. It’s not surprising that the host of the ‘Aliyah Revolution’ would bring up that topic as well. Addressing the millions of Jewish souls still hanging out outside The Borders, Go’el opines, “I know that moving to Israel is too difficult for you because you need to have two or three cars, a nice, big house and your New York Yankees season tickets.” Let me say straight out that, in my own view, there is very little that anyone can do to bring about the Ingathering of the Exiles by remaining in the out-gathering; your money might buy some needed equipment for Hadassah Hospital, a room in a yeshivah, or any number of other worthwhile projects, but it won’t be of any use in rebuilding The Temple. (How about: the priestly garment changing room, endowed in memory of Morris and Bessie Cohen, who would have come if they could have, by their children and grandchildren, who didn’t come when they could have.) But there are ways of saying things, and ways of saying things.
My former-congregational-rabbi friend had some thoughts about this as well, which I will paraphrase: when he and his wife were planning their aliyah, he was very rah-rah, very critical of people who were staying behind. They had friends who were just about ready to get on the plane, when the female friend’s mother begged them not to go. She was dealing with a very sick husband, as well as several other family members with physical ailments and serious emotional problems. She could not handle these multiple responsibilities all by herself. The couple reluctantly agreed to postpone their aliyah, and my friend was convinced that they would still be in The States fifty years later with dim memories of what might have been. But the woman’s husband died, things sorted themselves out, and the family is now living here in one of the Anglo enclaves; and guess what? The mother herself just recently made aliyah. “Hooray,” I yelled, right in the middle of the mall. So, my friend said, he has stopped judging people for where they live their lives.
My feeling is, hey, we’re leading by example, which is all we can do. We’re here; things are pretty good. You wanna join us; great. I’m not going to examine the very complicated motives for how you live your lives, although I’m pretty sure that season tickets to the ballpark or the opera house aren’t the deciding factor in where you pitch your tent. I’m certainly not going to pass judgment on millions of Jews I don’t know. That’s the beginning of a very slippery and nasty slope. It would be easy to wind up like the ultra-Orthodox rabbis who are trying to annul the conversions of twenty thousand people, almost none of whom they have ever met. Leave the sliding ponds for the small fry. And one more bit of advice: sarcasm, like roach spray, has to be applied with great care, and in small doses.
We are still left with some nagging questions. Go’el Jasper enjoins us to make Tisha B’Av not just ‘meaningful’ or ‘relevant,’ but ‘appropriate’ as well. So what am I supposed to be doing? What am I supposed to be thinking? Our practice is to observe some of the No’s of Yom Kippur: no eating or drinking, no bathing, no leather shoes…. Then what? Should I be making any effort to improve my understanding of the literature and the liturgy of the day – without purchasing the offending OU-Koren version, of course. Should I attend any of the lectures and classes that are given before and on the fast day?
“How badly do we really want the redemption?” Maybe we should start with a more fundamental question, do we really, honestly, have any idea what we lost when the second Temple was destroyed and we were thrust among the Nations? Can we conceptualize how much better it would be for the entire Jewish Nation if the Redemption would come in our lifetime? How can you want something if you don’t know what it is?
How to somehow encapsulate even a fraction of what has happened? I keep coming back to one exceptionally chilling scene in “The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon,” when a slave girl is publicly humiliated to the cheers and laughter of the multitude, the narrator wonders, “Do the Old Christians hate us so violently because we gave them Jesus, the savior they never really wanted?” We had a belief that there would come a time when all the troubles of the world would come to an end and we would come to understand human history. The Nations took our idea, turned it upside down, dragged it through the mud, and then used it with devastating consequences against us to prevent our vision from ever coming true. But it will. That is the promise of the Prophets. And prophets don’t tell bubbe meises.

Three Cheers for Rabbeinu Yona

It’s funny how a casual remark can spur you on to consider something you had up until then been avoiding like the plague. You want an example?: Two friends who were visiting us from The Exile needed to speak with some contacts in Efrat on a recent Friday morning. Being firm believers in combining work and pleasure, they arranged to have an early lunch at the Gush Etzion winery before their meetings. You can well believe that the time it took for us to accept an invitation to join them could have been measured in micro-seconds – if that long. And so we all drove down to ‘The Gush’ (which is the region directly south of Jerusalem as far south as Hevron), stopping long enough to pick up a friend of theirs (whom they had known from a different ‘west bank’ – of the Passaic River) who showed us the way to our destination.
It was a late Friday morning in the summer, a propitious time to be sitting in the combination restaurant/gift shop/visitors center, right next to the winery’s small bottling facility. Seated around a very long table in the back were at least a dozen English-speaking women enjoying a ‘girls’ morning out.’ Plenty of time for them to enjoy a leisurely meal and the company of friends before returning to their kids and the preparations for Shabbat – which wouldn’t begin for another eight hours. Likewise for the young couples and the smaller groups sitting at the other tables. I was in no hurry; I had a secret weapon: Natania was in our kitchen, cooking up a storm while daddy was out playing.
We settled into our seats and then headed for the buffet tables, all you can eat for forty five shekels. It turns out that our friends’ friend knew the proprietor, and so, as we ate, they treated us to copious samples of winemaker Shraga Rosenberg’s wares. So what do you think happened? As we were waiting for our coffee and dessert to arrive, I ambled over the short distance to the wine racks on the wall, behind the diners seated at the few tables there, and started checking out the different selections for sale. Aided and abetted by the proprietor, my brain mellowed by what I had already sampled, I selected two really nice bottles: a 2009 Gewurtztraminer (“fruity and elegant, with fragrances of lychee, rose and tropical fruit.”) and a 2005 Nahal Hapirim (66% Cabernet Sauvignon, 29% Merlot and 5% Petit Verdot grapes), for which I spent more than I generally do, but…………
We were headed back to Efrat, the plan being that Barbara and I would hang out while our friends went to their meetings, and then we would head on back to Ma’ale Adumim. But first our friends’ friend took us on a little detour, and I’m certainly glad she did because otherwise I would never have had the opportunity to stop at Pinat Hama. A certain number of years ago, there was a Doctor Gillis (I’m pretty sure but not positive that was his name) who, true to his calling, treated patients because they were ill, not because he necessarily liked them; the proof of the pudding being that one of his patients was a relative of Yasser Arafat, may his name be blotted out. For his troubles, the good physician was murdered by Arab terrorists; although later Arafat claimed that it was a mistake – they meant to murder someone else instead. (That’s a relief!) In these parts, when there is a tragedy, people try to do something useful: set up a tzedekah fund, build a beit knesset, something. Here, someone decided to open a place where soldiers could come to relax when they were off duty. First it was a simple shack and now it is more elaborate structure, strategically located on the main north-south road at a junction with another road which goes west to Beit Shemesh. Lots of traffic; lots of soldiers. Dozens of people from the entire Gush staff this little place (the first shift of the day and Fridays by men, otherwise by women), and people take turns providing home-made baked goods to go with the drinks and snacks. Sure enough, there were a bunch of soldiers, some coming, some going, when we arrived.
An article or two ago, I presented a fanciful idea, storing the good will inherent at a wedding celebration in an aerosol container, so that on dark and gloomy days, there would be a way to create instant “wedding cheer.” So why not “Pinat Hama”? When you are literally up to your neck in stupidity, narrow-mindedness, bureaucracy, corruption, and ‘I-can’t-be-bothered-doing-it right-itis,’ a little spritz is all you need to create a sense of being A Light Unto The Nations, to remind you of who we are supposed to be, how we are supposed to behave, (See below) and why we are living in The Land. A Land with an army to protect us, an army of young people who can use some TLC; and people who treasure the Land and the army because it’s their own children who are in that army. At least that’s the jolt I felt when we left this place, or other similar places where good old fashioned chesed is performed, the kind of activity which keeps us going, but is hardly ever mentioned in the media.
Now comes the ‘casual comment’ part. Our friends were here when the ruckus with the schools in the town of Immanuel was front page news, and, as we were getting ready to return back to Ma’ale Adumim, M. casually asked her friend, a Chabadnik, if she thought what was going on in Immanuel was ‘racist.’ Certainly not, was the reply, because if she thought it was racist, she would be against it. (But she’s not, and ipso facto, it is not racist.) Jewish schools do have the right to select their students; in fact, back in New Jersey, a haredi day school had refused to accept her children because of the family’s connection to Chabad. She didn’t like it, but the school had the right to do so. Finally, none of us had gotten the full story because we only read newspapers like the Jerusalem Post.
One thing I am getting better at over the years – far from perfect, but better at – is not arguing with everybody over everything. You don’t think that X is Y? Leave it alone. My personal estimate is that there is at best a two percent chance of changing someone’s mind about anything. And even if I did change someone else’s mind, so what? But this woman was absolutely right about one thing; I didn’t really know what was going on in this situation. In fact, up until that moment, I hadn’t followed the story in any depth because I didn’t want to know what was going on, just as I hadn’t made it a point to follow the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the sex abuse scandals plaguing the Vatican. If people want to create their own interpersonal train wrecks, don’t expect me to be interested. But as I did have an opinion on the Immanuel situation, it behooved me to have a better sense of what was going on. I know that this is atypical behavior for most people, but I’m funny that way.
Without overwhelming anyone with the dreary details – and believe me they are dreary – , the story seems to be something like this, as best as I understand it: there is this town here in The Land called Immanuel (which means in English, ‘G-d With Us’; perhaps it should be renamed to ‘G-d help us’) and a lot of haredim live there including members of the Slonim Hassidim. More recently, a growing number of Sephardic families have moved into town, and many were desirous of sending their daughters to the local Beit Ya’akov School. However, it was felt by the Slonimers that most of these Sephardic girls come from families whose level of observance does not meet their standards: they may have subversive devices like the Internet in their homes; they may have an uncle who has a TV; possibly they daven with the standard Sephardic pronunciation which most of us use, not the way the Slonimers daven; things like that. To make a long story short, as I understand it, all of the local girls were put into a new facility, divided in half: separate classes with a wall in between, separate staircases, separate entrances, separate areas in the school yard. We are talking S-E-P-A-R-A-T-E with a vengeance. No way the girls in part A were going to mingle with those in part B! The rigorous school has a population of three quarters Ashkenazim and one quarter Sephardim; the not as rigorous school is comprised almost entirely of Sephardic girls with a couple hands-ful of Ashkenazim (clearly the local ‘riff-raff.’)
