"Here's the Plan," or A Jaunt on the Temple Mount

“She made me do it!” Blaming one’s wife for whatever has happened is the oldest documented excuse known to the human species. So one should be sparing in its usage. In my relationship with my wife, it is usually closer to the truth to say, “She encouraged me to do it!” That is how I wound up on the Temple Mount this past Thursday: out of a clear, blue sky (and there is a lot of that this time of year in The Land), Barbara laid on me that she was planning to go on a tiyul up to what we consider the holiest spot in the world, and wouldn’t I like to join her on this venture?
Up until that moment, I had pretty much decided to keep off the Temple Mount, at least out of respect for the position of many rabbis who oppose the practice at this time – even if that position made absolutely no sense to me. And what would be the point? You have to make special preparations before you go; you get hassled, can even get even arrested, by the Israeli authorities and/or the Muslims if they think you are doing anything wild, like praying, or looking like you’re praying, or possessing any book or object that would assist you in praying. And when all is said and done, what is there to see? All remnants of what was important to us has been destroyed or removed either a long time ago by the Romans or very recently by the Muslims. So what force of logic, nature, or destiny brought me to the site of our holy Temples-past and future? Herein lies the tale.
What initially prompted me to reconsider was Barbara’s retelling of her conversation with N.K., the guide leading the tour. He told her that this was going to be a small group and if she knew of other people who might be interested…… Now N.K does not charge for any of his tiyulim (contributions to the several tzedekah funds he is involved with are of course appreciated), so it wasn’t a matter of how much money he would pocket for his labors. As he put, it’s important that as many Jews as possible visit the Temple Mount, “to show the government that we still care.” Well, if you put it that way… I have long since come to realize how much of what goes on here in The Land is a complicated battle over turf, bragging rights, and religious ideology; and sometimes the value of putting your heinie down somewhere – just because – is enough of a reason for doing something. Plus, I’m just as ornery and cranky as ever; if you tell me that I shouldn’t do something, you had better have a darn good reason – and I’m still waiting for something more cogent than “It’s forbidden because it’s forbidden.”
I have spoken with people here who say that they will not ascend to the Temple Mount because their rabbi forbids it. Fine. I respect their respect for rabbinic authority. But that has nothing to do with my decision. The rules for who may or may not be on Har Habayit and where one may go were pretty well established when there was a Beit Hamikdash, and it’s not clear to me who gets to override those rules just because a Temple is not now available for business and its attendant services have been temporarily discontinued. We also have some ‘heavy hitters’ who do permit this venture on our ‘Yes You May Dream Team.’ Our infield is made up of the great Rabbi Akiva and his three illustrious colleagues, Rabban Gamliel, R. Elazar ben Azariah, and R. Yehoshua, who were there together shortly after the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E., checking out the wildlife and speculating about better times ahead. A millennium later (in the year 1165C.E. to be precise), our center fielder, the Rambam, a giant among giants, did his own tour of the area. He is joined in the outfield by the Meiri, roughly his contemporary, who approvingly attests to visits there, and the 16th century Rabbi, David ben Zimra, the Radvaz, whose opinion on the location of the Holy of Holies was uncontested. Our catcher is the former Chief Rabbi Goren, who not only stood on the Temple Mount in 1967, right after the eastern part of Jerusalem was liberated, but held prayer services there with a Torah scroll and a shofar. Our starting pitcher? How about the great halachic decisor Rabbi Moshe Feinstein; while he never make the journey himself, he gave his approval to his son-in-law, Rabbi Tendler, who has made several trips when he has visited The Land. Oh, and R. Tendler will be available to come out of the bullpen. I almost forgot; we’ll need a designated hitter. How about Ovadia of Bartenura, who visited in 1448C.E.?
The manager of the No Team has not yet released his scorecard, so we don’t know for sure who his lineup will be. But I gotta tell you, I like our team’s chances in a seven game series.
But let’s take the opinion of the objecting rabbis at face value. Let’s accept for the moment the idea that we should not go up to the Temple Mount because we do not know the exact location of the Beit Hamikdash and the Holy of Holies, and therefore we run the risk of profaning the holiest spot on earth. OK. So we can’t be there, even though we may have made all the proper preparations and will take all the necessary precautions. But what about the Arab kids up there playing soccer? They get to stay? How does that work out?
For all these years, we were helpless (an understatement!) to prevent the ongoing destruction and desecration of this sacred spot; but now, it’s “in our hands,” and, in theory, we can do whatever we want. I don’t see or hear anybody, not rabbis of the National Religious camp or the Hareidim, clamoring to close down the Temple Mount so that the entire area will remain undisturbed until we once again have a High Priest and a sense of certainty as to what’s what and where’s where. Declare the whole area off limits and keep the invading hordes from trampling through it: “Construction Zone; No Trespassing. Future Home of the Bessie and Morris Cohen (Third) Beit Hamikdash. Work To Begin Upon the Arrival of the Moshiach, May It Be Speedily in Our Day, Amen.” Practically speaking, this may not be such a good idea, and don’t put me down as recommending it. But you get the point. As they used to say (although not in The Bronx), what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I can’t say that I understand the logic here. Imagine a street with fifty cars double-parked, and a cop comes along and the only one he gives a ticket to is – his wife. And he wonders why traffic doesn’t get any better? We are in theory ‘in charge,’ and all we’re doing is policing ourselves, and then only some of ourselves. Everyone else can park wherever they choose. As for other objections, let me deal with them as I continue this saga.

Barbara had already been in contact with a rabbi here in Ma’ale Adumim who moonlights as a librarian, someone with ‘Har Habayit experience,’ for information and advice on this project. He e-mailed me some material including “Guide to Ascending the Temple Mount for Men, Written by the rabbis of the ‘El Har Hamor’ Association in collaboration with HaRav Dov Lior.”, which includes copious information and very detailed instructions on appropriate preparation, going to a mikveh, etc., all of which I carefully perused before making a final decision. I knew that I was not supposed to wear leather shoes, a la Yom Kippur, and that I need to go to a ritual bath, but where would I find one for men around here? (Understand that my time in a mikveh is roughly equivalent to the lifespan of a canary in a Chinese coal mine.) No worries (or something to that effect), said the rabbi/librarian, there is one in Mitzpeh Nevo, the religious area. Just show up there – and he told me where it was – with seven shekels in coin of the realm and a towel, and you’re in. The best time to dunk yourself is right before the excursion, but just to play it safe, I got on the bus (it would be at least a half an hour walk in the hot sun) the day before. What I found out was, you can get into this self-service mikveh with your seven shekels between the hours of 4AM and 6:30AM. After that, you need seven shekels in coins of the realm PLUS a key-chain sized transponder – which you can purchase from a gentleman named Shelly for an undisclosed fee. I just want to go up to the Temple Mount tomorrow; I’m not planning on making this activity my life’s work; i.e., I wasn’t going to add anything to my keychain. I could somehow arrange to get to the bottom of Mitzpeh Nevo before sunrise the next day – a dubious proposition at best – or find an alternate plan. What to do? Speak with my mentor, Nachum, whose face lit up when I mentioned our planned venture. Turns out that every time one of their kids gets married off, they make it a family outing to go to the Temple Mount. Why don’t you go to the men’s mikveh in the Old City? Because I don’t know where that is. I will tell you where it is, which he proceeded to do. And so, at approximately 6:45 on D-Day, I could be found wandering through alleyways a few blocks from the Hurvah plaza in the Jewish Quarter (for those of you who know the area), looking for the place. Fortunately, there are people up and about at that hour in the Old City, and I found a nice man who showed me the way – to a doorway which I had passed twice without realizing that it was the place (there is no sign saying “This way to the men’s mikveh.”) Imagine a tiny locker-room area (minus the gym or the athletic field) next to another room with showers and two little pools filled with hot water. And a bunch of strange dudes who, for some reason, feel the need to immerse themselves at seven o’clock in the morning. Nachum was correct though : the place was clean, although a note for the future: bring toilet paper and soap. I said that the preparations wouldn’t be all that easy!
A quick search for a cup of tea, and then over to the main entrance to the Kotel plaza to meet Barbara and a friend and to rendezvous with the group and N.K., our fearless leader (We would recognize him in the white cap; actually it was off-white, but I’m willing to cut him a little slack). Why the white cap? We’re trying to be inconspicuous.
A friend back in The States had sent me a well-written article by the son of other friends about his “’Legal’ Trip To Har Ha-Bayit.” His leader had a very different approach from ours (and I’m not suggesting that either one is more valid), one more confrontational. This rabbi knew where one could pray secretly without getting caught, and he encouraged the young man, a Cohen, to recite the priestly blessing when they were as close as possible to where the Holy of Holies had been. This was not what N.K. had in mind. What he wants to do is to create a steady, but growing, stream of Jews of all factions and persuasions – properly prepared, of course – going up to the Temple Mount just to be there, to bear witness to our right to be there; and the cumulative effect of that will be (in theory) greater than the pious prayers of a handful of our most worthy brethren . His experience from over a hundred similar excursions was that if you look like you just came from your caravan on some remote hilltop in the Judean Hills, you will definitely be stopped, first by the Israeli security people, and your ID scrutinized very carefully. Assuming they let you through, the Arab security people on top will take over and dog you every step of the way. We saw such a group, and we witnessed the difference in the treatment we received. Our group (baseball caps, tzitzit tucked in, cameras in hand, just an ordinary bunch of tourists with no particular agenda) assembled at the separate entrance, all the way to the right at the main plaza. We went through the security, essentially the same as the regular check to get to the Kotel, without any trouble. Nobody stopped any of us, nobody asked for any ID; unless the x-ray machines would pick it up, nobody searched us for contraband like prayer books or the like. We walked up the new temporary ramp, the one whose planned replacement a few years ago caused such a ruckus, and there we were, on top of the Temple Mount, possible the most contested piece of property in the world, at 8AM, which, even during Ramadan, was pretty much deserted.