After a series of unsuccessful attempts to change the situation, a group representing some of the Sephardic parents petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court for redress. Led by its only Sephardic member, the Court insisted, and we’re talking about with less than a month to go in the school year, that the status quo was illegal and that the schools must be integrated immediately – like that day. When the Slonimers refused to accept this decision, the Court ordered the affected parents to begin serving a jail sentence for contempt. This did not sit well, to say the least, with the Haredi population, and, amidst fiery speeches by some of the rabbis, tens of thousands of Haredi men attended rallies to protest the court’s decision. The chief rabbi of the Slonimers is on records as having said that this was the worst tragedy to have befallen them since the Second World War (I have no idea what that was supposed to mean) and that he and his followers would rather face a firing squad than give in and change the situation in the Haredi school.
There is a lot to consider here, assuming one is in the frame of mind to consider, i.e., actually think – not regurgitate somebody’s party line or assume a defensive crouch and yell. For one thing, there is the way Israeli schools are funded; like many ‘private schools,’ the Beit Ya’akov schools receive some government funding. To what extent should the government be involved in matters of curriculum and policy when they are paying part of the cost? What interests me even more is the on-going relationship between the Haredi community and the government. Do they – yes or no – consider this to be a Jewish state; and if not, what is it? (more than I can consider here.) If there is a conflict between rabbinic authorities and a duly elected government, who gets to decide? However……….., let’s take a couple of steps back and consider the matter in a broader context. To set the stage, let me begin with a personal anecdote and a short history lesson, courtesy of my teacher, Nachum.
There came a time when we were growing up, when our mother (may her memory be a blessing) saw fit to begin leaving my brother and me alone in the house. And what did the two of us do with our new found freedom? We fought bitterly. Often. Why? You can posit any number of reasons, but ….bottom line….because there was no one to stop us, no mom, no big sister, no baby-sitter. It took us quite a while to figure out some way of getting along, but in the end we did. Now, consider the Jewish people in a similar vein. From the time our nation was split into two kingdoms following the death of Shlomo Hamelech until the time of the second expulsion – when we couldn’t agree on whether to fight the Romans or seek an accommodation with them – we have been at each other’s throats. In the process, we lost most of our twelve tribes, who simply vanished without a trace. Why were we fighting amongst ourselves? Because there was no earthly force to stop us. (You can say that it was vastly more complicated than that; but, the same bottom line, was it really?) For the last two thousand years, what’s left of us have been scattered among the Nations, and they have taken turns being our (not-so-nice) baby-sitters, and most of the time we have been too busy hiding from them to bother with each other. But not always. Several weeks ago when it was the Shabbat when the section of the Torah called Chukkot was read, Nachum reminded us about the public burning of thousands of volumes of the Talmud in Paris in the year 1242 C.E. It seems that there was a student who didn’t get along with his rabbi and wound up going to the Church authorities to ‘rat’ on the Talmud; they needed little convincing to burn every copy they could get their hands on. Watching this catastrophe was Rabbeinu Yona (this was the time of the rabbeinus [our rabbi]; not my rabbi, or his rabbi, or their rabbi, but our rabbi. What a concept!), which caused him to have an amazing insight: Only forty days ago, we, and I was one of the chief instigators, burned copies of the writings of the Rambam, because we considered them heretical, right here where the Christians are burning our Talmud. Can there be a connection between these two events; is this a Divine punishment for our sins? Rabbeinu Yona reconsidered his position on The Rambam and ultimately wrote his ethical masterpiece, The Gates of Repentance. There are to this day Jews who fast on the Friday before Shabbat Chukkot in remembrance of what the Catholic Church did to us. Is anyone fasting to atone for what we did to each other, burning the Rambam’s work?
There were plenty of scuffles during the time of our dispersion: for example, the Chassidim versus their opponents versus the secularists, but our infighting was limited by geography. It would have been hard to work up a good tussle between the locals in Slonim and Algiers. But then, all of a sudden, we were miraculously able to return to The Land and the fun began. I’m sure that there were idealists around sixty two years ago who thought that with the in-gathering of the exiles we would all work together to build our Nation in Our Land: dance the Hora together, things like that. It hasn’t worked out all that smoothly – as you may have noticed, assuming you were paying attention.
Several weeks ago, I came upon an article, together with a photograph, in Haaretz. Apparently, a number of Chabadniks moved into Ramat Aviv, a very pricey, secular neighborhood north of Tel Aviv proper. Being Chabadniks, a couple of the guys went down to a street corner and looked for customers to put on tefillin. Did that get the neighbors upset! There was a demonstration with people carrying signs saying “Ramat Aviv is not B’nei Brak.” While the demonstration was bad enough, the article was even worse. Haaretz has a collection of leftist loonies whom they let out of their padded cells from time to time to write vitriolic articles. The journalist the paper chose to write the article used it to attach anything which is important in Judaism, and that Ramat Aviv must, must, be kept free from any taint of our ancestral religion. Imagine what would happen if all of a sudden people wanted to pray anywhere near Tel Aviv University and the Diaspora Museum? Why, everyone might start to sprout a long, white beard overnight – even the women! Personally, I think the Chabad movement is somewhat weird; but if there can be a Chabad House in Katmandu, why not in Ramat Aviv? I understand that whatever activities these folks are up to, it started with the absolute love their rebbe had for each and every Jew; and as far as they are concerned, the most worthy thing a Jew could do is to reach out to his fellow – no matter how estranged from the tradition the latter might. It’s just that the Chabadniks don’t have to be so annoying about it. Likewise, the secularists writing for Haaretz don’t have to be quite so hostile; I guess it comes with the territory.
So where does that leave us with the Slonimers in Immanuel (G-d help us), who are seeking a separate education for their children? If you ask someone, like the spokesman for a large American Haredi organization who is paid the big bucks to sit in Washington D.C. and pontificate, it’s perfectly acceptable for Haredi parents to educate their children how and with whom they want. (In a recent article I read, he even compared the Sephardic families who petitioned the Supreme Court to Bull Connor, the segregationist who physically opposed school integration in America. Yes, you read it right. That’s what he wrote. You’ll have to ask the good rabbi by what convoluted logic he arrived at that remarkable conclusion.) One can debate endlessly whether the Slonimers were acting within the framework of the law or not, or whether the law should allow them to do what they were doing. Can I tell you something? That’s not my issue. I don’t care either way. I’m much more interested in what the Slonimers are trying to accomplish and why. AND what effect their actions will have on others.
I stumbled on an article in the Jerusalem Post which I think sheds light on the subject. Peggy Cidor’s beat is the Jerusalem City Hall, and she described a City Council meeting which had taken place almost a decade ago. It was 10:30 at night, and council member Shmuel Yitzhaki (Shas), known for being politically incorrect (my kinda guy!) rose to speak: “My dear colleagues, forgive me for keeping you up so late, but my conscience will not allow me to remain silent any longer.” What was on his mind? There were twenty three Sephardic girls whose mothers kept calling him to do something for their daughters, who were being kept out of Beit Ya’akov schools in Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, this was not a one-shot affair; he got these calls every year. Cidor related that one day Benny Cohen who was then head of Jerusalem’s Haredi Education Department gave her the following explanation of what was happening and why it should not be considered ‘racism.’ “In Ashkenazi haredi families, when a member leaves the religion, the rest of the family ostracizes him. In some extreme cases, they will even sit shiva for him or her because they fear an eventual impact on the other children. They would rather sacrifice one child than jeopardize the rest. But in Sephardi families you can find a haredi son, a religious Zionist, a traditionalist and a totally secular child. They all respect their parents, share the same holiday or Shabbat meal and remain a rather close-knit family. It may look warm and beautiful, but Haredi Ashkenazi families look upon it differently. They are afraid of a girl who might visit an aunt who has a TV at home and perhaps dresses in a way that is too provocative in their eyes. So they will never accept a girl whose family has a ‘problem.’” In Jerusalem, where there are many schools, every girl ultimately gets into some school, even if it is not her choice; there is much less of an option in a small community like Immanuel (G-d help us). In either community, the process does little for these girls self-esteem, but that does not seem to be part of the equation..
Reading Benny Cohen’s explanation I thought to myself, that is an absolutely dead-on description of our Sephardic neighbors across the hall. They must have four or five grown children, and they are beginning to collect an impressive number of grandchildren. There’s almost always a carload or two of family members arriving just before Shabbat. You can stand in the hallway and listen to them singing Friday night and the children playing all through Shabbat. If you are invited into their apartment during the week, you can see the family pictures hanging together n the salon and the dining room. You would also notice the huge TV, tuned to a qualifying round of the World Cup (what we call soccer in The States, if you haven’t been following). If you want to judge people by their clothing, then it would seem obvious that each of our neighbors’ children has chosen a slightly different religious path. I guess none of their children would qualify for a Beit Ya’akov school – assuming that the parents would want to send them there.
Why am I writing about this? Please take my assurance that this is not meant as another bash-the-haredim article, which are as common these days as the local cats at our garbage bins. I admire this group (the Haredim, not the cats!) for the strength of its convictions, their eagerness to repopulate the decimated world Jewish community, their interest in learning Torah, their commitment to chesed for themselves and others. It’s just that…….if you think Israel gets bad P.R., these folks get much worse – which is sort of where I’m coming from – although I’m sneaking up on it from behind. I never pretend to be a Torah Scholar, or even a Torah scholar, and I try to confine my comments to those areas in which I have some understanding. One of them is the concept of G-d judging us with rachamim (mercifully, overlooking our faults and focusing on our good deeds) versus din (strict justice, just the facts), and of course we are always beseeching G-d to show us mercy, for we are what we are, even though our ancestors were virtuous. (At least mine were; I don’t know about yours!)