Perhaps at this point I should clear up a common misconception, that the terms ‘Har Habayit’ and ‘Temple Mount’ mean the same thing. As any number of people have pointed out to me, Har Habayit refers to the har, the hilltop on which the First Temple and then the Second Temple were built. During the reign of Herod ‘The Great,’ right before the beginning of the Common Era, the area around the Temple was doubled in size by building huge retaining walls – the Kotel being part of the western one – and filling in the area to create an enormous plaza, roughly thirty five acres, which I believe is the equivalent of thirty or thirty two American football fields. The Beit Hamikdash now became only a small part of the total area, most of which was used to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who came to bring sacrifices on the three yearly festivals. It is this enlarged area, Har Habayit and what Herod added, that now constitutes the Temple Mount.
There are those who insist that insofar as we cannot be certain exactly where the Beit Hamikdash was, and consequently we cannot be certain where the Holy of Holies was, we have no business taking the chance of violating the area’s sanctity. As one person I heard said in rebuttal, we may not know exactly where it was, but we certainly do know where it wasn’t: the area that Herod added on. That’s where we, and anybody else who is careful, walked – around the periphery. I had imagined that we would be, in effect, hugging the outer walls. In fact, there are paved paths, and one can easily circumnavigate the area counter-clockwise as we did; or if you feel like being contrary, you can do it clock-wise instead as one small group we met up with was doing (for the same reason as it is a custom to sit in a different seat in shul when you are in mourning.)
The first thing that you notice, once you have gotten over the “Oh my Gosh, I’m actually standing on top of the Temple Mount, I can’t believe this is happening” feeling and you begin to get your bearings, once you’ve been introduced to the cast of characters lurking around: a few well armed Israeli soldiers – who I’m sure were hoping that nothing ‘exciting’ happened while they were on duty, several members of the Israeli security police, and most important, the Muslim guards in their unofficial uniforms, blue shirts and dark pants, the guys who really run the show and whom you have to keep your eye out for – as they are doing to you; as I said, the first thing you notice once all that happens and you start to look around, is how enormous this place is and that it looks nothing like a place where our holy Temples once stood. Right by the southern wall, on your right, is the Al-Aqsa Mosque; don’t even try to get too close because you’ll be shooed away in an instant. Between that and the Dome of the Rock, all the way to your left is a rather spacious plaza in which there were maybe in total a dozen Muslim men engrossed in prayer. There were a couple of guys taking out plastic chairs from the Al-Aqsa to this plaza; why our guide couldn’t imagine because the Muslims prostrate themselves on their prayer rugs when they ‘daven.’ Once you walk past the mosque, you see on your right a collection of column fragments, ruins from Herod’s temple. I’m not sure whether they were there all the time, or whether they were part of the recent Arab excavation, their effort to obliterate as much as possible any and all traces of a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount.
At this point, the ‘game’ became obvious. The Muslim Thought Police were not going to follow us too closely; they had no reason too. But quietly, discretely, they were everywhere. Our guide had a lot to say – sometimes a little too much, a common fault among guides who do know more about a place than they can possibly share. Every time we lingered a tad too long in one spot, one of them would mosey over to where we were standing to make sure we weren’t doing something subversive.
If you keep going, you’re right next to another large plaza, presently covered with an enormous green tarpaulin, a giant size version of what we have on our merpeset, most likely there for Ramadan. This is the area where the kids usually congregate to play soccer. From there, you head north, then west, and then south, and you will have circled the Temple Mount. You will also have gone completely around the Dome of the Rock, an enormous, imposing structure. You can walk up the stairs close to the entrance, but there’s no way you can get inside. Actually, this is just as well because, even though this is now a Muslim shrine, only the Kohen Gadol (ours, not theirs) should be walking around inside, and only on Yom Kippur because this is where the Beit Hamikdash once stood, and this is where the Holy of Holies was located. To quote from the ‘El Har HaMor’ Association, “The central and most established position of both halachic authorities and archaeologists identify the stone under the Dome of the Rock as Even HaShtiah (the Foundation Stone) under which the Kodesh Kodashim was built. This is the position of the Radvaz and quoted by later halachic authorities.”