So what about us? If we are asking for mercy for ourselves, shouldn’t we try to show a little rachmones for the next guy. And if we insist on employing the strictest standards for our fellows (your grandmother’s sister has a second cousin-by-marriage who wears pants; you’re not getting into my school) or making up standards for criteria which don’t even exist – like the kind of shoes a prospective son-in-law wears to shul on Shabbos – well, what should we expect from the Supreme Judge? Then there’s the concept of midah k’neged midah, which means, more or less, than what you do to the next guy might come back to bite you if you’re not careful. Rabbeinu Yona figured that one out pretty darn quickly: You wanna burn the works of the smartest guy of your generation, I’ll show you some REAL book burning. Wait ‘til the Bishop of Paris gets through with you First learn to behave towards one another, and then we’ll worry about a blatt (one side of a page) of Gemarrah.
Now I don’t claim to have any inside information on these matters; so this is just a wild guess on my part. Maybe, just maybe, our frenzied zeal to be critical of one another, he did that, she didn’t do that, is mirrored in the insane lengths to which the nations of the world are going these days to judge us (we don’t care what your reasons are for blockading Gaza, you killed nine people on that flotilla; doesn’t matter if they were armed and would have killed your soldiers….) You want din, I’ll give you din in spades. You want to be contemptuous of a duly constituted court, I’ll show you what a court can do (and Sholem Rubashkin is given what is essentially a life sentence, way out of proportion to his offence. Funny, there were no riots anywhere in Haredi America over that.)
Time for a spritz of Pinat Hama. Time to remember all of the good deeds by so many people here in The Land (and you guys stuck in Exile). Wiser heads prevailed as regards to Immanuel, and for the last several days of the school year, all the girls (those with and without a blemish) were able to sit together and participate in some kind of a program without any recourse to a firing squad. Perhaps I might give some advice to the esteemed Rabbi of the Slonim Hassidim: be careful what you say; somebody out there might latch on to your rhetorical excesses and think it’s a good idea.

It's Just an Ocean

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Some of you are old enough to remember this hoary maxim (although in my day, more cynical minds had shortened it to “All work and no play makes jack [money]). We in the Casden household are firm believers in that aphorism – in its original form – for we are neither dull nor wealthy. Even though neither of us is gainfully employed, we are still putting in a lot of effort and have well-established routines, which we can easily get caught up in to the exclusion of life around us. A simple remedy for the I-can’t-do- such-and-such-today; I-have-to-do-the-laundry syndrome is to get off our duffs and go on a tiyul to somewhere in The Land; although it’s usually Barbara who has made the initial suggestion and yours truly who is initially resistant (every marriage needs a pusher and a pushee). Often my hesitation stems from financial considerations; but that was not the case as far as the proposed trip to the old city of Jaffa was concerned. Here it had to do with the need for us to be on a bus out of Ma’ale Adumim at 6:15AM, an hour which I normally don’t ‘do.’ Of course, in the end, I succumbed to my sweet wife’s wishes. We could, after all, sleep on the bus (we did; we did). And Jaffa was left on a diminishing list of places which we visited in 1980 and have not been back to since. No doubt, there would be plenty to photograph, and the laundry and the shopping would wait another day.
And so, on the day after my efforts with my Ethiopian student, chronicled in my most recent article, we set out on the frightfully early bus which would take us straight to Tel Aviv, where we would get a second bus, one which would meander through that city and forty minutes later bring us to the best known landmark in Jaffa, the migdal schaon (the clock tower). Fond memories of this Ottoman monument, in whose shadow we had some unforgettable couscous and chicken thirty years ago. I have remarked to Barbara about our failure to have kept better records of some of the places we went to on our first trip. Not that this restaurant, or other places of fond recall would still be there today; but it would be nice to know where things were and what’s there now. (What isn’t there now in old Jaffa is the kind of kosher place where one can get a coffee and a pastry at 9AM, so I wound up spending eight shekels for a four and a half shekel container of yogurt, although the Arab grocer did throw in a plastic spoon at no extra charge.)
It turns out that there were two English-speaking tours which began at the aforementioned clock tower at 9:30 that Wednesday morning: one, the regular tour which goes on every Wednesday and is FREE, and a private tour sponsored by an organization which is held every so often and for which there is a forty shekel charge. Now I’m convinced that some of you are running out to place your bet with your favorite bookie as to which one we went on; but, not so fast, because for once you would be wrong. Barbara, not even thinking about the regular tour, had signed us up for this special tour, touted as going to unusual places which the regular tour wouldn’t go to.
Sometimes I have no choice but to reveal details that are not so pleasant, all in the service of ‘a fair and accurate account,’ a stern taskmaster in the best of times. Otherwise, I would gloss over the way our tour began. The woman who was our guide began by climbing onto a two foot high pedestal to address the group and ten seconds later, descended and put her head between her knees, in obvious distress. One of the other women led her off to ‘the facilities,’ from which she emerged fifteen minutes later, having up-chucked whatever had offended her digestive system, ready to resume her work. But she was not herself; or at least we hope she would have been more in command of the situation on another day. The group reassembled and we headed off through a side street, definitely off the beaten track, where stopped for an explanation of where we were. As our guide began speaking, Barbara pointed out to me a doorway with the following legend in large white letters on a sky blue background written vertically and horizontally: B-R-O-N-X. (Homeland, homeland, you’re forever in my memory…) I sensed that there was a fine photograph there, but I couldn’t take it just yet. Half of our group was blocking my view. No matter. The sign wasn’t going anywhere; I would wait until the lady was finished talking and would move on. She continued to talk and continued to talk, and after a while, those of us with cameras began peeling off, in search of something to photograph. I moseyed around, keeping an eye on the group. Sometimes one has to be patient. F-i-n-a-l-l-y, she finished talking and moved on, leaving me to get my photograph.
The pattern continued. The guide would stop somewhere and talk and talk. Barbara, whose role it is on tours to actually listen in case the leader is saying anything of interest, reported that whatever message she had, she was not staying on it. People would distract her with irrelevant questions, and off she would go on a tangent, like the fact that the eucalyptus is the second tallest tree in the world (only the California redwood is bigger). Now I’m not writing this to complain. Half of her group chose to listen, and the rest of us were free to wander around, fairly confident that if we returned ten minutes later, she would still be there. Thus I got to take many more photographs than I would if I were constantly running to keep up with the guide.
And what a place to wander around in! What a collection of amazing streets with eclectic stores! There were shops chocked filled with wild stuff like a 1920 vintage windup Victrola (why do they always ruin it by putting an LP on a machine that was designed to play 78 RPM shellac disks?). Some had huge collections of lesser-value items (a/k/a junk). I could have been back at a Brighton Beach flea market, where one man’s drek is another man’s gelt. There were stores with legitimately old furniture in better or worse condition, and I suspect that every restaurant in town was furnished with idiosyncratic tables and chairs obtained locally. Another block was filled with restaurant supplies, second hand stainless steel sinks of all sizes and shapes, just the place if you want to buy a machine to make the sludgy ice café that is ubiquitous here in The Land. In fact, as we passed one of these stores, the proprietor came out with little cups of some kind of iced desserts to cool us off. But how did it happen that all these stores wound up on adjoining streets in this old city? There is a story here, and while the tour leader was trying to explain the history of the area, in general, her audience was too distracted to discern a coherent thread to her narrative about a city dripping with history.
Then we changed direction and began walking up a hill, and suddenly we were passing some beautiful buildings in the Bauhaus style. What were they doing there, when were they built, and by whom? At that precise moment in time, someone spotted an ice cream store across the street. “Ooooh, can we stop for ice cream?” The entire group including the leader traipsed across the street. I looked at my watch and then at Barbara. It was now twelve noon, and the tiyul was scheduled to end at 12:30. The nutritional effect of the eight shekel yogurt I had eaten at 9:15 was dissipating rapidly, as was my attention span. It was time for lunch, not ice cream. We said goodbye to the group and headed off.
Earlier in the morning, we had spotted a kosher dairy restaurant on one of the streets, and we made a note of where it was, trying to create the same kind of mental map that you would need if you had deposited your car in an enormous parking lot. (My friend Ron tells this great story of when his parents were at Disneyland and his mother thought she had everything under control. She knew exactly what section their car was parked in, except the sign didn’t say 1N, it said IN…) Because this was, all in all a good day, the restaurant was exactly where it was supposed to be, and we hastened inside, out of the sun and into the air-conditioning. We had our choice of tables, all different, with similarly mismatched chairs; again, this being de rigueur in Jaffa. The English speaking waitperson came over to explain what was on their extensive menu and to give his personal recommendations – it took him almost as long as our tour guide, but for him I was all ears. The food was very good, but the coffee was, as they say, to die for, probably the best cup of cappuccino available on the planet.
[Note: the following is an official, authorized digression: When we arrived in 1980, the only coffee available here, as far as we could tell, was ‘bots’ (mud), Turkish strength coffee that you would prepare like instant. By 2004, the world-wide coffee revolution had arrived in Israel, and now you can get better coffee here than I was getting back in The States. Regular American style is not as common in restaurants, but cappuccino or hafuk is ubiquitous and generally speaking is better than what you would get at Starbuck’s. Technically, there is a distinction between cappuccino and hafuk (opposite or upside down), and it has to do with whether the coffee or the frothed milk is poured in first and the strength of the coffee, but it’s all the same and it’s all irresistible – which is not good for my reflux disorder.]


After a leisurely lunch, we were ready to resume our perambulation – this time self-guided – through Old Jaffa, heading up to the park and down to the beach, passing a series of inexpensive meat and fish restaurants along the way. Oh yes, we passed by what looked like the beginning phase of an archaeological dig. Wouldn’t you know it; several days later, we read about the week’s Hareidi riot. Where? In Jaffa. About what? An archaeological dig. I showed the article to Barbara and said, “I’ll bet you I know where they were rioting. How did I know???
It was definitely déjà vu all over again as that well-known man of letters, Yogi Berra once put it. We were walking up a hill with a wooded park area to our left, and, yes, I remembered that exact spot from 1980 although I hadn’t been certain where it was. Here we were in the non-commercial, restful part of the old city, filled with monuments, statues, artifacts, old Christian churches and monasteries for those of that persuasion, small museums, something called the Wishing Bridge, an amphitheater. Simply a wonderful place to take in the scenery, which includes a stunning panoramic view of the Mediterranean, looking as blue as ever, and the shoreline of Tel Aviv. It was there, sitting on a bench out of the direct sun, when we met a couple with their two sons, one post-bar mitzvah and one pre. I had noticed the man because, even though he was wearing a cap, he looked a tad too sunburned for comfort and I assumed he was a tourist. We noticed that they were speaking proper American English, and they noticed that we were doing the same, so we got to talking. He told us that the he was born in The Land and his parents had moved to The States when he was a young child. They had spent the day running all over the place. His two sons thought that the Palmach Museum, which they had visited in the morning, was cool; but by the middle of the afternoon, their attention spans were in dwindling in the heat of the day. The father called his older son over to the edge of the promenade to look at the view. The boy reluctantly walked over and returned to his mother moments later. “It’s just an ocean,” he announced. The father tried something similar with his younger son, with about as much success.
Time for them to call it a day. They told us, but I don’t remember, where they were staying, but it was somewhere in the area near the shore. The fellow, who was involved back in Atlanta in the financial sector, was talking about booting up his computer and getting some work done. For what he needed to do, it mattered not a whit if he was in an office with his tie on or on the deck several thousand miles away in shorts. No one would know, or needed to know where he actually was; as far as anyone knew, he was a phone call or a computer screen away. The marvels of the modern world! I have no idea if he actually intended to get to work or whether he was merely ruminating on the possibility. But I have seen that expression, that wistful look, too often here not to recognize it. “I could be here; I’d like to be here; in truth, I want to be here. But my being here is an illusion. I am chained to my life in Atlanta/Teaneck/Cleveland/London. My children, who go to ‘Zionist’ schools, are as interested in living here as they are in the blue waters of the Mediterranean. My wife is the co-chairperson of our Sisterhood; the thought of any of her children serving in the IDF horrifies her. We have three more days here, during which I can engage my fantasy that I am here to stay. Then we are going back to reality. By the time Father’s Day arrives in a few weeks, we’ll be in the backyard having a barbecue, and the whole trip will be a distant memory. Maybe we can get back here for a week or two in four or five years, or when one of my sons spends his one and only year in yeshiva here.”
Barbara and I took our last look around before heading back to the bus stop. I kept thinking of what the older boy had said, “It’s just an ocean. It’s just, it’s just. The two most dismissive words in the language. It’s just our homeland; it’s just The Land we’ve been yearning for the last two thousand years. It’s just that spot where the enormity of the world’s water meets the tiny bit of land we are trying to hold on to, to develop, to live in. Is it air conditioned? Is it in 3-D? How far is it?
The stop for the bus which would return us to the Arlozeroff station in Tel Aviv was not near where we had gotten off in the morning, and we spent fifteen minutes looking for it before we stumbled on it. It was on Yerushalaim Boulevard. Of course. The street in Jerusalem which begins at the gates of the Old City and keeps going is……Jaffa Street. It’s the same street. In days of yore, one would disembark in Jaffa after a perilous journey across the It’s just Ocean, and head east on that to the City One Could Only Dream About. Today that old road has been superseded by modern highways and you don’t get the same effect as you would making the final ascent to Jerusalem – on a donkey. It’s just a road.

Az ma?

It’s nice being retired. It’s nicer being retired in The Land. It’s nicest still being retired as an English speaker in The Land because then there is always the possibility of tapping into a HUGE network of opportunities to volunteer and do something interesting. Stuff you probably wouldn’t get a chance to do elsewhere. You think there’s any chance that I would get to be listed as the editor of a Hagaddah if I had stayed in Teaneck? No way!
Now I have another venue to use my well-honed writing skills in our never-ending battle to bring English language literacy to Israel (not to mention the yeshiva world). Sometime before Pesach, there was a posting on the Nefesh B’Nefesh e-mail group on behalf of Hebrew University. Their English as a Foreign Language Department was soliciting for a few volunteers to serve as tutors for some of their weaker students. (Even though it’s called Hebrew University and, by and large, the courses are taught in the language of The Land, in many subjects the textbooks are in English; and the students have to be able to read fluently in this universal tongue. Believe it or not, there are kids who grow up here in English-speaking homes who sound like they are from New Jersey but who can’t read a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.) I saw the post and thought to myself: Is this a volunteer job right up my alley, or is this right up my alley?
So every Tuesday, when Barbara is heading off to Hadassah-Mount Scopus to volunteer in their Occupational Therapy Division, I am about a mile away at the university, trying mightily to get S____ up to speed in his third language. My student arrived here from Ethiopia when he was fifteen and he has picked up enough Hebrew to qualify for university. English is another matter. Here is someone who, quite frankly, would have been a weaker student in my very slow eighth grade English class in J.H.S. 113 Bronx – where I labored for two years. However, he will not fail his level one course; even if his efforts to master English are insufficient, he will not fail. For better or worse, the Department has decided to have rachmones on this young man – who took time off from his studies to do his miluim (reserve army duty) when others wouldn’t have bothered to show up. It’s not a matter of misplaced liberal guilt. The sentiment on Mount Scopus is that this young man has gotten this far on sheer determination, and if he can get by even with a sub-standard understanding of the English language text books, let him at least try. They are going to construct the equivalent of the target which has been painted on the barn after the archer has shot his arrows. He will pass!!! Nonetheless, I am spending two hours a week trying to teach him strategies to extract information from articles in which he knows only some of the vocabulary – which is exactly what I was struggling to do in Hebrew during my Ulpan days.
The articles which the Department of English as a Foreign Language uses in its 178 page stapled-together book (Social Science-Humanities, Level One) are models of brevity and clarity and it was relatively easy to show S____ where to find main ideas and summarize what he has read. But then came the kicker. He had to take an article from one of his regular classes and prepare a summary of that for his English class. As S____ is majoring in international affairs, or something like that, he chose an article, the subject of which his teacher had discussed in class – in Hebrew.
To the day I die (may it not be soon), I will remember with regret the day I first set eyes on “Europe’s Border Relationships and Internal Migration Relations” by Andrew Geddes of the University of Sheffield (which for those of you who are geographically challenged is somewhere in England, which is why they spell funny.) Here’s the Abstract:“This article explores the impact of the changed border relationships within and between EU Member States on the increasingly important external dimension of migration and asylum policy. The article distinguishes between types of borders and identifies key patterns in the post-cold-war migration policies of Europe. It then links these to new forms of international migration relations between EU states and their neighbours.”
But suppose the article’s abstract had been written on the annual I-Cannot-Tell-a-Lie-Even-If-I- Want-To Day. I suspect it would have come out quite different, perhaps something like this:“This article has been written mainly to satisfy the university’s policies on publishing. It allows the author to make reference to fifty two other publications on the subject. The author does not claim to have any original thoughts or ideas or anything new to add to the discussion, although he hopes that you would not have noticed that on your own.”
I took S___’s article and asked the office staff to make another copy for me. After stapling it together (my copy is stapled on the left; his on the right), I began reading it with increasing trepidation. How was I going to fit it into the neat pattern I had constructed for my student: Usually the main idea of an article is contained in the first paragraph; therefore, so there’s no point in going on if you don’t understand the first few sentences. Here the first part is the introduction; it doesn’t say anything, so let’s skip it altogether……… The author maintains that it is important to distinguish between three kinds of borders, territorial, organizational, and conceptual. We can put that distinction in a summary; so what’s the difference between them? Territorial borders we understand. What about the other two? “Organizational borders are not necessarily co-terminus with territorial borders.” And then, “Conceptual borders can be but need not necessarily be co-terminus with territorial and organizational borders.” Are we working on a summary or a flow chart? My general rule of thumb is: any time you see the word ‘co-terminus’ used in a sentence, understand that the user is trying to dazzle you with you-know-what; don’t waste your time trying to figure out what he means because he doesn’t mean very much. This article is the very model of a modern verbal enema, and even I was afraid of tackling it.
We were working on this article for three weeks and the summary for two, and during our last session, S____’s teacher, whose first name is Peter, came in to check on our progress. He mentioned that each of his students was required to give a two or three minute presentation, describing the article being summarized. The point of this exercise was to get the students used to speaking in English in front of a group. He and I both understood that S____ was not fully prepared for the task at hand, but, as always, we would do our best.
So I turned to my student and asked him to start talking about some of the main ideas in the article; we could start from there and do some polishing. So S____ began with the three kinds of borders. What else? What are the reasons why people move from country to country? He continued: to work, to study, to join with family members, to seek refuge (being from the University of Sheffield, the writer did not consider that people might move to another country to restore a homeland from which their ancestors were driven from two thousand years before; but we’ll let that pass). And then the following question, which I re-phrased several times to get a response: do all immigrants have the same experience when they get to the same new country? No. Why not? What does the article say about different kinds of immigrants? With prompting, S____ continued: there are highly skilled and lower skilled migrants, seasonal workers, family migrants, and asylum seekers. (Again, nothing about zealots.) And depending on varying demographic distinctions, one’s experience in adjusting to life in a new country is markedly different.
I looked at S____, and I had a flashback to the morning almost three years ago when we arrived on our Nefesh B’Nefesh flight, and the frenzied welcome we received: dozens of female soldiers and hundreds of well-wishers; a reception with government officials, speeches – too many of them; refreshments; the whole nine yards. In the midst of this hoopla, many of us noticed a minibus transporting twenty or thirty Ethiopians who had also landed that same morning at Ben Gurion airport – to much less fanfare – and we burst into applause. Whether they heard us or not, I have no idea. The contrast between the two groups of olim couldn’t have been more striking. They were probably on their way to the Spartan accommodations of an absorption center. Most of us were headed to apartments, cottages, villas of our choice which we would be renting or had purchased. All of the Ethiopians’ possessions would fit inside some of the large canine crates that a number of our delegation had brought – once you removed the family pet, of course.