There is an enormous amount of written material documenting the assertion that the Holy of Holies remains under this Muslim building, from the testimony of the twelfth century C.E. traveler Benjamin of Tudela, to obscure material in the Cairo geniza (a burial place for holy material that is physically unfit for use), to non-Jewish sources. You can find references to this material in several websites. But, you know something: if you just stood on the Temple Mount (or looked carefully at an aerial photo) and noticed where the Dome is and then looked at any of the replications of Herod’s Temple, you might figure out this connection all by yourself. Their similarity of location relative to the four retaining walls sort of hits you in the face.. And why should that come as any surprise? By all accounts, the Muslims intended to build the Dome on the same site as the Temple; and when the Dome was built around the year 700 C.E., there was a lot more physical evidence and a lot more of a tradition where the Temple stood than there is now. But then was then, and now is now. Thirteen hundred years ago, the Muslims were eager to exploit the connection to our holy Temple; today, their authorities are just as determined to prove that we were never, ever, there. So there is the irony, funny and sad at the same time. All this talk about the Kodesh Kodeshim and how we might desecrate it. You can’t get near it. You would have to create a scene from an action movie: a SWAT team parachutes down onto the Temple Mount, sprays some debilitating gas to immobilize the Muslims, breaks open the imposing entrance to the Dome, and scatters through the whole building, concentrating on the central area where a piece of bedrock is exposed. But in real life, the chances in today’s political climate of a Jew planting his brogans on this hallowed spot is probably less than being hit by lightning or winning the Jackpot lottery. The Muslims? That’s a different story. They walk through there every day, and there are few of us who seem to mind this intrusion.
One more point. I recently read a statement by a prominent local rabbi which I found rather problematic. His argument against ascending the Temple Mount, beside the fact that it’s forbidden because Rabbinic authorities forbid it (except for those who don’t!), was that we are not ready to build the Third Beit Hamikdash. Personally, I have nothing against straw men; Indeed, I have fond memories of Ray Bolger in The Wizard of Oz. But there is a limit to their value, especially in an argument. Esteemed rabbi, you know full well that there is no connection, none, less than none, even more less than none, between Jewish people walking where we have an halachic right to be and an actual attempt, tools in hand, to start the building process as part of the Final Redemption – of course, first knocking down whatever structures are in the way. There are probably more people wandering around the area near the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall, thinking they are the Messiah, than there are having delusions of building the Temple in the next week and a half (we are not discussing the possibility that the building may miraculously descend from on high – our Heavenly Father having given up all hope that we will ever get our act together.) So what’s up with this not-to-be-taken-seriously line of reasoning?
Our tiyul was at an end, about two and a half hours after we began. Rather than return the way we had come, using the ramp in the Kotel plaza, we exited by one of the many side entrances (you can go out, but you can’t get back in – unless you’re an Arab kid with a soccer ball). There’s no ramp to go down because here the ground is level; the Turks long ago built up the surrounding area so that it would be as high as the Temple Mount. Our group walked through a part of the Arab shuk, and Barbara, our friend, and I wended our way back to the Jewish quarter, right near where I had begun the morning with a dunking, for some bagels with tuna fish and iced coffee. From there, Barbara left for her Thursday morning packing, and I left for Mahane Yehuda. Shabbat would be coming, and we sure as shooting were planning on eating. That would give me enough time to go home, take my nap, and be ready that evening for the Beer Festival. (Remember the Beer Festival???!!!)
So you might be inclined to ask, “OK, Fred, now that you did it, what do you think you accomplished – besides being able to get some good photographs and having something to write about?” Great question. This is the answer from the El Har Hamor Association, the umbrella group of Israeli rabbis who encourage visiting the Temple Mount, “The police have attested that having significant numbers of Jews visiting Har HaBayit has enabled them to have a strong presence there and prevent damage (such as resulted from the construction of a huge underground mosque during the years when Jews were banned from the Mount) and control outbreaks of Arab violence. Our physical presence is a claim, before Heaven and earth, of our unique relationship to this hallowed site.” I rest my case (and then I rested my body).
Postscript One: While we were walking on the Temple Mount, or better still, OUR Temple Mount with the oh-so-grudging approval of the local Muslim authorities, back in the Big Apple, there is a controversy over the advisability of building a mosque in the shadow of the WTC site. I am not going to opine (at least here) on whether or not it should be built, but I have fairly good idea what would happen if the shoe were on the other foot.
Postscript Two: Our friend Jeff, ever on the alert, sent me a link to a clip from a NYC TV station. Our mutual old stomping grounds, Teaneck, NJ, with its large Orthodox Jewish population, has a Muslim mayor. (The voters elect a City Council, who in turn votes for a semi-ceremonial mayor) So the TV station sent its crew across the Hudson to highlight a town in which everyone ‘gets along,’ and why can’t everybody else do the same? I recognized the streets and the storefronts, even some of the people who were interviewed. And I recognized the central thesis, that there is no Muslim or Jewish or Mormon way of collecting garbage, which is a spin-off from there is no Democratic or Republican way of doing the same. Point conceded. However, it is very easy to ‘get along’ PROVIDED that there is no bone of contention, no sticking point, or, to put it as plainly as possible, nothing remotely worth disagreeing about. Milton Votee Park has no special signficance for any group or faction, so there is no need, reason, or provocation for a holy war. It gets trickier to ‘get along’ when there is a dispute over something of relative importance, let alone when there is a site which two sides covet more than life itself.