There is always the knee-jerk reaction: look at the discrimination; see how the Ethiopians are being treated compared to the royal reception we are receiving. But once one’s knees have been returned to their proper anatomical position, consider the following: consider under what conditions most emigrants from Africa historically have been ‘invited’ and given ‘free tickets’ to scenic places like Mississippi – not of their choice. It is certainly not Israel’s fault that some olim arrive with college degrees and serious employment qualifications and others can’t read or write. All are welcome and all will receive the same package of benefits. But there is no way around the fact that our and their klita (absorption) would not be the same.
I did not describe my experience in so many words to S_______, but even bringing up the subject got a response from my student: after all, he was one of those arriving here with absolutely nothing – at least materially. At which point, I brought up the matter of az ma. (Did you think I would give an article a title and never refer to it?)
Here’s an expression I’ve encountered more than once on the streets. The first time I heard it was in a conversation between two guys walking up Hamitzadim, where we used to live. The first guy said something and the second guy answered with these two Hebrew words. The first guy continued speaking, and again az ma. This went on for about five minutes until the two of them passed out of my range of hearing. The literal meaning is ‘then what,’ which can have more than one nuance in English. If I have it right, az ma is more of an interrogative challenge: ‘so?,’ ‘what next?,’ but ultimately, ‘why are you telling this to me?’ As I explained it to S____, if you are writing or speaking, there has to be an az ma, there has to be a reason why you’re taking someone’s valuable time; you have to be saying something of interest. You have to make your audience care about what you’re saying, something which our friend from Sheffield most likely didn’t consider. If S____ just repeated that there were three kinds of borders, and four major reasons for migration, and five distinct classes of immigrants, (and perhaps a partridge in a pear tree), would anybody be interested, let alone stay awake?
I explained to my student that I am on occasions required to speak in public, as I was recently at my older daughter’s wedding, and I am usually successful in keeping my audience’s attention. Those who know me understand that it’s not because my speaking voice is so mellifluous or my diction so clear – neither of which is the case. It’s because I only talk (or write about) what I know, what is important to me. I told S_____ that I sent out an approximate version of what I said at the wedding, to which I had received a response from friends in The States, suggesting that I might be asked to prepare a similar speech when their daughter got married. Now I don’t know if they were saying this simply as a compliment, but I asked S____ if he thought I could prepare the same kind of effective wedding speech for someone else’s daughter. He pondered the matter for a minute or two before replying “no.” “He’s learning,” I thought. Of course, it would easy for me to have gone through this turgid article on borders and migration and put together a few choice thoughts for S____ to regurgitate, but would it be the same as if he had done it himself? Would it have the same az ma?
S____ would soon be giving his presentation to a class of his peers, students whose common denominator was a weakness in English. Some of them were foreign students, some, like S____, were themselves immigrants. But the rest? Surely their parents or their grandparents had made the difficult journey from Elsewhere to The Land. There are, after all, only so many seventh generation Yerushalmis at Hebrew U. Would any presentation on migration patterns be of interest to the group; would his be? Could he, would he make it interesting? That would be entirely up to the young man I was tutoring. Would he get his mojo and his az ma working? We’ll soon find out.

And this is what I said.........

At least it’s as faithful a reproduction as I can put together; I invariably speak without a script or a teleprompter (unlike certain people I won’t mention). But as best as I can remember, this is what I said.
“Let’s begin with the obvious. Welcome, and thank you for coming from several continents to share our simcha. Thank you on behalf of my wife Barbara and myself as well as Sara and Tibor Berkovitz.
“Shortly after Tina told us that she and David were going to get married, she asked me to say a few words at their wedding. No problem. It was a long way off so I would have plenty of time to prepare something. And now, it’s the twinkling of an eye later, and here we are, and here I am, and I have to stop thinking about what to say and actually say something. So I have a few thoughts I’d like to share with you.
“Invariably, when there’s a wedding, what’s the one question that people ask? How did the couple meet? So Barbara would explain that Tina and David met at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Oh!? But sometimes a story begets another story, and an answer begets another question. What do you mean they met at Rutgers? Was it that simple?
“Consider that Tina, our beautiful bride {applause} was born in Odessa and came to Brooklyn with her family when she was eight, and because of some unfortunate circumstances came to live in New Jersey with people with whom she had no previous connection four years later. And David, our handsome groom {more applause}, what about him? Well, he was born in Romania. His family came to The States from Romania? No, they went first to Israel. Oh, they went to The States from Israel? No, they left Israel and went to Paris. And then they came to The States? No, then they went off to South Africa. We’re running out of countries. Then they went to The States? Then they went to The States. Did they also go to Brooklyn first? As far as I know, they didn’t go to Brooklyn. They went right to New Jersey. Anyway, it’s not so obvious that Tina and David would meet. If you wish to consider this an act of Divine Providence, you are free to do so, and I will not dissuade you from that.
“There is something else which is not so simple. Barbara and I are of an older generation, which I define as being born before there was a State of Israel. For how long when we talked about building a bayit ne’eman b’ Yisrael, did we mean it in a general sense, creating a home among the Jewish people. It certainly did not mean ‘in Israel.’ How many generations of Jewish men and women could not get married at kibbutz Netser Sereni near Tel Aviv. The closest they came was when the groom broke the glass (which David did so well; it took me five times when I got married) which is supposed to remind us that the first Temple was destroyed, the second beit hamikdash was destroyed, and the third one has not yet been rebuilt.
“But I have a more immediate explanation. Sometimes our path seems strewn with broken glass. Jagged edges and broken glass. Not only that, sometimes we are the ones breaking the glass – at the most inopportune moments when everything is going well. Perhaps this is just a cautionary warning to newly married couples.
“There is perhaps one possible remedy for this problem. Looking around tonight – and this is true at most weddings – I see happy faces, good will, best wishes. Imagine of you could save that feeling; let’s say you could smush it all into an aerosol can. You can call it ‘Wedding Cheer.’ And any time the couple was facing the jagged edges, the broken glass, they could just do a spritz, and the room would be filled with good old ‘wedding cheer.’ Simple.
“Of course, there is no such spray can available. And maybe those are the tasks for this generation: to rebuild the Third Temple and to create the Wedding Cheer spray can. So Tina and David, you’re on your own; you’ll have to create the wedding cheer on your own. And I have full confidence that you will. Because I think you have stumbled onto the secret.
“Generally speaking, couples getting married are in love. But that first blush of love can fade faster than the flowers that are usually grace the tables at a wedding (note: David and Tina used small potted plants; a lot cheaper.) You also have to like each other. You have to be willing to invest the time and energy into caring for each other, nurturing each other, helping each other reach their potential. And I think you will do that.
“I have this vision. You see that gentleman over there taking pictures (pointing to the official photographer). Someday years from now, but it will be in the twinkling of an eye, a young person will be looking at one of the photographs from this wedding – it may be in an album or on a wall – and will say: ‘You see that couple. Those are my grandparents. Or those are my great-grandparents.’ No pressure! ‘They look much older now, but they are still the same loving couple as they were then. I hope that someday when I get married, we will be as nice as couple as they are.’
“I have one more thought. When I finally got married, and later when my brother finally got married, and we would all be together with my mother, she would look at Barbara and my brother’s wife Abby, and she would say: ‘I don’t have two daughters-in-law, I have two daughters.’ And she considered Barbara and Abby to be her daughters, and you weren’t going to convince her otherwise. So I say, if it was good enough for my mother, it’s good enough for me. So I say, we don’t have a son-in-law, we have a son. And we hope we have your permission, Sara and Tibor, to share David with you. And because I believe in fair play, you have our permission to consider Tina to be your daughter.
“With that I will conclude. But I have one question: does it get any better than this? If it does, let me know where.”

A Day in the Negev

You know what I say? If you’re in The Land, and it’s Chol HaMoed (the intermediate days of Sukkot or Pesach), and you don’t go on at least one trip to somewhere, anywhere in the country, you might as well be in Poughkeepsie. That’s what I say, and who is going to argue with me?
That said, we had nothing at all planned for this Pesach; (as is often the case, my reporting is one full holiday behind, since Shavuot is almost upon us) at least until Barbara spoke with June (the June of June and Jeff). She had found a JNF tiyul on line; they were going, and did we want to join them? Barbara started to describe the itinerary to me. I cut her off; if June and Jeff are going and you want to go, sign us up. In other words, quit while you’re ahead. Maybe if you tell me where we’re going, I won’t be that interested. This way, worst case scenario, I’ll get out of the house, spend the day with friends, and avoid the perils of a journey to Poughkeepsie. And that’s how Barbara, Natania, and I got to join our friends and a bus load of Anglo-Israelis and State-side tourists on our JNF fun-filled day in the Negev.
It turns out that I was right (no surprise there). If I knew in advance that our first stop was going to be the Israeli Air Force Museum, my level of enthusiasm would have dropped precipitously. The world is filled with museums, ranging in interest from The Louvre or The Smithsonian Institute, down to the Stalin Museum in Volgograd. It ultimately depends on what turns you on, or as the Romans of yore were wont to say, De gustibus non est disputandum. One man’s meat……….. I think you get the idea. I have the fondest memories of an afternoon spent twenty years ago eyeing a collection of antique cars in a Shaker barn in the town of Sandwich on Cape Cod. (In my idiosyncratic scale of things, there are few things as lovely as a 1954 Oldsmobile, turquoise or pastel pink.) I could spend the better part of an hour gazing at a display case of Bakelite radios like the ones that used to grace our kitchen table (c. 1950) on E. 208 in The Bronx. But airplanes as a rule don’t do much for me: something to get on and off as quickly as possible once you’ve gotten where you’re going – just grateful that you arrived in one piece. . But the Israeli Air Force Museum is more than 140 randomly discarded outmoded aircrafts spending their final days at rest on a concrete field on the outskirts of Be’er Sheva. If you walk around and take the time to read the signs, or, in our case, listen to the young lady who was the museum tour guide, you realize that each of these airplanes has an amazing story.