Postscript Three: The Beer Festival (at last!) Not like the wine festival of two weeks before, at which we wandered around the garden at the Israel Museum, sipping free samples of local offerings out of crystal goblets. Here the customers bought their beer, served generally in plastic cups, and walked around the huge parking lot of the old train station, drinking as much as they could consume. Much more proletarian. The idea was for me to hook up with my friend Ian and his boss, Ken. I assumed that Ken was a good guy, but I didn’t know anything about him except that, like Ian, he was employed by the American government in the design and construction of their new consulate in Jerusalem. From the get-go, Ken pulled out his wallet and insisted on paying for several rounds (I made no attempt to match the two of them; I probably consumed one third of what they did). In general, I am reluctant to discuss religion or politics with people I don’t know because you don’t know what kind of a hornets’ nest you’re getting yourself into; but as the three of us began to converse – standing in the middle of the parking lot, with no place to lean our elbows – first about our families, and then about the world in general, It began to dawn on me that Ian’s boss is more right-wing than just about anyone I know. Ken gets posted all over the world. He was probably a philo-Semite before, but after his last assignment…..in Saudi Arabia, of all places, that really clinched it. Israel, where you can have a beer festival, seemed like Gan Eden with an unlimited supply of suds. But there are things that Ken doesn’t understand. I began talking about the events of the day and our journey up to the Temple Mount. That’s the problem, Ken opined. We (referring to the Christian world in general, of which he is a non-believing member) have our spot; they (referring to the Islamic world) have their spot. You guys (those of us of the Hebraic persuasion) don’t have your spot. You gotta get your spot. You guys are wimps. Here’s the plan. First thing you have to do is take back Gaza. Then you go and tell Abbas that this is your land and there isn’t anything to negotiate. He asked us how he would do as head of our negotiating team. My suspicion is that he would be a lot more resolute than the team we have now; unfortunately, there would be a few obstacles in his way, some due to his status and some because of our incoherency as a people. But, you have to admit, the man has a plan.

Musings That Began at a Brit Milah

The following episode was told to a few of us by the son of our friends Jeff and .June. Aaron family was supposed to move out of their apartment on Tuesday – in other words, one day before we were told the story. They had been looking and looking for a new place for months, even considering our neck of the woods, Ma’ale Adumim, which, as everybody knows, is a little bit east of Yerushalayim. They had found nothing, and had decided to focus their search in certain areas in the city: Baka, Katamon, etc. Nothing doing. It was now Sunday and they had one more place to look at. Wouldn’t you know, it was overall the best apartment they had seen. They called up a moving company. “Can you move us….tomorrow?” So on Monday, while they were negotiating the details of a contract with the new landlord, the movers were carting our their belongings from the old apartment. When the contract was signed, they called the movers to bring everything over to the new apartment.
Aaron told us this story without any outward signs of acute anxiety. I leaned over the table and said to Abby and Steve, “That is so Israel!” We all agreed that an episode of this kind would almost never happen in New Jersey, but it occurs all the time here in The Land. We’ve always wondered about a certain national nonchalance, a loosey-goosey-ness, when it comes to a roof over one’s head, as compared to the need-to-plan, need-to-know months in advance that I’m familiar with. The people from whom we bought our apartment didn’t made any serious effort to find a rental in the city until absolutely the last minute. Of course, they found something. We, on the other hand, made a special trip here in May 2007 to find our first apartment, even though our aliyah wasn’t scheduled until August 1. We were perfectly happy to pay the two and a half month’s rent for an apartment before we were going to occupy it; it was worth the money to have our peace of mind, and we couldn’t imagine doing it any other way. I’m beginning to think that there must be a yekke cloud that covers the rest of the world that we know – like an ozone layer – which the Divine Illumination burns away over The Land. The problem is that sometimes we forget where we are and worry about things as if we were back in Exile. A perfect example: a post on one of the e-mail groups from a recent olah, wondering if she should start being concerned about getting herself a sukkah – which she won’t be using for another six weeks. That’s a lifetime away here in The Land. She might as well be shopping for a new rain hat or a pair of gloves!
The apartment that the junior Glazers found was conveniently located a few blocks away from where we were gathered when we heard the story, a facility named Yakar – a beit knesset and a place of learning – where the grandson of other friends, Arvin and Gila, was enduring his brit milah. The fact that I was present at this august occasion is in and of itself newsworthy because, as a rule, for a variety of reasons, some of them aesthetic, I don’t ‘do’ britot; only if it involves the families of very, very, special friends. Even so, I could be found scrunched against a wall, as far from ‘the action’ as I could get – without being outside – which was a good thing, as we were up on the second floor. But I could hear the goings-on. There is, of course, a prescribed ritual for this event – even more extensive here in The Land; and most of the attendees knew the words and the melodies by heart. I’d better bone up on all this if I ever have a grandson (no pressure!).