But before you begin the journey down aviation Memory Lane, there is the present and the future to consider (nostalgia is not a big ticket item here in The Land). There is first and foremost an indoor display which includes a mockup of the cockpit of a contemporary Israeli jet fighter, how it is equipped and the incredible protective gear which the airmen are given. We are not even going to discuss the megabucks all this stuff costs or dwell over the disparity whereby private individuals and groups are scrounging up money to provide socks and underwear to the regular combat units. No sir, we are not going to tread – not even tippy toe – over this political landmine, the allocation of never-enough resources. But that’s the raison d’etre of this museum: to make the case for the Air Force as the greatest of its size in the world and its central role in keeping Israel safe and secure, going back to Israel’s Day 1.
Speaking of which, you have to begin with an Avia S-199 (a Czech modified Messerschmitt), the only survivor of the original four planes that together were the Israeli Air Force in 1948, and which shot down two Egyptian planes that had bombed Tel Aviv. It doesn’t look like much by today’s standards, but that plane – together with the men who piloted it – was somehow part of G-d’s plan to bring us back to The Land and keep us here. It’s easy to understand that without this rudimentary defense system, there wouldn’t be much of a Tel Aviv today; the White City would be what city?
In an Aviation Museum, there has to be room for the random and the bizarre. On another row of planes there’s the one that landed itself, a large cargo prop-plane with big wings. On one of its flights, for whatever reason, the pilot was forced to bail out over northern Israel. The air force spent several days combing the area, looking for pieces of the wreckage, until a call was received from a bewildered farmer inquiring as to why there was an IAF plane sitting in the middle of his field. Somehow, this aircraft without a pilot glided down and landed itself with hardly a scratch. Now, this kind of thing can’t happen; but there is that plane, in one piece, to tell the tale.
Not all of the planes were originally Israeli. Some were trophies, enemy planes brought down in combat. There were at least two that were flown to Israel by Arab pilots defecting from their own air forces, incredible stories of derring-do in their own right. As I said, each aircraft in this outdoor museum has a reason for being there. By far the most popular plane was the Boeing 707 which people were lining up to board. Back then, that would be July 4, 1976, this very plane was used to ferry the freed hostages from Entebbe back to safety. And if that wasn’t enough, for an encore performance, this very plane then was used to ferry our brethren out of Ethiopia in one of the airlifts out of there. Close your eyes and try to imagine either one of these ventures and what it must have been like: a cabin filled with desperate people, jammed together; probably no flight attendants going around offering pillows and serving soft drinks. This plane is now used as a mini-theater, and there we were, sitting quite comfortably, watching a film to promote the IAF.
Andy why not promote the IAF? Isn’t that what this world of ours is all about: letting people know who you are and what you’re doing? That’s certainly what the JNF has in mind when it arranges these trips: to show the folks (some of whom – not us – might have the do-re-mi to contribute big time) where and how the money which is raised in The States is being spent. And a lot of it is being spent on a massive effort to get folks to live in The Negev (as well as in the Galil).
Now none of this is new. It was obvious back in the days of Ben-Gurion that it would be important to populate an area that was at least half of Israel’s land mass, and it’s been kind of a dream ever since. In the more down-to-earth world of lines and arguments in which most of us are forced – reluctantly – to reside, there is something called the National Planning and Building Council which developed a master plan to encourage the decentralization of the Israeli population precisely into areas like The Negev, and this by 2020. What I’m going to tell you next will probably shock, shock you, but I can’t help that. While cities like Petach Tikva, Rishon Letzion, and Rehovot have already reached their projected growth target for the next ten or twenty years, Be’er Sheva, as of 2007, was going backwards, losing population. Right now, less than ten percent of our population lives in this enormous – for us – land mass.
A point to remember is that this is not the 1950’s when some government official could dump planes full of Moroccans into out of the way areas like Beit Shean and then forget about them. Nowadays, it will take more than a laminated plan replete with charts and illustrations sitting on some official’s desk to get people to go somewhere. Into the breach, filling the void are established groups like the JNF and smaller organizations, including the Or Movement, a group I had never heard of before.
Our tour bus circled through an older part of Be’er Sheva, the kind of area that you can find in lots of communities, a place which, with just a little push in either direction, can either decay into a slum with vacant storefronts and poorly tended buildings, or can be revived into something really nice, cheerful bustling streets with interesting stores. In short, a perfect place for the Or Movement’s regional visitors center! If we had come a week or two later, this office, made from two adjoining buildings, would be open and ready for business. But as we stood in front, we could see guys carrying in computers, and as we toured the facility we could see the finishing touches that needed to be done. We had the opportunity to meet with Ophir Fisher (a relative of the cantor and recording star, Dudu Fisher) one of the founders of this organization, who had come to the sobering conclusion a few years back that either Jews settle the Negev or the 200,000 Jews living in Be’er Sheva could one day be surrounded by a growing Bedouin population. Ophir stood in front of the building as workmen were going in and out and he offered up his vision for the future of this city and this region, with a projected influx of several hundred thousand people over the next decade. The linchpin of his plan is this Center as an place to bring people who want to find out about the region and to provide prospective residents with services (like Nefesh B’Nefesh does), helping them get information about employment, housing, schools, and transportation.
Several weeks after our trip, I clipped out an article from the Jerusalem Post about a similar attempt at urban renewal, which was entitled “Pushing for a better tomorrow in 8,000-year-old Lod,” which reported on an event held by the Lod Community Foundation “to help showcase the city’s promise and raise support for the various initiatives taking place there” in a community best known for poverty, crime, and drug trafficking. Avishay Braverman, who is a government minister and ought to know about these things, said in his address that “If you wait for the government you will wait a long time. If you take the initiative you will carry the government on your shoulders.” I thought that remark was perfect, and it describes better and more succinctly than I could ever put it, the mindset of Fisher and his colleagues. If you have a good idea and you begin to implement it, you can push the government into providing assistance. (Much like Nefesh B’Nefesh got the Jewish Agency to improve its efforts regarding aliyah from the West.)
For several years before we took the plunge and made aliyah, I remember seeing advertisements from the American version of the JNF about Blueprint Negev, their plans to develop the region. The rest of our tour was to show off three of their projects in various stages of completion. One of them, more or less a blueprint for future endeavors, is Givot Bar (wild hills),a fledgling community, one of several under construction, now home to a few dozen families. What’s the recipe? Create a plan, get some a commitment for some land, prepare the infrastructure for a town, start building nice, affordable housing, get a few dozen families with the pioneer spirit to move in, and in a few years there will be 200 families in a well-planned community with parks, schools, and synagogues, a train-ride away from Tel Aviv. It’s not that difficult if you do it right. Repeat the formula a few times, and you have something.
It’s probably easier to create something from nothing than if you’re dealing with an existing city like Be’er Sheva, one which is seen as a ”stagnant backwater, culturally and geographically isolated from modern Israel….” (that’s from the JNF brochure). The reference to backwater is particularly apt because running through the city from east to west is Nahal Be’er Sheva, in fact a river for a few days of the year when it is filled with water from the flash floods that occur during the winter rains. The rest of the year it was, de facto, a dumping ground for unwanted stuff, a dreary place that any sensible person would try to avoid. Never mind that this area includes the ancient well route where the patriarch Avraham walked. Well, what do you do? You clean up the garbage and you start building a park. You plant thousands of trees; JNF is good at that! You build nature paths, gardens, the whole nine yards. Now people want to be there. Suddenly, the area becomes HOT. As we rode by on our bus, we could see high rise apartments, recently built or under construction. We traveled on a street with several commercial malls. All of them faced away from the river; except the new one just being built. That one will be looking towards the new park. The rest of the plan will follow by degrees: a botanical gardens, hotels, an amphitheater. You know, none of this is, using the well-worn expression, rocket science. It just takes some thought, a lot of effort and a considerable amount of money.
Speaking of ‘considerable,’ we had been on the road for quite a while, and by then most of us had worked up a considerable appetite ( you are free to admire my graceful segue to a new topic). The high point for me of any trip is of course lunch. Lots of times on these trips we all brown bag it, but who wants to bring along a bag of broken matzohs? – it was Pesach, after all. Our tiyul included lunch, and so our bus brought us to a restaurant in one of the aforementioned malls for a Kosher LePesach meal. The large establishment was crowded with families off for the holiday; our group was ushered upstairs to a private dining room where we were served a delicious meal. To be more precise, we were served half a meal. Folks, here in The Land, except for certain high-end places that cater to Western tourists, almost every restaurant open for Pesach will offer a Sephardic menu. ‘Kitniyot’ is not an issue. (I feel confident that if you went around and asked the diners heaping rice on their matzohs what the term ‘gebrochts’ meant, you would get some fantastic answers: “a dread disease?”; “a German football team?”; “part of New York City?”) Anyway, they served portions of carefully censored items to our busload of Ashkenazim. You needn’t feel sorry for us; we still had plenty to eat. And then we were back on the bus, back to the new riverfront park in downtown Be’er Sheva for a festival!!! Not just A festival, but the first annual Chol Hamoed festival.
I’ve been to these kinds of events before; they’re usually meant for kids. The usual stuff: face painting, places to jump up and down or to climb through. But that’s a good thing here in The Land, which, if nothing else, is child-friendly. We spent an hour or so wandering around through the various activities, taking time to check out the old bridge (Ottoman?) which is still standing. The young man in a Theodore Hertzl t-shirt who was taking us around told us that they expected, on this first day of the festival, about 20,000 visitors. People were obviously having a good time; they would go home and tell their friends, and there might be 40,000 people there the next day, many of them non-locals traveling to Be’er Sheva just for the festival, including the people who would come just for the evening’s concert.. The year before, there was no festival, no concert, no one there. A few years before, all there had been where we were standing were broken mattresses, tires, parts from abandoned cars, and the like. It’s not too much to hope that with all this effort by the combination of the JNF and the Or Movement– with the Israeli government limping along – there will be a renaissance here in historic Be’er Sheva and the region surrounding.