The deal is that after an eight day old Jewish boy’s foreskin is removed, everyone gets to eat. (Try explaining why watching this ritual should make anybody hungry.) So everyone went downstairs to the refreshments (where we got to hear the aforementioned story), catered, as is often the case, by Holy Bagel. In fact, that’s how we found the place, tucked away as it is on a small side street; we just looked for the Holy Bagel truck, and we knew we were there. Speaking again across the table to Steve and Abby, I suggested – only half in jest – that Holy Bagel should become an official sponsor of the Nefesh B’Nefesh flights. This outfit is part of the burgeoning Anglo economy here in The Land. What distinguishes them from Tal Bagels or Sam’s Bagels, or Eliyahu Hanavi’s Bagels, is that they do a thriving catering business – perfect for smaller, informal affairs: britot milah, sheva brachot, house parties, even an occasional Monday or Thursday bar mitzvah. And who’s ordering bagels, assorted spreads, cheeses, and stuff like quiches and lasagna? Moroccans? Ethiopians? Everyone coming off an NBN flight is a future Holy Bagel customer – as well as one more fact on the ground, one more potential procreator of a brit milah candidate – or a relative or friend of same.
It was one of those rare weeks when we seemed to be ‘out’ every evening. We were, though, in that ‘in-between’ time, the days between Tisha B’Av and the beginning of the next month, Elul, and even up to the weeks before Rosh Hashana. Here in The Land, these days happen when they happen; they’re not smushed in between July 4th and Labor Day. Most of the summer events are programmed for these somewhat relaxed days. Not all: the Jerusalem Film Festival with all its interesting movies is scheduled by its blatantly secular organizers to coincide with The Nine Days (leading up to Tisha B’Av) when a lot of us don’t go to movies. But that’s the exception. The grand reopening of the renovated and expanded Israel Museum was scheduled about a week later with all the appropriate hoopla, which will continue for the next several weeks.
This is also an ‘in-between’ time for us personally. Everything was essentially on hold for about a month while our daughter Natania was suffering from migraine-strength headaches with accompanying nausea. We still don’t know what caused it; possibly some mysterious virus. She is fully recovered now and back to her charming but acerbic self. She has begun writing about her travails in her own blog, and I’ll let her tell her story in her own well-chosen words. It’s not yet finished, but if anyone is interested, the link to her opus is http://nataniacasden.blogspot.com/.
To make things even more stressful, not only was our daughter unable to keep any food down, our geriatric cat was refusing to eat. While Natania was sleeping on the couch in the living room, Mimi was wandering around the apartment in search of food she didn’t want. In desperation, we changed her diet from the special food prescribed for older cats with weak kidneys to equally expensive ‘gourmet cat food,’ Fancy Feast Turkey and Giblets Feast. Then we somehow figured out that she was unhappy with the metal pet food bowls she had been eating out of for years. Barbara got her some plastic bowls with a pretty design; no good. We seem to have settled on two blue plastic plates which gratify Mimi’s aesthetic sensibilities. Being old and small, she cannot eat a lot at any one time, and if the cat food stays out too long in this heat, it dries up, and someone can’t eat it. So every hour or so, we put out a tablespoon of food, mixed with her medicine and occasionally some chicken fat. When she wants more, she lets us know. We are thinking of getting her a dinner bell.
Next week, Barbara will be heading back to The States, once again to help her mother, now moved to a semi-assisted-living program in Maryland, try to settle in. So in this ‘in-between’ time, we have a few weeks to do some fun things, and, yes, we will do them, by golly, by gumbo!.
We started out with a bang that Monday at the International Arts and Crafts Festival, which has been held for the last thirty-five years at Khutsot Hayotser,. As far as I can figure out, ‘Khutsot’ means open spaces, and that just about describes it: a lot of room for artists and craftspeople, located south of the Old City walls, adjacent to the tower of David. They need lots of room because there are 150 participating Israeli artists, plus exhibits from thirty countries, plus a lot of food (a lot of food!), plus a number of stages for musical performances, plus the main venue, an amphitheater in the area called the Sultan’s Pool (don’t ask me what sultan or what pool) where they have a featured concert every night. That’s a lot of room for a lot of people to wander around in, and you’re sure to meet somebody you know – even your family doctor. This year we kept running into people we knew from Teaneck; I guess it is an international festival after all.
You just walk around. If you see something that is really intriguing, you can buy it; if not, there are all these temporary displays where you can go window shopping for ceramics, jewelry, works in metal, glass, leather, fabric, or wood; plus funky stuff like hammocks or exotic doorbells. When you get hungry, you can stop to eat; when you get tired, you can stop and listen to a jazz ensemble, or a band from Colombia or Poland. When you’ve had enough, you leave; no matter when that is, more people will be arriving. I do not know the official attendance, but if you told me that over the two weeks they’re open a quarter of a million people show up, I wouldn’t bat an eyelash.
The next night at the office of Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, the crowd was a little smaller; just a tad. Their new quarters in Talpiot has a lot of wall space and they are using that as an art gallery – a precious commodity anywhere, especially here. The current exhibition features the work of a water colorist, a digital photographer, and a young man who is doing cabbalistic drawings as part of his effort to find his place in the Jewish world. The official opening of the exhibit was several weeks ago, but this was an ‘Artists Speak’ evening – an effort to bring in additional people to see the work. Was it worth it, all the work involved to attract fifteen or twenty people? That’s the question I posed to Donna, the woman in charge of ‘the committee,’ after the formal presentations were over. During our conversation, Donna figured out that she could use someone who has had experience working with other artists and mounting exhibitions, so, with no effort on my part, I managed to get myself drafted onto her committee.
I must be working on the principle that the more fingers you have in the pie, the more you’ll get done (or at least, the stickier your hands will be). As of March, I had one project on the fire: revising the translations Rabbi M. is doing for a yeshiva here. In April I took on a second task, tutoring students at Hebrew U. in the intricacies of the English language, one of the few things I know for sure. Then last month, I again stepped up to the plate; a well-know non-profit organization took out an ad in the Jerusalem Post asking for writers to help them make their English language material literate. It’s too late for what’s on their website now, but I’m supposed to be working with them the next go around.
I thought I had enough to do, but wouldn’t you know it: a recent olah remembered that one of the works I had edited was a haggadah for ‘the yeshiva here.’ She must have a good memory because that was two years ago and the printed version has still not arrived at the bookstores. Anyway, she works with publishers in The States, and a small outfit there was also looking for an editor for their haggadah; would I, she asked, be interested, hinting that I might even get paid for this project. “Paid, what a novel idea!” Once again, I will be dealing with terminology like “process of rectification” and “Divine concealment,” and concepts like “attributes of justice” which are always getting into an argument about how long the yidden were supposed to be in Egypt. As long as I still have time for my afternoon nap……
Back to my story. We have disposed of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings. Thursday would be the topper, the annual wine festival in the sculpture garden at the Israel Museum. Oh joy! But first, there were some every day type activities to attend to. I would head into Jerusalem for my monthly trip to the chiropractor, who would attend to my chronically stiff lower back and loosen my right arm – the one that spends long hours massaging a wireless mouse. Then around the corner to Mahane Yehuda, to buy the victuals to feed, nay, to stuff family and friends who join us for a Shabbat meal. I have written copiously about the wonders of the shuk and how it is slowly changing. What I saw this day says it all. But you have to cooperate and imagine you’re seeing what I’m going to describe to you. As you would expect, it was a hot day. No, it was a very hot day, and in the middle of my shopping I stopped for an iced coffee at a new stall which sells specialty ice cream and slushy drinks.. I was in the ‘closed’ part of the shuk – covered with an ancient plastic roof – where the passageway is never more than fifteen feet wide; and I was standing on the side, trying to keep from being knocked over by the on-coming traffic. On my left was one of the newest businesses, purveyors of high end jewelry – the only one of its kind. And the owners have fixed it up beautifully: it’s the only stall in the shuk with parquet wooden floors. It could just as easily be in Tel Aviv or the Upper East Side of Manhattan. (Imagine what it looks like.) Diagonally opposite is a fish store, not the only one of its kind, in fact, a typical fish store that you find in the shuk or a lot of other places. (Imagine what this must look like.) One of the men who works there is a burly guy in a tee-shirt. And what is he doing as I’m watching and slurping my iced coffee: he has taken the hose, the one that is used to wash off the fish, and he is spraying water over his head. (I said it was a very hot day!)
On to the wine festival!!! (Who’s excited?) OK, there are other wine tastings I’ve been to that I remember fondly, especially the ones in Teaneck. We would go over to Beth Aaron on a Sunday night, and there would be a bunch of distributors with kosher wines from all over the world. They’d give you a plastic cup and, for a half an hour or an hour, you’d walk around the room sampling this and that; and at some point, either than evening or later, you’d place your order. You’d get a discount; the shul would get a cut. If you were smart enough to show up near the end, you might get to take home a few half empty bottles of good wine; a nice touch.
At the Jerusalem festival, you pay sixty shekels to get in. But…….with your admission, you are given a large crystal wine goblet (courtesy of the Avi Ben wine shops) which you use all through the evening and which you take home with you (no one, absolutely no one, leaves his behind). Crystal goblet in hand, you are free to spend the entire evening – up until 11PM – wandering through the sculpture gardens and environs, chatting with friends (and we had many friends there), eating the cheeses which you brought from home or you bought there (or the sushi or the cupcakes and chocolates), listening to American jazz (thank G-d, no Israeli music!), admiring the view of Yerushalayim, and sampling as much wine as you are able to consume – without dropping your crystal goblet. Let me give you two numbers to consider. There were thirty two Israeli wineries at the festival, which is almost all of the important ones. If I counted correctly from my program, there were one hundred and forty two different wines available to sample. If anybody was able to get to every booth and try every one of the one hundred and forty two , he’s a better man than I am. (It’s actually slightly less because a few of the wineries are not kosher.) One of the reasons I never get plastered is that my body shuts down at a certain point – whether it’s Scotch or wine – and I can’t drink anymore, so some of the booths were unvisited and many of the offerings went unsampled. (Plus, I have to be in shape for the Jerusalem Beer Festival next week which features 100 types of beer from all over the world.) Whether other people have this built in mechanism, I can’t say. What I can say is that there were a lot of seriously mellow people there. Thursday night is date night all over Israel, and there were so many young couples enjoying a romantic evening. The trick for people of my generation is, if you have enough wine, you don’t mind being the oldest person (well, one of the oldest) in the throng. Nobody else, young or old, was wearing an official wine tasting t-shirt [“sophisticated, complex, with lots of character (enough about me – let’s drink wine)”]. One fellow was so impressed, he asked if he could take a picture of my shirt with his cell phone. If I ever get a call on my cell from another t-shirt, I’ll know what it’s all about.