The final stop on our JNF tour would be, once again for us, Sderot. One could easily start the following train of thought: If it would take a considerable effort to start new communities in the Negev, more to revitalize Be’er Sheva, an ancient city dripping with history, the gateway to the Negev, the home of Soroka Hospital and Ben Gurion University of the Negev – in short, a place with a lot going for it – what about Sderot? What does Sderot have going for it? Not too much. OK, it is by default the largest community in the western Negev and people from the region go there to do their shopping. And it does have that wonderful hesder yeshivah which we visited a while ago. And Sapir College is nearby, and there are a few factories. But that’s about it. Sderot was always a place to dump new immigrants, who had little say in the matter. Perhaps its biggest tourist attraction is the kassam ‘museum,’ the repository for a sample of the missiles sent their way by the friendly folks in Gaza. Perhaps someday there will be a project for artists of all kinds to go there and turn each of the hundreds of public bomb shelters, one by every bus stop, into an outdoor gallery of sorts, a major tourist attraction. But not yet, sad to say.
Unlike at the festival in Be’er Sheva, or unlike on any day in Ma’ale Adumim, you do not see the children of Sderot – and there are many of them – at play on the streets or in the parks. There is a fifteen second rule, and while that might sound like a regulation in a basketball game, here it is deadly serious, with the emphasis on ‘deadly.’ From the time one hears the alert siren, there are only fifteen seconds to get into a shelter; that’s the time before the kassam which has been detected will land somewhere and, on a ‘good’ day for the Arabs, explode. One of the miseries of growing up here is that you always have to know where the nearest shelter is and calculate how long it would take to get there. So kids are usually inside and that does not mean enjoying the comforts and the recreational facilities of an American home.
The JNF just built the Sderot Indoor Recreation Center, the largest of its kind in Israel. The work was done in ten months (itself a miracle in Israel, where very little gets done on time) at a cost of five million dollars. Talk about money well-spent, money used to change people’s lives BIG TIME. Here you have it. This big blue building, planned and run by the community, is its own ‘festival’ every day. For a nominal fee (and no child is ever turned away for lack of it), kids can always go there to bounce and climb, to hang out, to use the computers (donated by local businesses); and in an emergency, everyone is a few seconds from a safe room. But this day, because it was the Pesach vacation, there was a special treat, a theater group performing for hundreds of children and their parents (You thought there wouldn’t be a stage for music and plays???!!!) There’s one thing they almost had. Someone thought to put a merry-go-round smack-dab in the middle of the largest area. But then, somebody else asked, how long would it take for this apparatus to come to a stop if there were a ‘situation’? Twenty one seconds. Scratch that idea. Maybe this is not ‘normal,’ but, as the saying goes, when you have a lemon, make lemonade. We left the big blue building, passing the concession selling kosher for Pesach pizza which looked dangerously like the real thing.
All that was left of our adventure was the ride home. Me being me, I couldn’t help but needle my friend a little bit. “Jeff, that would be the perfect job for you.” He understood what I was getting at because he was the one who had told us about the regulations here in The Land. Every official tiyul has to have a licensed tour guide, and every bus or car used for a tour likewise has to be licensed. So even though the entire narration during our trip was done by Ariel from the JNF, they had to hire an official tour guide who in total must have contributed a hundred words of his own. Easiest day’s pay he ever made! And they do these trips as often as once a week. As soon as Jeff finishes his tour guide course, he should apply to be an official guide for the JNF! In case you didn’t realize it, there is no course, official or otherwise, to be an Israeli blogger. People like me just have to wing it. Oh, there is one requirement: you can’t be an Israeli blogger unless you’re living here in The Land. Sorry about that, but a rule is a rule.





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How Two Kittens and an Oven Door Met a Wandering Aramean

“No rest for the weary!” Certainly not around Pesach time, for many of us. Certainly not for your inveterate correspondent. I had completed my last article describing the finding of abandoned kittens and the smashing of an oven door, and I was looking for a short respite after the holiday while we prepared ourselves for the wrecking crew coming to demolish our old kitchen and preparing for the installation of a new one. Suddenly there was a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping on my e-mail inbox door. Could it be Edgar Allen Poe’s raven? No, it was only XXX, one of my long-suffering readers, who wanted, needed to know, what happened to our oven door? Never mind that we were struggling to keep two week-old kittens alive. Never mind that I had promised in writing to continue my saga ASAP. My old friend could not wait an instant longer to find out the denouement. Perhaps she too had been without an oven at some critical juncture of her life and over-empathized with our plight. Perhaps she was being dragged along, kicking and screaming, by Idle Curiosity? Whatever the reason for her interest, I felt her pain and resolved to make every effort to continue the saga. So, in the midst of the pounding and the smashing, the plumbing and the wiring, the dust settling and the pigeons flapping in and out the open windows, Yom Hashoa, Yom Hazicharon, and Yom Haatzmaut coming and going, I began – with multiple interruptions and serious delays – the continuation of my saga. If nothing else, I was determined to silence the tapping, the gentle rapping on my inbox door.
We might begin with a question: what on earth does one feed a week old kitten who has no mother? Natania’s solution was to dilute regular milk, warm it up, and try to feed it with the eye-dropper which we fortunately have. OK for the short run; kittens cannot thrive on human milk, but we were hoping to keep our charges alive until the next morning, Friday, when our local veterinarian, Dr. Donny would have office hours. Natania, the good scout that she is, kept getting up every few hours whenever these wretched creatures would wake up and begin emitting their pitiful bleats of hunger. At 8:30 AM, Barbara was on the phone with the service company, who assured her that our oven door had indeed arrived and it might be ready for pick-up later that morning. By 9AM, I was at work starting to prepare our Shabbat meals. All the dishes had to be stove-top preparable, but I could certainly handle that. At 10AM, more or less, Barbara and Natania were on their way to the vet’s office in Kikar Yahalom, the old shopping center.
The kittens were pronounced basically healthy by the vet, and Barbara went off to the several pet supply stores in our community in search of powdered kitten formula. Not surprisingly, none was to be had, and my wife settled for infant formula from the supermarket – better than cow’s milk for our purpose. Before she left the vet’s office, she had asked him if by chance he knew anybody in town who had a nursing mother cat who might be willing to take on two more charges. Donny said he did not, and that seemed to be the end of the matter. We were now the official life support system for two tiny orphaned felines; just what we needed. Mimi, our resident feline, a solitary creature by habit, would not be happy. So my wife and daughter and the two unnamed specimens returned home. I was now turning out dishes left and right, hoping to get our Shabbat cooking done as early as possible. (I should also mention that the day in question was the first day of Daylight Savings Time in The Land, so we had plenty of time until the official candle lighting time.)
And then, the phone rang. It was Doctor Donny. Somebody had just come into his office with a nursing female cat with nobody to nurse. Something or somebody had attacked her and killed her kittens. He had just anesthetized her and stitched her up. Was it possible? Could there be a shidduch in the making!!!!!!!!!!! The cat’s owner agreed to take the nursing kittens on two conditions: one) they would do their best to protect them from harm, but he could offer no guarantees as to their safety; two) when they were properly weaned, we would agree to take them back. His family had another pregnant female and enough was enough. We, of course, were desperate; a life raft is a life raft. We weren’t likely to get a better offer. Natania and I hightailed it back to Kikar Yahalom with kittens in basket and arrived just as Asher’s large black cat was coming out of the anesthesia. We placed the two kittens in the box with the mother cat and offered a silent prayer. The black kitten, who had been harder to feed with the eye dropper, sized up the situation and immediately attached his mouth to Mrs. Cat’s nipple and began to feed. The white kitten, the one who had been more willing to take sustenance from the eye dropper, seemed to be clueless. He/she kept climbing over the big cat’s back going who-knows-where, no matter how many times the vet returned him to the proper place. The mother cat began to wake up and lifted her head to see what was going on. What was percolating in her mind? Did she think these two were her original kittens? Cats apparently recognize their own offspring by smell. Had these two been climbing over her long enough to absorb the mother’s odor? Or was Mrs. Cat simply too weak to object? Perhaps she was that rare philosophically inclined specimen who saw these new kittens as a cosmic reward for her travails? It is unlikely that we will ever know the truth; and I am at peace with my uncertainty. We exchanged contact information with Asher, and Natania and I bee-lined it out of there, still offering silent prayers that this would work. My daughter called them before Shabbat started; mommy cat was grooming her foster children – a good sign. Their children were fighting over what to name these new arrivals – a very good sign as far as we were concerned. We had this vision of a flock of kids crying out, “Mommy, mommy, can we keep Lancelot and Guinevere?” However, I just heard from Asher and his wife: the kittens are doing fine and will be ready for separation from foster mommy in a few weeks. Oh, and their other cat just gave birth to five, count ‘em, five kittens of her own. So it seems that we will be stuck with them. Get ready, Mimi, for some company.
There is one other piece of information which I should mention. It was raining that morning in Ma’ale Adumim, something it doesn’t often do that close to Pesach, so all of us were dodging rain drops whenever we left our apartment. We got back from the vet and shortly thereafter the phone rang. Sherut Gur. “Your oven door is ready.” (Remember the oven door????!!!!!) I looked at the clock and reckoned that I could just about make it there before they closed at 1PM, but, as I said, it was raining, and who wants to shlep an oven door in the rain? Plus how much adventure can one person handle in a day? “Can I come in Sunday morning?” “Of course.” That would certainly give Barbara enough time to bake her renowned Pesach chocolate cakes, the kind that all of you want a slice of – whether you know it or not. More time for me to keep cooking for Shabbat.
We were planning a low-key Shabbat, one without company and without the usual leftovers – a good part of our normal weekly menus; but in the end we decided to invite one of Barbara’s friends to join us. She mentioned how grateful she was; if she needed to prepare her own meals, there would have been no way she would have had time to clean her apartment for Pesach. I was suddenly reminded of our holidays back in Teaneck. One family with whom we were good friends, had spent Pesach at a hotel for many years, courtesy of her parents. As a token of gratitude, our friends would always invite a number of their friends for the meals the Shabbat before Pesach, so that these families, all of whom would be at home for the holiday, would have an easier time getting ready. I have fond memories of those meals with lots of happy, grateful people around the table, which custom, sadly, has now come to an end. The wife’s mother died this past year; the father is now living with them, and Pesach for the family will now be in Teaneck. The other families will have to fend for themselves before the holiday. Another fond Exilic memory up in smoke, just like the bread in Jeff’s huge barbecue grill to which everyone could come and burn their hametz. Jeff and June are now in Jerusalem, and it’s too far these days to their apartment off Rehov Jabotinsky to join them for Jeff’s version of Texas toast.
Sunday morning, I was up and out early, in hot pursuit of an oven door, although I did make a stop first at an out-of-the-way wine store which had been advertising a pre-Pesach sale on Israeli ‘boutique’ wine, a bargain at four bottles for 180 shekels. However, whatever small amount of money I saved buying wine, I more than made up for ransoming our oven door. Somehow, the ‘labor charge’ was five hundred shekels, meaning the total cost of rectifying my clumsiness was over a thousand shekels. At least they bubble-wrapped my door for me before sending me on my way, poorer but perhaps wiser. I needn’t tell you that I let Barbara and Natania put the door back on its hinges. Barbara was now ready to start baking her cakes and I could lick the chocolate in the bowl and relax.
I have always wondered what it would be like to spend Pesach at a hotel, meaning you can arrive early and loll around while the hotel staff busies itself with all the necessary preparations. You would certainly have time, if you were so inclined, to review the Hagaddah and some of the commentaries on it, and you would have the added bonus of arriving at the Seder table relaxed and refreshed. The down side, of course, is that you might have to make do with someone else idea of a Seder, which in a hotel, can be something of a problem. And it might set you back a month’s salary for this luxury. But now I think I have an idea of what it would be like.
This year we got lucky. Not only were we invited to the Seder with our friends Ron and Esther (for the third year in a row), but we were invited out to other friends for lunch as well. So all our meals were covered, and we had little left to do. (As you all are aware, because we live in The Land, there is only one day of the holiday at the beginning and one at the end; we get time off for good behavior.) I had only two chores to do on Monday, make some charoset for Tina to take back to Tel Aviv with her and then go through the ritual of burning the remaining chametz. Absent Jeff’s barbecue pit, I was resigned to going down to the street and trying by myself to burn what that I had kept in reserve. But there was Eliezer, an elderly Sephardic man who lives in apartment #4 below us, to the rescue. He had made his own campfire next to the garbage dump and was making Moroccan toast. I had just kept two pitas for my offering; he seemed to have an entire bakery to dispose of. Or else he had been saving up bread to burn since Purim. Why do things half way? I dropped my piddling pitas onto his fire, thanked him, and returned to my kitchen. I took out my Pesach food processor, whose main raison-d’etre is pulverizing the ingredients for our Ashkenazic charoset: apples, walnuts, cinnamon, and sweet wine. I usually make about a quart of the stuff. Again, why do things half way? Besides, it’s yummy.
That task accomplished, I had the rest of the day to relax, just as I would have at a hotel, and prepare myself for Ron’s Seder. I had been going through the Haggadah little by little for several weeks, and now I would have time to review everything one more time. There would be no pool to sit by and no deck chairs to sit on, but I could at least sit on my own balcony\\on my own folding chair and admire the view.
I had hoped that ‘my’ Haggadah would be finally be available (the English language version of Rav Shlomo Aviner’s commentary, translated by my buddy, R. Mordechai Tzion, which lists yours truly as the editor) but it’s still not out after a year and a half delay. It still might be ready before the Jerusalem Light Rail project – my benchmark of comparison – which now has an official start date in April 2011. I am not holding my breath on either account.
As a consolation prize, I had bought myself a Haggada with a commentary compiled from the study notes of the great Torah teacher, Nechama Leibowitz, whose textual approach was to point something out which needed clarification,, offer her students suggestions, and make them come up with their own solutions to the difficulties. What a novel idea! What got me going was something that has always bothered me, and my discovery that I was in good company. In the Haggadah, there is a reference to a passage in The Torah in which it says that when the Jewish people were to enter The Land, they were to offer their first fruits as a sacrifice and recite a paragraph which begins: “Arami oved avi.”
The ‘official’ translation of these three enigmatic words is, according to Rashi, the medieval commentator who seems to be the be-all and the end-all for many people for what things in The Torah or The Talmud mean, “The Aramean (that is, Lavan) sought to destroy my father.” The text continues, “and he (my father??!!) went down to Egypt and sojourned there; and he became there a nation…..” This interpreation always seemed to me to lack a critical element of coherence, but I have never been able to express my skepticism as well and with as much authority as the fifteenth century commentator, known by his nom de plume, Akeidat Yitzchak, “All of my life I was puzzled by this verse….For in truth, according to the simple meaning of the text, Lavan did not seek to destroy Yaakov…..And even if we assume that he intended to harm him, what is Lavan’s relevance to ‘And he went down to Egypt’? (Go get ‘em, A.Y.!)
Even earlier, Shmuel ben Meier, the Rashbam, the son of Rashi’s daughter, who seemed to delight in disagreeing textually with his grandfather, interpreted these three words to mean that the patriarch Avraham was a wandering Aramean – wandering and exiled from the land of Aram. One of the earliest commentators and Biblical grammarians, known to us as ‘the son of Ezra’ gave a succinct explanation why you would have to torture the syntax of these words to make it mean what Rashi says it does, adding “But it is more logical that the Arami is Yaakov, and the verse is saying that when my father was in Aram, he was poor.” (Ibn Ezra, he’s our man; if he can’t do it, no one can!!!)
Of course, I brought this issue up at the Seder, and I mention this only to preempt the skeptics who would wrongly assume that we “cheated,” skipped something, rushed through everything, in order to get done at the incredibly early hour of about 11:30. I’ve noticed an interesting activity, one which has probably been going on for longer than I’ve been alive. It’s called the ‘When did you finish?’ game; that is to say, how long did your Seder drag on until? (perhaps akin to ‘How much water did you get in your basement after the recent downpour,’ or ‘How long was your power out for?’) We know that it is a mitzvah to retell the exodus from Egypt, but I feel confident that nobody gets any ‘points’ for time wasted in the effort. We’ve all heard about or been part of Pesach horror stories when the Seder were very late in starting because the assorted teenagers present insisted on bickering on and on about who wouldn’t be caught dead sitting next to whom; and then some of the guests waltzed in an hour late; or it was the children were quarreling over whose turn it was to recite the ‘divrei Torah’ which they had spent the entire month before Pesach copying off the chalk board in their yeshivah, so that, in effect, they were running the Seders with their parents functioning as referees; or the relative who has to be invited, even though he doesn’t want to be there, whose role it is to ask the same annoying questions year after year, ignoring the fact that someone patiently has given him the same answer for the last ten years – because he’s only asking the questions to annoy you PLUS prove that the wicked son is not just as construct, but is alive and well. These are just some of the many sure fire recipes for wasting time and diminishing the joy of those assembled.
Ron and Esther are very good at avoiding these and other pitfalls. We could officially start the Seder a little after 8PM; we, in fact, started exactly at 8:15 because all of us were there on time. Ron and Esther’s daughters and a friend had made place cards for our assigned seating, so we were sitting where we were supposed to within one minute. All the stuff we needed to begin was ready ahead of time. We went around the table, each person reading a paragraph in Hebrew or English, depending on their linguistic capabilities. If anybody had a question or something brilliant to say, there was time for that. We didn’t rush, but we didn’t dawdle. We ate a leisurely meal, finished the rest of the Hagaddah, and, lo and behold, everyone at the table was still awake at the end. That’s an accomplishment worth trumpeting!
We were able to get a good night’s sleep, and I showed up the next morning at our beit Knesset, Musar Avicha, no later than a lot of other guys. As I mentioned before, we were invited out for lunch as well where we continued overeating. I remember quite clearly my train of thought as we were walking on that beautiful afternoon back to our apartment after the meal. I’M FREE! I DON’T HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN! I DON’T HAVE TO GO BACK TO MITZRAYIM FOR A SECOND SEDER!
The purpose of the Seder is to enable one somehow, some way, to recreate for oneself the experience of the Jewish people leaving Egypt. We start the Seder by holding a piece of Lehem Oni, poor man’s bread, a symbol of our affliction, and we end it by singing about our fondest dream, a rebuilt Jerusalem. Having symbolically escaped from Egypt the first night and being physically a bus ride away from Jerusalem – albeit in an ‘un-rebuilt’ state – every day of the year, why would I want to go back and repeat the harrowing experience a second time the following night? Would you want to repeat the fourth grade after you’ve finished college?
The first part of Pesach was over, but there was still something tapping, gently rapping on the cortex of my brain which I could hear even over the banging and the clanging in our kitchen, until I suddenly realized why it wouldn’t go away. It was the business of the differing interpretations of Arami oved avi. It occurred to me that, taken together, the ‘someone’s out to get us’ part and the ‘wandering Aramean’ motif, they sort of sum up much of Jewish history. Whether or not Lavan was actually seeking to destroy us, a lot of other folks have been, for real, for a very long time, up to and including the present day. And collectively we have certainly been wandering, dispersed, powerless, throughout much of our history. What is so distressing today is that even though, with G-d’s help, the historic process of our physical re-unification is going on before our very eyes, we are in many ways acting as if we were still wandering in the desert, scattered, weak, and confused. Maybe that’s why I prefer the second interpretation, because perhaps we need to focus our attention on ending the Exile – not only physically, but in the ways we think and act. And so, everyone, all together so everyone can hear, “I AM NOT, WE ARE NOT, A WANDERING ARAMEAN. And let us say Amen.