My original plan was to end this article right about here, but something of note came up, and I must, simply must, comment on it. It was the following Monday afternoon, and I was doing whatever I was doing when the phone rang. It was my wife and chief push-me-out-of-the-house-er. Did I want to head over to Mahane Yehuda for the larger-than-life puppet show? Well, who wouldn’t. So Barbara, Natania, and I reconnoitered for a light repast at our favorite smaller-than-our-dining-room, vegetarian Indian restaurant, just outside the shuk. The area was already more crowded than you’d like it to be as I arrived, and by the time we finished eating and turned our attention to the attraction at hand, it was more crowded than you thought it was possible to be. A small price to pay for a lesson in the care and feeding of do-it-yourself almost-as-big-as-a-dirigible sized puppets. We are talking about objects that are fifteen to twenty feet tall and which need a handful of people each to maneuver and to operate them. And…..we are talking about objects made almost exclusively from items found or purchased in the shuk itself: plastic baskets and kitchen ware, fabrics, used containers and discarded pickle and olive tins. There was one puppet made entirely out of oddly shaped loaves of bread and another made of discarded cartons that looked like a refugee from one of the refuse carts that trample their way through the alleyways picking up garbage and removing peoples’ toes. All of these dinosaur sized Muppets gamboled around the wider open shuk, to the delight of the assembled throngs. The rest of the shuk, the smaller Etz Chaim Street and the connecting alleyways were all mobbed with people. When we decided that we had had enough, it took us twenty minutes to make our way to the iced coffee place, a two to five minute journey. I asked the server for a BIG container; I figured that I had deserved it.
You can always find a larger meaning in things, if you work at it—especially if your mind works at warp speed the way mine does. As I postulated several thousand words ago, ‘that is so Israel.’ One can take things that no one else wants, things that would seem to have no intrinsic value, and make something from that, and everyone goes “ooh” and “ah.” That, in a nutshell, is the essence of the modern State of Israel. That is what has been going on here in The Land for two thousand years and more. Everyone – the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Christians, the Muslims – understood that there was something very special about Jerusalem, and something very, very, special about the Temple Mount. That holiness they certainly wanted one way or another, either to trash it or to bring in their own brand of worship. But The Land itself? Whether you ascribe it to a Divine Decree or an inherent lack of interest by the Nations, it is unquestionable that The Land remained desolate and fallow during all the centuries when we were not here to tend the garden. It is also unquestionable that the sudden interest the Nations took in this tiny, decrepit bit of land coincided roughly with an ingathering that began with the followers the Baal Shem Tov and the Vilna Gaon around 1840 CE and has continued until this very day. The common explanation for the European involvement is that, seeing the obvious weakening of the Byzantine Empire, each country wanted to get a foothold in Jerusalem, and that’s why they acquired land and established a presence here. Fine. But how does that explain why was there so much effort put into missionary work to convert the impoverished Jewish community in Jerusalem? Why was it so important that Jews not be here?
The way I see it, the instant that the Nations noticed that we were showing an interest in returning to our Homeland, they became interested too. If we wanted it, it must be worth something – even if they couldn’t figure out what it was. And once we showed them what could be done with what is essentially a rock filled sand pile………… Obviously, there’s more to the world’s current obsession with condemning Israel for anything and everything, but that is, to my mind, a healthy (or better, an unhealthy) part of the reason.
We’re back in the shuk watching the oversized puppets – made from who-knows-what with a lot of time and effort. Suddenly, a bunch of people who were standing around, not doing much of anything, come over and start insisting that it’s their puppets because some of the olive tins and discarded containers had been theirs, and they keep repeating mantra-like that the puppets belong to them. At first, few people pay attention, but after a while people begin to fall in line with the Puppet Liberation Organization. Soon committees are being formed to divvy up the puppets; it’s only fair, isn’t it? Someone draws a line down the middle of Mahane Yehuda; anything on this side belongs to this group; anything on that side……….
Would someone do me a HUGE favor. Wake me up and tell me I’m dreaming.

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.